In Washington state, the Trump administration’s crusade to force aging coal plants to stay online is meeting resistance from lawmakers — and confronting the reality that the state’s power grid is doing just fine without coal.
On Monday, the Department of Energy issued its second 90-day emergency order demanding the continued operation of Unit 2 of TransAlta’s power plant in Centralia, in southwestern Washington. The DOE had first ordered the facility to keep running in December, the same month it was set to stop burning coal under an agreement with the state that’s been in place since 2011.
The order comes less than one week after Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, signed legislation that would impose hefty costs on TransAlta should the Centralia facility begin running again. The law, which passed Washington’s Democratic-controlled legislature in February, revokes TransAlta’s exemption from a requirement to buy allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade program. It also eliminates an exemption that allowed TransAlta to avoid paying the state sales tax on the coal it burns at the Centralia plant.
These changes will make it “extremely expensive for them to generate power at that facility,” Washington state Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, the bill’s lead sponsor, told Heatmap News last week. Fitzgibbon, a Democrat, added that the goal was to forestall the threat of the Trump administration getting “more aggressive” in its use of emergency power by putting the state “in a stronger position to ensure that the plant did not restart operations.”
The DOE has trotted out familiar justifications for ordering the Centralia plant to continue operating. The Monday order stated that the “reliable supply of power from the Centralia plant is essential to maintaining grid stability across the Northwest, and this order ensures that the region avoids unnecessary blackout risks and costs.”
But no such risks exist. According to an Environmental Defense Fund analysis of power generation data from the DOE’s Energy Information Administration, the Centralia plant hasn’t generated any meaningful electric power since January. The state has not suffered from any grid emergencies or supply shortfalls so far this year.