This week, the Trump administration announced its most ambitious pro-coal plans yet — a multipronged effort to resuscitate the industry, despite the financial, health, and climate case against doing so.
The administration’s Monday announcement included three big pledges: The Department of Energy promised $625 million to prop up coal power plants, the Interior Department will open up 13 million acres of federal land for coal mining, and the EPA is delaying seven deadlines related to wastewater pollution from coal plants.
That promised DOE funding includes $350 million for recommissioning or modernizing coal power plants — an indication that the DOE will continue to force such facilities to stay open past their prime. The administration has already kept Michigan’s J.H. Campbell plant open for months beyond its planned retirement in May, racking up $29 million in costs to utility customers in just five weeks. At that rate, the plant would cost consumers $279 million each year to keep open, according to a recent Grid Strategies report.
J.H. Campbell is just one of roughly 30 coal plants that are supposed to retire through the end of 2028, when President Donald Trump’s term ends. Keeping them and other aging fossil-fuel plants open past their planned retirement could cost consumers as much as $6 billion each year, per Grid Strategies.
There’s a cheaper, and not to mention cleaner, way forward: According to a 2023 Energy Innovation report, every single soon-to-retire coal plant could be replaced with solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage at a net savings to consumers. The rollback of clean-energy tax credits weakens that calculation, but renewables remain the cheapest, quickest way to add new power generation to the grid.
And then there’s the administration’s focus on coal-plant wastewater — a critical piece of the industry’s operations, as burning coal produces coal ash, which can contaminate groundwater with deadly toxins. The Biden administration’s EPA had cracked down on loopholes that let power-plant operators avoid responsibility for these pollutants. Monday’s actions are among the Trump administration’s latest efforts to undermine those rules and let coal-plant owners off the hook for contamination.
Coal’s climate and health impacts — the worst among any U.S. electricity source — went unmentioned in any of the departmental plans. No surprise there: Late last week, it was also reported that the Energy Department has directed employees to avoid the use of pesky terms like “emissions” or “climate change.”
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Fossil-fuel permitting keeps rolling amid shutdown
The U.S. government ran out of funding Wednesday after Congress failed to pass a stopgap bill, but the Trump administration is seemingly picking and choosing how to implement the shutdown.
Meanwhile the Interior Department will keep fossil-fuel permitting rolling along. More than half of the Bureau of Land Management’s staff will stay onboard to approve fossil-fuel projects under the Trump administration’s “energy emergency,” relying on money generated by permitting fees. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will similarly keep processing fossil-fuel permits and working on upcoming oil and gas lease sales, but “will cease all renewable energy activities,” according to a federal document.
Great Job Kathryn Krawczyk & the Team @ Canary Media Source link for sharing this story.
