By Jeff St. John, Canary Media
A new report finds the Trump administration’s push to keep dirty, aging fossil-fueled power plants from closing down could end up costing U.S. utility customers between $3 billion and nearly $6 billion per year by the end of Trump’s term — and that’s a conservative estimate.
Thursday’s report from consultancy Grid Strategies was commissioned by Earthjustice, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club, four environmental groups that have joined states in challenging the Department of Energy’s use of emergency powers to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan and the Eddystone oil- and gas-burning plant in Pennsylvania running.
Both plants were set to close earlier this year, but the DOE used its emergency authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to order them to stay open for 90 days, and it could issue more orders to keep them running beyond that time period.
State regulators and environmental and consumer advocates fear that the DOE is just getting going. An April executive order from President Donald Trump tasked the DOE with taking unilateral authority over power-plant closures in the name of grid reliability, which could circumvent practices long-established by utilities, state regulators, regional grid operators, and federal regulators.
In July, the DOE issued a report claiming that the country faces threats of massive blackouts if the federal government doesn’t intervene. But critics say that to arrive at this conclusion, the DOE cherry-picked data and ignored the massive amounts of new solar, wind, and battery resources set to come online in the coming years.
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