And between earth and sky, atop rooftops or planted in rows on farmland, framed panels of silicon angle upward like sunning butterflies.
In the battle for energy supremacy in Pennsylvania, these forces of nature - coal, wind, and solar power - are the key combatants.
Last week, the coal lobby gained what it considers a friend in the governor's mansion: Tom Corbett, a native of Western Pennsylvania, where coal still pays the bills in thousands of households and underwrites community projects, and where a coal queen is crowned every year.
What that means for the state's fledgling alternative-energy industries is not yet clear. But the stakes are high: energy-market share in a new era of electric deregulation and consumer choice and, as former Gov. Edward G. Rendell argued for years, Pennsylvania's ability to reengineer its economy to one more dominant in clean technology.
Significant strides were made early in Rendell's eight-year administration, with legislation mandating renewable alternative-energy use. But more recent efforts to build on that failed, largely because of resistance from the coal industry, the reigning source of power in Pennsylvania for more than 100 years.
Even today, the U.S. Energy Information Administration says, coal feeds 53 percent of the state's electricity-generation needs, followed by nuclear power (35 percent), natural gas (nearly 9 percent), "other renewables" (1.3 percent), and hydroelectric power (1.1 percent).
At play in the energy debate is geography. On one side: the state's still-thriving coal towns, largely in the southwest. On the other: former industrial regions, such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Allentown, that after decades of job loss see fresh economic opportunity. At a former U.S. Steel site in Bucks County, for example, a wind-turbine manufacturer employs 265.
