The Trump administration just ordered another retiring coal plant to stay open. It could cost ratepayers millions

By Ella Nilsen, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration ordered an aging coal-fired power plant in Colorado to stay open on Tuesday, a day before it was set to be retired.

The order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright will keep the nearly 50-year-old Craig Generating Station Unit 1 in northwest Colorado operating until the end of March, with an option to extend it further.

It’s the Department of Energy’s sixth such move this year; Wright has also ordered two coal plants in Indiana, one in Michigan and one in Washington state to stay open past their retirement dates, as well as a Pennsylvania power plant that runs on oil.

“Keeping this coal plant online will ensure Americans maintain an affordable, reliable, and secure supply of electricity,” Wright said in a statement.

Colorado’s governor and its top energy official pushed back on Wright’s claim that keeping Craig open would boost affordability, saying it would only raise electricity prices.

In a statement, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, said the order would pass “tens of millions in costs to Colorado ratepayers, in order to keep a coal plant open that is broken and not needed.”

According to Polis’ statement, Craig 1 “isn’t even operational right now” and would require repairs costing millions of dollars to get it up and running before it could even produce power. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, the power supply co-op that owns Craig 1, said the unit has been offline since a critical part broke on December 19.

“As a not-for-profit cooperative, our membership will bear the costs of compliance with this order unless we can identify a method to share costs with those in the region,” said Tri-State CEO Duane Highley.

It would cost at least $20 million to keep Craig 1 operational for 90 days and approximately $85 million to run the unit for a year, according to a report from power sector consulting firm Grid Strategies, prepared for the Sierra Club. Those costs are mostly from the purchase of coal. However, the price tag could balloon to $150 million per year, depending on how much the DOE requires the plant to run, the Grid Strategies report said.

Colorado Energy Office executive director Will Toor said Tri-State has already built gas and renewables projects to replace the power the unit produced. Toor said the North American Electric Reliability Corporation has not forecast any reliability risks in the region.

In other words, Toor said, Craig 1 is simply not needed to bolster the state’s grid.

“We think there would be a very significant cost to ratepayers for no benefit,” Toor told CNN.

In addition, Toor said, Craig 1 was built near a coal seam that has had all of its coal mined. Procuring more coal from elsewhere would incur additional costs.

Wright’s order “is purely for the purpose of trying to keep coal in the system for ideological reasons, while driving up cost to customers,” Toor said. “At the same time, they are actually taking steps to reduce the reliability of the grid by making it far harder to deploy the resources that you can quickly build, which are wind and solar.”

Keeping other coal plants open past their retirement dates has foisted tens of millions of additional costs on ratepayers.

Consumers Energy, the utility running a retiring Michigan coal plant that Wright forced to stay open in June, recently reported that it cost $80 million to keep the plant open from late May to late September — largely from the purchase of additional coal — which will raise residential electricity bills in Michigan and 10 other states the plant serves.

Environmental groups are challenging the other orders from Wright in the courts.

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