Trump’s Zombie Fossil Fuel Power Plants Could Cost Us $3 Billion — or More

On Friday, the power sector consulting firm Grid Strategies released a report guessing just how high the costs of this sort of move could get, if the Trump administration keeps shoving its foot in each retiring plant’s closing door. “Based on the trend to date and indications that DOE has approached the owners of many retiring fossil power plants about potentially mandating their retention, DOE may attempt to mandate the retention of nearly all large fossil power plants slated for retirement between now and the end of 2028,” the report states. If so, that means nearly 35,000 megawatts of dirty power — at a cost of $3.121 billion, spread out to ratepayers. Us.

And that’s the low estimate. It could get much higher, for a very grim reason: the DOE mandates basically create a perverse incentive for aging, uneconomical power plants to move their retirement dates forward, in order to then be told to stay open, and then be allowed to get paid by consumers to produce power that wouldn’t make financial sense to produce otherwise.

The Grid Strategies report, prepared on behalf of the environmental non-profits Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club, estimates that another 31,000 or so megawatts of fossil-fired power without pre-2028 retirement dates, but that are 60 or more years old. In total that would yield 90 power plants, creakily belching death into the sky, propped up by an administration happily breathing the clean air upwind of them. If the DOE mandates extended to all of those, that total cost would be just shy of $6 billion.

There is no guarantee, of course, that such mandates do cover all those plants, or that they stand up to pushback. The Michigan coal plant forced to remain open faced a challenge from utility regulators arguing that the DOE failed to demonstrate the “emergency” justifying the move. Michigan’s attorney general has also fought the move, as have many residents breathing in its fumes. It isn’t hard to imagine such challenges to basically any dirty behemoth expected to finally die an ignominious death but forced to live on, with one imagines wide variance in success. Still, the Grid Strategies report lays out the potential, and the clear hypocrisy at its root.

“This report confirms that the Department of Energy’s unlawful mandates amount to a self-inflicted rate hike in nearly every region of the country,” said Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. Clean Energy at Environmental Defense Fund, in a statement. “These dirty and expensive fossil plants were slated to close for good reason: they cannot compete with cleaner sources of energy that are more affordable and better for our health.”