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.
Next up, Trump orders sailing ship commerce and whale hunting restarted.
All jokes aside, returning to sailing instead of diesel ships would be a green thing to do.
instead of diesel ships would be a green thing to do.
Counterintuitively, giant cargo ships switched exclusively to diesel instead of the bunker oil they typically use or also be a green thing to do.
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.
Anything to keep the AI pollution machines fed and operating while socializing the costs to tax payers against their wishes.
Are we winning yet?
The article clearly states that the plants aren’t needed, not even to power AI. They’re literally keeping them running purely to pollute and own the libs.
I bet if you dig deeper you’ll find a connection to the Trump family’s wallet.
China meanwhile dominating EVs and investing in LMTS.
Ok… surely then it would just cost less to install a harmless dark smoke emitter at the top of the coal powerplant cooling stack and hire a bunch of actors to pretend they are running a coal powerplant and just let Trump think it is still open right?
Seriously, is anyone in the Trump administration actually even smart enough to tell?
Invest the money saved in more cost efficient alternative energy and everybody wins! Including actors! They need jobs too…
I mean honestly it would be a perfect job for Homer Simpson and what could be more American than that?
Wright a fucking moron and should be drug from office on a rail.
I mean, that’s the Trump administration in a nutshell.
It’s absolutely fucking ridiculous for any 50-year-old coal plants to exist at all. In 1975, this thing should’ve been nuclear instead.
