"Environmental and consumer advocates say the DOE has “manufactured an emergency” to keep a costly, polluting coal plant running and serve Trump’s pro-coal agenda."
"The Trump administration has followed through on a threat to use emergency wartime powers to force expensive and polluting coal-fired power plants to stay open — even if the utilities that own them, the states in which they operate, and the grid operators responsible for maintaining reliability all agree it’s safe to shut them down.
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy issued an order demanding that the J.H. Campbell plant, a 1,560-megawatt coal-burning power plant owned by Michigan utility Consumers Energy, must abandon its plans to shut down on May 31 and instead continue operating through at least late August.
The order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive and a vocal denier of the climate change crisis, states that “an emergency exists in portions of the Midwest region of the United States due to a shortage of electric energy.” It cites this rationale to invoke the DOE’s emergency authority under the 1935 Federal Power Act to unilaterally order any power plant in the country to keep running.
“This administration will not sit back and allow dangerous energy subtraction policies threaten the resiliency of our grid and raise electricity prices on American families,” Wright said in a Friday press release. President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders in April aimed at “bringing back” the U.S. coal industry, including an order authorizing the DOE to cite grid reliability as justification for keeping coal plants open."
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