Coal-fired power plants are failing across Massachusetts. They’re closing down because they can’t compete with power plants that burn cheap natural gas. And as the coal plants close, communities are left wondering what to do with them. A fight has broken out in Salem over redeveloping that city’s failed coal plant as a gas-fired power plant. In Somerset, residents and environmental advocates are warily eyeing Salem. They worry that Somerset’s massive Brayton Point coal plant could follow Salem’s example, and trade one fossil fuel for another, because nobody asks what else Brayton could be.

Brayton Point is New England’s largest coal-fired power plant, but the Somerset power plant won’t hold that title for much longer. The firm that took over Brayton late last year, Energy Capital Partners, has filed paperwork to leave the grid and shut down in mid-2017 (“The zombie coal plant,” Fall 2013). Energy watchers believed that if any power plant could withstand the wave of cheap natural gas that’s currently buffeting old-line coal plants, it would have been Brayton. The plant’s size (it’s more than twice as large as Salem Harbor) means it runs more efficiently than the rest of New England’s coal fleet. Brayton successfully bid into the 2016-17 energy auction of the region’s power grid operator.

Coal provided 30 percent of Massachusetts’s power in 2001, but in 2012 that figure was under 6 percent. Brayton joins Salem Harbor and Holyoke’s Mount Tom in winding down operations; smaller coal plants across town, and in Connecticut, have already ceased operations. At Brayton, the question is what comes after coal. Battles at Salem Harbor, and across town at the shuttered Somerset Station plant, show that question can be a loaded one.

Richard Sullivan, the state’s environmental secretary, chairs a committee the Legislature created to study redevelopment at closed or troubled coal plants. He sees his role as putting money and staffers behind efforts by cities and towns to move past coal power. “It’s not the state dictating outcomes,” Sullivan says. “We’ll provide technical assistance, but, ultimately, it’s going to be the community’s plan.”

In Salem, Sullivan’s committee has lined up behind replacing the Salem Harbor coal plant with a natural gas-fired power plant. That bid has devolved into a nasty fight between the city’s state rep and leading state environmental advocates.

Footprint Power, a New Jersey-based firm, plucked Salem Harbor off the scrap heap and proposed building a new natural gas power plant where the old coal plant stands. Salem officials, facing employment and property tax pressures, embraced the idea, but the Conservation Law Foundation is appealing state permits for the Footprint plant. Salem state Rep. John Keenan has retaliated by repeatedly inserting amendments favorable to the proposed Footprint plant in key State House bills. The CLF has called those legislative maneuvers “unconstitutional and unconscionable.” The property looks destined for years of litigation.

Somerset Station, a smaller coal plant that sits upriver from Brayton Point, has been dark since early 2011, but it’s no closer to reuse. The plant’s first post-coal owner stripped it for scrap before letting it fall into foreclosure. Town officials beat back a 2011 citizen-led effort to rezone the Somerset Station plant for office and housing redevelopment, as they hoped for a resurgence in coal power that never materialized. So now the Somerset Station plant remains dark and padlocked, while Brayton Point, the much larger plant downriver, approaches a similar fate.

“We should be creating an environment where ideas are allowed to flourish, where we explore a variety of options,” argues Joel Wool, an organizer with Clean Water Action. Wool is part of a coalition of environmentalists who have been agitating against coal power in Massachusetts. Now, he’s pushing for a broad grassroots planning effort around Brayton Point’s future.

Wool worries that the longer Brayton goes without a redevelopment plan, the likelier Somerset is to follow Salem’s approach and trade one fossil fuel for another. Brayton’s new owners haven’t announced their plans for the site after they stop burning coal, and the town hasn’t put any redevelopment ideas on the table. “It’s one thing to let the municipality decide,” Wool says, “but when a municipality only has one thing in mind, or doesn’t want to commit to an idea at all, it’s a problem.”

“What has the town been doing? Nothing. That’s what they’ve been doing,” says Pauline Rodrigues, who lives near the two Somerset coal plants. “We’ve been trying to say, look, we have to plan for the future. They’ve preferred to stick their heads in the sand and say Brayton won’t close, it’s too big to fail. Now they’re faced with it. We haven’t seen them do a thing.”