Students, residents protest UNC coal plant

Dozens of students and Chapel Hill residents marched Monday afternoon, calling on the University of North Carolina to stop burning coal at its campus cogeneration plant, citing public health risks, environmental injustice and broken climate promises.

Led by the Sunrise Movement at UNC-Chapel Hill, the protest started at Granville Towers and ended outside the Cameron Avenue Cogeneration Facility, a coal- and gas-burning power plant that provides steam and electricity to the campus and UNC Hospitals.

“We want clean air, clean water,” said Kiersten Hackman, a student and spokesperson for the group. “We want our neighbors to grow up without health problems.”

Hackman said the facility emits pollutants at four to six times the legal limit set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Any amount of toxins that the community is inhaling is unacceptable,” she said.

The protest was part of a broader push for environmental justice. The plant produces more than 3,000 tons of coal ash each year, which is trucked across state lines and dumped in a landfill in South Boston, Virginia — a minority community where more than half of residents are African American.

“The fact that it is also a predominantly Black community is very harmful to the people that are living there and to the standards we are setting for environmental justice,” said Amy Onyinye Okonkwo, president of Sunrise UNC. “This coal plant has been a huge stain on not just UNC’s legacy, but on the legacy of Chapel Hill.”

Protestors said the university should commit to a public timeline to retire the plant and invest in reparative actions for affected communities.

Amber Penny, a UNC senior and Sunrise member, said the group is pushing for a transition to clean energy sources that the university has yet to prioritize.

“There’s been alternative energies on the table for years,” Penny said. “Every time we ask about them, it comes down to, ‘Oh, we don’t have enough money for it. It wouldn’t work with our infrastructure.’ There’s bureaucratic hurdles we have to jump through, and there’s not a lot of facts and statistics the university provides us with for those claims.”

Penny said the issue affects students who live and study near the plant. “We have to breathe that in every day and for four or more years,” she said. “It’s really detrimental to people’s health.”

The protest comes five years after UNC missed a self-imposed deadline to stop burning coal. In 2010, then-Chancellor Holden Thorp announced a goal to eliminate coal use by May 2020. “Universities must lead the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy,” Thorp said at the time.  

In a statement, UNC said it has cut coal use at the plant by approximately 67% since 2007, contributing to a 37% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The university says about 60% of the facility’s current fuel use is natural gas, and that it continues to evaluate cleaner energy options.

“To meet the campus steam demand and maintain high levels of reliability and resilience for critical services, Carolina needs multiple fuel options and to be able to store fuel on-site,” the statement read.

UNC also said it recently launched a solar energy project at the former Horace Williams Airport — the school’s first commercial-scale solar array — and plans to begin an alternative energy analysis this spring to plan for long-term capacity and fuel transitions.

In January, the university faced community backlash after seeking a permit from the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality to burn engineered waste pellets made from plastics and paper. The proposed fuel mix raised concerns about PFAS contamination and other emissions. UNC withdrew the permit application last month.

Protestors said momentum is growing on campus to push for meaningful change.

“Coal is the biggest polluter of all electric generation in the world,” said Maple Osterbrink, a Chapel Hill resident and member of No Coal UNC. “It’s David and Goliath, but people are speaking out — and it’s very good to see that.”