Coal power, currently in decline across the country, is facing a sharp decline in New Jersey.

The Garden State was home to about a dozen coal power units spread across seven locations about a decade ago, according to NJDEP spokesman Larry Hajna. Today, New Jersey only has three coal power plants and one of those, the BL England plant in Upper Township, is scheduled to close this year.

But when a power plant is taken offline, it doesn’t just disappear. The power plants are still expansive structures on large tracts of land, so the retirement of a plant always leads to questions about what happens next.

PSE&G announced that it had sold two retired coal plants, the Hudson Generating Station in Jersey City and the Mercer Generating Station in Hamilton Township, to a redeveloper.

That redeveloper, Chicago-based Hilco Redevelopment Partners, intends to turn the two power plant sites into industrial parks. HRP is a subsidiary of Hilco Global.

Neither PSE&G nor HRP would disclose the purchase price for the two plants.

“The locations of both the Hudson and Mercer sites offer transformational opportunities to reposition underutilized land into modern industrial parks in one of the strongest warehouse distribution center regions in the entire country,” said HRP CEO Roberto Perez.

Outside of New Jersey, HRP is redeveloping retired power plants in Boston and Chicago.

PSE&G said it decided to sell to HRP based on the redeveloper’s “strong environmental track record and demonstrated success in managing complex redevelopment projects.”

"We hope these sites will continue to be productive assets for the communities that hosted the plants for decades,” said John Paul Cowan, the senior vice president of operations for PSE&G Fossil.

Both of the power plants opened in the 1960s and were retired by PSE&G in June 2017. The utility no longer owns any coal plants in New Jersey, and the last remaining PSE&G coal plant is in Bridgeport, Connecticut. That plant is scheduled to be retired by July 2021, according to PSE&G spokesman Michael Jennings.

Gary Epstein, an executive vice president for Hilco Global, said that the new owners are not prepared to discuss a timeline for how long demolition of the plants and any potential environmental remediation at the plant sites would take. Epstein also could not say how long it would take for the new developments to open.

Jeff Tittel, the director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, applauded the sale.

“Before they were monster polluters,” Tittel said of the two power plants. “Now they can be turned into something that will provide economic value to the cities and be safer for the environment.”

Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.