The Department of Energy has extended its previous 90-day order to a broken Colorado coal plant, forcing it to stay online further despite generating no electricity, and costing ratepayers tens of millions of dollars.
The DoE continues to cite “reliability” concerns in its illegal orders to keep these coal plants open, despite that coal is the least reliable form of energy available to the US.
Not only is coal unreliable, it’s also costly both from an energy and health perspective. Coal costs tens of billions in health costs per year to the communities surrounding the plants, with this damage to health costing 13 times as much as the electricity the plants generate.
But even if you discount these health costs, coal is still among the most expensive forms of electricity generation.
Because of coal’s high costs, its use has drastically fallen over the last few decades. Coal supplied around half of US electricity in the early 2000s, but is now down to around 17%, and will continue falling over the long term because nobody wants it.
That hasn’t stopped the fossil shill squatting at the head of the DoE from doing his worst to extend coal’s lifespan, though. Chris Wright has never found a dirty energy source that kills enough Americans for his tastes, so right as the Colorado coal plant in question, Craig Unit 1, was scheduled to shut down at the end of last year, he ordered it to remain open.
The problem is, nobody wanted this to happen. The owners of the plant had deferred maintenance, knowing since 2016 that it would shut down by the end of 2025. And over the course of the last decade, it brought plenty of cleaner, cheaper capacity online to replace the coal plant before retirement.
The plant’s owners even asked the Department of Energy to reconsider its order, and yet it extended that order today, after the owners asked it not to.
The sudden order is subject to lawsuits from the Colorado attorney general and from public interest groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and Sierra Club that oppose the administration’s actions to saddle higher health and energy costs on Americans.
One analysis says that the cost of keeping Craig Unit 1 open for the first 90 days would have been $20 million. Tri-State, one of the owners of the plant, said that it doesn’t have an estimate of the costs of DoE’s forced repairs, and that it is “working to prepare filings in support of cost recovery.”
Top comment by Jamis
Remember in November and vote to remove each and every member of the current party’s administration at every level of government possible. Maybe it will send a message to them that their policies (or lack thereof) are wrong and perhaps we can regain our republic.
Cost recovery, in this instance, means how much they’re going to charge customers for keeping this useless plant open.
The DoE bragged about how much coal its orders have kept online, taking pride in the fact that it is working to poison Americans and bring them dirty, expensive, unreliable energy.
Craig Unit 1 is not the only coal plant DoE has forced to stay open. A Washington plant which isn’t even running has been forced to stay open, doing nothing but costing everyone money, and plants in Michigan and Indiana have also cost local ratepayers tens of millions of dollars to stay open while providing no benefit to the grid.
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