GoKawiilAt one time, the US electricity grid ran mostly on coal.
But coal-fired power plants have steadily been decommissioned. Power producers found the plants were too expensive to operate and carried risks tied to toxic air pollution, waste and climate-warming emissions.
Then President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year with a fresh zeal to revive the coal industry. His Department of Energy invoked emergency powers to force utilities to keep old plants operating.
Not only is this bad policy, it’s also a misuse of a law designed for wartime, according to legal scholars and analysts. If allowed to stand, this poses problems for utilities, grid operators and regulators who plan for decades-long timeframes, only to be overruled by short-term political imperatives that favor certain industries.
“It’s just illegal,” said Alexandra Klass, a professor at University of Michigan Michigan Law School, about the emergency orders. She served in the Biden administration as a deputy general counsel at the Department of Energy.
Environmental advocates and state officials have challenged the orders in court, with cases underway in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
I’m focusing on the emergency orders because I don’t think the public grasps how much these actions undermine the principles of utility planning and regulation, with harmful consequences for consumer bills and the climate.
While the Trump administration props up coal, it aims to slow the deployment of clean alternatives with actions such as a stop-work order on offshore wind and slow-walking permits to build onshore wind.
Klass co-authored a new essay with Dave Owen of UC Law San Francisco in the Michigan Law Review Online that examines the history and current use of presidential emergency powers on energy.
The Department of Energy under President Donald Trump is invoking Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, a provision first used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 to meet electricity demand in the Southeastern United States in the run-up to US entry into World War II. The idea was that the government needed the ability to step in to meet short-term needs when existing regulations failed to do so.