The Department of Energy issued a second “emergency” order to keep the last coal plant in Washington open for another 90 days, doing its best to raise electricity and health costs for central Washington.
But nobody wants it open – including the owner of the plant, who hasn’t operated it at all in the last 3 months since its planned closure, citing “flush” electricity supply from the state’s ample hydropower resources.
The DoE cited “reliability” concerns in requiring the plant to stay open, despite that coal is the least reliable form of energy.
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.
The Centralia plant specifically has cost its community $329 million in increased heath costs since 2015, though the bulk of that was from 2015-2018, when the plant was actually operating (and the plant has been gradually winding down operations since 2011, so its costs would have been much higher if study data was available from earlier).
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 coal plant was scheduled to shut down at the end of last year, he ordered it (and others) to remain open.
But even as those orders came in, the owners of the plants shrugged at them. The plants are uneconomical to operate, would need repairs due to the long-planned shutdown, and are not needed due to ample generation resources available outside of coal.
Washington, specifically, has high levels of hydropower resources. Hydro is incredibly cheap and resilient, as it acts as its own battery so can be easily dispatched whenever needed.
And over the course of the last 3 months, hydro has done the heavy lifting it was expected to do. The vast majority of Washington’s generation has come from hydropower, with nuclear and wind filling out the balance and only a tiny smattering of methane gas, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund.
Coal, notably, has produced no electricity for the state, despite the emergency order to keep the plant open.
However, it’s likely still costing the state money. Another plant subject to a similar illegal DoE order, the Campbell plant in Michigan, says it cost $42 million to keep the plant ready to go just for the last 90 days, and that cost will have to be paid by utility customers in Michigan as a result of the DoE’s ruling (and go into the pockets of Wright’s coal executive friends), raising electricity costs during an affordability crisis that his administration is causing.
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