'This is not normal': Trump leans on MAGA organizer to revive coal

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‘This is not normal’: Trump leans on MAGA organizer to revive coal

The Energy Department is giving millions to a company partially led by a far-right activist and telecom executive to build the nation’s first coal-fired power plant since 2013.

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President Donald Trump speaks alongside coal and energy workers during an executive order signing ceremony.
President Donald Trump's hopes of a U.S. coal renaissance relies in part on a company that wants to build a coal plant and carbon capture project in West Virginia. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

By Zack Colman, Ian M. Stevenson and Hannah Northey
06/12/2026 05:00 AM EDT

A man the Trump administration picked to be a key player at the fore of a U.S. coal renaissance is likely more familiar to QAnon circles than energy ones.

TerraSpark’s project carries big promises. The proposed 1.6 gigawatt facility — touted by the Trump administration last week — would be the first new coal-fired power plant built in the U.S since 2013. It vows to infuse up to 1,000 jobs into West Virginia, a state rich in coal-mining history that’s seen its industry wither over the past two decades.

But few if any Trump administration energy allies have heard of TerraSpark or Alex Phillips, who is running the company with two other people also lacking coal backgrounds. Even the Republican lawmaker whose district would host the massive coal plant and carbon capture project learned of it just two months before the Energy Department this month agreed to give it $18.5 million of taxpayer dollars to pay for a feasibility and design study.

While Phillips has no energy industry experience, he has hovered around Washington politics during the Trump era. The owner of a rural Virginia internet business served on telecommunications advisory boards. He was past president of a wireless internet company trade association that also had a political action committee. And he operated his own PAC, the Great American Patriot Project, that backed candidates who “adhere to the United States Constitution and America First principles.”

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