Owners of broken Colo. coal plant forced to reopen ask DoE to reconsider order

The two main utilities that own a Colorado coal plant which was ordered to reopen by fossil shill Chris Wright have pushed back on the order, stating plainly that it would raise costs and would not benefit reliability for Colorado electric ratepayers.

Coal is a dead energy source. It’s costly, inefficient, and deadly both for workers and for all species on Earth alike. For these reasons, coal has seen a rapid decline in the US, as the country shifts to significantly better power sources.

Coal peaked at around half of US electricity supply in the early 2000s, but has been dropping precipitously since around 2008. Now, coal is only 15% of US electricity supply, and that number will keep dropping.

There is no point to opening new coal plants, because they’re enormously expensive, and it’s getting worse. This is why almost all of new US capacity this year has been solar or wind generation.

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But that hasn’t stopped republicans from trying. The current squatter in the White House, who cannot legally hold office in the US, is doing his best to force the high costs and poison from this dead energy source onto the US populace. He’s already dedicated $625 million of taxpayer money to propping up this dead energy source, and the former oil CEO he installed into the Energy Department fired his latest salvo today.

In December, one day before it was set to be retired, the Department of Energy released an emergency order demanding that Craig Power Plant in Craig, Colorado continue operating for at least three months.

The problem is that this order will only cause more pollution and cost Coloradans more money at a time when energy bills are already high. And in addition, nobody wants it – not even the owners of the plant itself.

Even the plant’s own owners don’t want it open

Late last week, two utilities who both own significant shares of Craig Unit 1, Platte River Power Authority and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc, both filed a “request for rehearing” from the Department of Energy, asking it to reconsider its order.

The two groups state in their request that the cost of reopening the plant would be shouldered entirely by Colorado ratepayers.

The plant has been non-operational since December 19 due to a mechanical failure, and would require significant capital to bring back online. Tri-State said that it has “deferred optional maintenance since 2019,” which would be costly to bring up to date.

A separate analysis showed that the annual cost of keeping Craig open would be $79 million – which would all be paid by the ratepayers.

Further, despite the DoE’s order, which claims it’s being done due to “reliability” concerns, the two groups plainly said “Craig Unit 1 is not necessary for ensuring reliability on either of the utility services providers’ systems.”

It’s also not true that coal plants are reliable – in fact, coal plants suffer about twice as many outages as wind.

Tri-State said that the order “requires the operation of an uneconomic resource and disrupts ordinary and orderly planning, development, and investment in generation resources.”

And since the companies involved have planned ahead, making them work on a plant which they don’t need won’t help anything. Platte River’s CEO Jason Frisbie said “we have planned for the retirement of this resource for over a decade and have proactively replaced the capacity and energy from new sources.”

The order has also been opposed by several other entities – the Colorado Attorney General, alongside a coalition of environmental groups filed their own request for a stay of the DoE’s order.

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