President Trump’s feckless campaign promises to revitalize the U.S. steam coal industry has suffered another major blow. As expected, the Tennessee Valley Authority close to closing two more big coal-fired power plants in its giant system. TVA has been moving away from coal and toward natural gas for several years.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press got it right when it reported Monday, “The Tennessee Valley Authority is proposing to close two more of its coal-fired power plants due to stagnate or declining power demand in its seven-state region.” The action has been in the works for months.
The triggering event for Monday’s news was the completion of TVA’s environmental analysis, which found that the federally-owned power system should shut its single-unit, 881-MW plant near Oak Ridge, Tenn., and unit three at its Paradise plant in Kentucky, an 1,150-MW plant, the last of three burning coal at the site. TVA shut down the first two Paradise units earlier, converting them to gas-fired, combined cycle units.
The TVA board could vote on the recommendation to close the two coal units in the next several days.
The news prompted the tweeter-in-chief to pounce. Trump tweeted, “Coal is an important part of our electricity generation mix and @TVAnews should give serious consideration to all factors before voting to close viable power plants, like Paradise#3 in Kentucky.” The short, punctuated conventionally, and grammatically correct tweet suggests that Trump himself didn’t write it.
Trump implied that TVA had not given “serious consideration” to the plant closures, which is not the case. TVA responded with a tweet of its own: “This is our response to the President’s tweet earlier this evening: Mr. President, coal is an important part of TVA’s power generation mix and we will give serious consideration to all factors as we make this decision.”
As Energywire noted on Tuesday, the coal for Paradise comes from a mine owned by Murray Energy Corp., where CEO Bob Murray was a big supporter of Trump in the 2016 election. Sine then, Murray has been lobbying the administration for financial bailouts of struggling steam coal markets, with nothing to show for it.
The thrust of Trump’s campaign comments on coal were that Washington environmental regulations were killing coal, which was never the case. Coal’s chief problems are low-cost natural gas and stagnant demand for electricity.
In Washington, the administration has attempted to roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules, including the Obama administration’s signature Clean Coal Plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which has never gone into effect.
So far, the administration’s attempts to bolster coal have focused less on environmental regulations than on attempts to bias competitive wholesale markets so failing coal plants would be able to compete. The prime approach was a Department of Energy initiative to get the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to order the wholesale markets to add a value for “resiliency” of fuel supply. FERC last year unanimously rejected the DOE initiative, despite a 3-2 Republican majority on the commission.
Since then, the White House has appeared to lose interest in trying to reverse coal’s inability to compete.
Predictably, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also pro forma lobbied TVA to keep the Paradise plant in his home state open. He (or one of his staff) tweeted, “I agree Mr. President. #Coal is an affordable & reliable source of energy we can find right here in #Kentucky. It powers the lights in our homes & employs thousands of hardworking Kentuckians. Coal has helped fuel our country’s greatness & it needs to be part of our energy future.”
The Paradise plant is legendary, captured by singer-songwriter John Prine in his 1971 song “Paradise.” It uses local coal from a large strip mine originally developed by Peabody Energy.
“When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born.
And there’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.
“And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County,
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay.
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking.
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.
“Well, sometimes we’d travel right down the Green River,
To the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill.
Where the air smelled like snakes and we’d shoot with our pistols.
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.”
— Kennedy Maize