Ratepayers across the midwest will be dinged for the cost of keeping an obsolete, expensive and unnecessary coal plant running beyond its useful life.
MAGA energy policy = Picking losers.
But you have to keep the oligarchs happy.
Ratepayers can expect to pay another $3.1 billion a year if 54 large fossil fuel power plants scheduled to be retired by the end of 2028 are forced to stay online longer, according to a consulting firm’s report.
The cost could rise to nearly $6 billion a year if the number of plants, in theory, were to be expanded to 90 by including some either brought back into service or expected to be retired soon after 2028, the study found.
The report, released Thursday, was done by Washington-based Grid Strategies for Earthjustice, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club.
The four activist groups have mounted a legal challenge against President Trump’s efforts to require prolonged use of the nation’s coal-fired power plants, per an April 8 executive order.
The U.S. Department of Energy, under President Trump’s directive, used emergency powers to require the coal-fired Consumers Energy J.H. Campbell power plant in West Michigan to remain open past its previously announced closure date of May 31. It was the first plant in the country to receive such an order.
The 90-day order expires Thursday. It is uncertain what will happen at that plant after that.
No new shutdown date has been announced.
Consumers Energy has said in paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that the first 30 days of that extension cost it an additional $29 million. It is attempting to get those costs passed along to ratepayers.
The Michigan Public Service Commission was among several groups that objected to the Trump Administration’s order, claiming there was no emergency and it was not needed.
On Friday, Matt Helms, Michigan Public Service Commission spokesman, said it is declining comment on the Grid Strategies report.
The report’s appendix has a cost estimate for several plants, including DTE Energy’s coal-fired power plant near Monroe, one of the nation’s largest.
It estimates that DTE could incur an additional $146.5 million a year to keep that plant operating past 2028, although it is not clear if the figure applies to the whole four-unit plant or the two scheduled to be shut down in 2028.
DTE, through an agreement with the state public service commission, has previously committed to shutting down its first two Monroe units in 2028 and the second pair in 2032.
It hasn’t yet been ordered by the administration to keep any of those open longer.
But Dana St. Coeur, DTE senior communications strategist, said in an Aug. 7 email that the utility has no plans to veer from its published schedule.
“We don’t have anything else to share beyond the statement I sent over last week,” she said in a follow-up email on Friday.
Ben Dietderich, DOE press secretary and chief spokesman, told The Blade Friday evening that it “should come as no surprise that a report commissioned by radical left environmentalists is totally out of touch with reality.”
“For years, American grid operators have warned [that] decommissioning baseload power sources would jeopardize the reliability of our electric grid,” Mr. Dietderich said. “You can read their reports or the recently released DOE grid reliability report which explains that existing generation retirements and delays in adding new firm capacity, driven by the radical agenda of past administrations, will lead to a surge in power outages, increasing the risk of blackouts by 100 times in 2030. To deny that there is an energy emergency is irresponsible and factually incorrect.”
The four activist groups said they went to Grid Strategies because it is an independent consulting firm.
Spokesmen for those groups expressed concern about the results.
“The Department of Energy’s abuses are not some academic dispute,” said Michael Lenoff, Earthjustice senior attorney. “DOE’s unlawful orders impose real costs on real families.”
Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund’s clean energy program, said consumers “shouldn’t be paying billions out of pocket to keep aging, costly fossil fuel plants on life support, but that’s the path the Trump administration is taking us down.”
“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,” he said.
Caroline Reiser, an NRDC senior staff attorney for climate and energy, agreed.
“The result of this will be higher electricity bills, more pollution in our communities, and a worsening climate crisis,” she said.
Tens of millions in costs to keep an aging Michigan coal-fired power plant running past its intended shutdown date under a Trump administration order could fall on utility bills across the Midwest.
An order from federal energy regulators issued on Friday, Aug. 15 grants a request from J.H. Campbell plantowner Consumers Energy that the burden be distributed not just in Michigan, but also across 10 other states.
The action from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, does not approve any costs but green lights the mechanism through which households and businesses could eventually pay to keep Campbell on life support.
The costs may be distributed across the North and Central regions of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, the grid operator covering large portions of the Midwest, central U.S. and several southern states, per the Friday order from FERC.
The regions that could bear Campbell costs cover all or parts of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and Kentucky.
Consumers is “pleased” with the FERC approval, said spokesperson Katie Carey in a statement. “We are continuing to comply with the order and will always advocate for our Consumers Energy customers.”
The power company will have to petition federal regulators to recover specific costs of running the coal plant at a later date, and it does not yet have approval to do so.
Consumers intended to shut down the 63-year-old facility on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Ottawa County on May 31 — a major milestone that would have marked the end of burning coal for the utility.
But U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright intervened days before, using emergency powers usually invoked during natural disasters to block the closure for 90 days.
Federal officials pointed to assessments warning of elevated risk of blackouts over the summer, though regional grid operators and critics of the Department of Energy order say the Midwest has adequate capacity and Consumers had other power plants lined up to replace Campbell.
Environmental and consumer watchdogs have warned a primary consequence of President Donald Trump’s actions to prop up coal — a dirty means of generating power that is on the decline nationally — will be inflated utility bills.
President Donald Trump campaigned last year on slashing electricity rates by as much as half. His administration is now bracing for political blowback from the opposite effect — surging electricity rates as data centers drive up demand for an already limited supply, all while Congress and federal agencies curb development of the fastest-to-deploy solar and wind facilities. “The momentum of the Obama-Biden policies, for sure that destruction is going to continue in the coming years,” Wright told Politico during a visit to wind- and corn-rich Iowa. Yet, he added: “That momentum is pushing prices up right now. And who’s going to get blamed for it? We’re going to get blamed because we’re in office.”
Rising electricity prices are already emerging as a political issue ahead of upcoming elections, including in the New Jersey’s governor race, where rates soared by 20% in June. According to an Energy Innovation analysis of the effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed by Republicans and signed by Trump, wholesale electricity prices could rise by as much as 74% by 2035 as a result of the law.
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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has ruled that the utilities whose coal and gas-fired power stations are subject to Trump’s order to keep fossil fuel plants open could recoup the cost from ratepayers. The commission couched its decisions — which approved pathways for recovering costs from ratepayers, but did not yet greenlight rate hikes — largely on bureaucratic legal grounds, arguing that it’s “reasonable” to pass the costs along to households and businesses in the places where the electricity is used.
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