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Beyond King Coal: Can West Virginia follow the UAE’s lead into a green future?

An interview with energy reporter and author Ken Silverstein

Ken Silverstein, a senior contributor for Forbes and an author of the forthcoming book “The Last Barrel: How the UAE and Masdar Defied Logic and Pioneered the Clean Energy Future,” believes the Arab nation has lessons West Virginia can learn from. (Photo by Steven Allen Adams)

CHARLESTON – West Virginia and the United Arab Emirates have something in common – both are known for their fossil fuels, coal and oil respectively. But a West Virginia native who made his career as an energy reporter believes the Mountain State can learn from the UAE’s clean energy revolution.

Ken Silverstein, a senior contributor for Forbes and a syndicated columnist, has written a soon-to-be released book on the UAE’s billion-dollar investments in clean energy technologies over a more than 20-year period. The book is titled “The Last Barrel: How the UAE and Masdar Defied Logic and Pioneered the Clean Energy Future.”

“It is not a PR effort. They’re worried,” Silverstein said of the UAE government. “Oil has a finite life. It doesn’t have an indefinite life … At some point, they’re going to have to pivot off of that dime and onto another enterprise.”

A native of Charleston who splits time between a home near Kanawha State Forest and Colorado, Silverstein has covered the energy industry for nearly 30 years for various publications, including the Christian Science Monitor.

When covering the energy beat in the late 1990s, the utility industry largely viewed renewable energy as a “colossal waste of dollars and time,” Silverstein said. Climate change was frequently dismissed as a “made-up phenomenon” intended to subsidize the green energy sector.

“My whole argument in the columns that I wrote were that you just have to think ahead; that if climate change is real, these investments are good investments to be made,” Silverstein said. “And if these investments ultimately scale and mature — the technologies improve, and so forth, and the costs fall — that the investments will have been worth it. These are arguments I was making 20 years ago.”

Around the time Silverstein was writing about the need to begin investing in clean energy technologies, such as wind and solar, eight officials in the UAE began what would become Masdar, the nation’s renewable energy company. Today, Masdar operates in over 40 nations and manages approximately 100,000 megawatts of renewable energy projects.

His beat has taken him all over the world, but Silverstein began traveling to the UAE in 2019 to chronicle that nation’s work on clean energy. According to Silverstein, the UAE – through Masdar – has demonstrated that even oil-rich nations can lead the green transition by viewing energy production as a holistic business rather than one tied to a single resource.

“The (UAE) leadership had the foresight to say to its people oil is not going to be around forever,” Silverstein said. “We are an energy producing nation. Our job is to produce energy. It doesn’t matter if it’s oil and gas, it could be green energy. We are in the business of producing energy … We’re just investing in renewable energy.”

According to an informational page on the website of the UAE Embassy in Washington D.C., oil and gas imports make up 30% of the nation’s total economic activity. But over the last 21 years, the UAE has been working toward pairing traditional fossil fuels with alternative energy sources.

According to the UAE Energy Strategy 2050, the nation has the goal of raising the percentage of alternative energy in its total energy mix to 30% by 2030, tripling its renewable energy capacity by 14 gigawatts and creating 50,000 new jobs. The end goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050.

The UAW has three of the world’s largest solar energy power plants, and it launched its first wind power program in 2023. While still acknowledging the need for oil in the global marketplace, the nation is implementing industrial-scale carbon capture with the goal of storing 1.5 million tons of carbon per year.

Silverstein said the UAE has been able to become the global leaders in clean energy because of the nation’s oil wealth, allowing it to weather downturns in the alternative energy industry that saw other countries fold or postpone projects.

“You don’t just snap your fingers and out pops a whole new industry unrelated to what your traditional vintage industry is,” Silverstein said. “They came in, they’ve stayed in 20-plus years when times were tough. When it was not easy, they’ve stayed in.”

The free market has also driven much of the UAE’s success with developing better clean energy technologies, creating revenues that go back in to innovation.

“Green energy is showing lots of promise. They are making money at it,” Silverstein said. “They’re making money for their shareholders. So, it’s not, it’s a do-good enterprise. They’re making money, and they are solving an important dilemma, which is they’re trying to address the issue of climate change. But it is a capitalistic movement.”

Silverstein believes this model offers critical lessons for other fossil-fuel-dependent regions, such as West Virginia, emphasizing that environmental forward-thinking is essential for attracting 21st-Century talent and ensuring long-term economic stability.

“You can be involved in coal and say, ‘you know what? I’ve made my living off a coal, but now we want to invest in renewables because that is the next generation,'” Silverstein said. “That is the current generation of energy production. It’s where the jobs are going to be. Coal has made a great contribution to the state, but now it’s a new day.”

According to a March 2026 report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, West Virginia is the nation’s fourth-largest energy producer, producing 6% of the nation’s total energy in 2023. The Mountain State is the fifth largest producer of natural gas and the second largest coal producer.

Despite the state’s energy largely being supplied by several coal-fired power plants, coal mining in the state has declined over decades due to a national decrease in coal-fired electric generation. Half of West Virginia’s coal is exported to other countries.

During the recent legislative session, several attempts were made by coal supporters to pass bills that would have incentivized the state’s existing coal-fired power plants to operate at a 69% capacity factor as recommended several years ago by the state Public Service Commission. But opponents argued that these bills would cause electric rates to increase due to the higher costs compared to natural gas fired electric generation and other sources, including renewables.

“This is not an argument against coal. I understand coal’s history and what it’s meant to this state, but this state is so much more than coal,” Silverstein said. “They can’t have the loudest voice in the room and drown out everyone else. There are other people at the table that can build these communities and make West Virginia a better place.”

The Legislature did pass House Bill 5381, the Comprehensive Energy Policy and Development Plan Act of 2026, which tasks the Office of Energy with creating a long-term strategy to bolster electrical grid stability and energy security through 2050. The legislation is the next step in codifying Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s 50 by 50 plan to increase the state’s electric-generating capacity from 16 gigawatts to at least 50 gigawatts by 2050.

A draft version of the state comprehensive energy plan is expected to be released soon and be made available for public comment. But the plan being developed does factor in growth in renewable energy – specifically solar and wind – over the next 25 years.

Silverstein said if West Virginia wants to reverse the trend in downward population growth and attract news residents and workers to the state, it needs to follow the example of UAE in being able to support its fossil fuel industry and being willing to embrace renewable energy projects and the innovation that will come.

“In order to attract all of these people, you have to build your society based on what young people want … but to draw young people, you need a green economy,” Silverstein said. “West Virginia has all these built-in advantages with the ski resorts, with the hiking trails. In order to build on that, you need to market yourself. You need to position yourself as environmentally forward-thinking.”

“The reason the UAE is … able to attract people from all over the world is because they provide … a forward-looking path for people from all over the world that locate there,” Silverstein continued. “West Virginia is trying to draw people into this state. It has so much to offer — cheaper property rates, all these ski resorts. Build on that by investing in the future. Take some of the wealth and invest it in the future.”

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