Tennessee had a budding green power sector back around 2005. TVA nuked it with absurd, arbitrary restrictions on who can put up solar panels on their houses because TVA is in bed with the coal operators and green power was competition they didn't want. It kills me to think about how much more money this state would have in its economy now if that hadn't happened.

There's reasons the whole "just replace coal jobs with solar jobs" thing has never played out. It's not for a lack of trying or because nobody here ever coming up with the idea. It's because the powers that be sure as hell weren't gonna let it fly.

(TVA continues to be the least green utility in the South btw. Promotion of the welfare of the people of the Tennessee Valley my ass.)

Wish it was that easy, you can't just reschool a coalminer into an entirely different profession 10 years before their retirement.

You can easily skill shift a coal miner into eg the natural gas industry. Including at 10 years prior to retirement. I've known at least a dozen miners that transitioned to natural gas, in the greater Marcellus shale region.

When shifting an experienced miner to the natural gas industry, the problem isn't education, it's replacement pay. They're usually technically, industrially competent people, and are well suited to the oil and natural gas industries as far as ease of skill adaptation goes. It's something our government/s should be pursuing aggressively (except usually the states where the coal industry exists don't want to go against those jobs and actively encourage that shift). If done correctly, you could make the job shift from coal to other energy industries far easier, buffering the labor hit, and drain the coal industry of the labor it needs to operate (accelerating its demise).

Replacement pay and relocation. Asking an older blue collar worker to move away from family and friends to another state, more or less involuntarily, is much harder than encouraging a young tech worker to move to, say, California.

Really doubt that solar companies are hiring in the same towns as coal mines are. The reality is that when the mines go, the communities supported by the mines will go, too.

These jobs aren't in the same places and many people won't move.

In a few decades the people unwilling to move will be pensioners. Like gold mining towns, these will become abandoned eventually.