For the second time in as many weeks, the Trump administration used emergency powers to prevent an old fossil-fuel power plant from closing just one day before it was scheduled to shutter.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered late on Friday that an oil- and gas-fired power plant in Pennsylvania keep operating through the summer, citing concerns about possible energy shortages in the region.
But experts say the plant doesn’t need to remain open to meet energy needs — and that President Donald Trump’s interventions will cause further spikes in electricity bills already expected to increase significantly in some parts of the country this summer.
“What we’re seeing with this order is a manufactured emergency. Overall resource constraints on a regional grid are being used as the justification to keep individual plants open,” said Joel Eisen, an energy law expert at the University of Richmond.
Constellation Energy, which runs the Eddystone power plant’s units 3 and 4 on the Delaware River just south of Philadelphia, was scheduled to shut them down on Saturday after about 50 years of operation.
The order followed a nearly identical directive one week earlier to keep operational a large coal-fired power plant in Michigan that was scheduled to close in May.
The Department of Energy used emergency powers granted by the Federal Power Act to stop the retirements in response to a Trump executive order intended to slow the pace of power plant closures. Trump declared a national energy emergency in his first week in office, even though most industry insiders say no such emergency exists.
“The secretary of energy was responding in part to the executive orders, but more just to the general discourse that there’s something special about these old power plants,” said Ari Peskoe, an energy law expert at Harvard University. “There’s a lot of different ways to address these resource adequacy challenges. Why double down on the oldest plants?”
The U.S. electrical grid is indeed facing significant challenges. Old power plants that run on coal, oil and gas have been retiring at a significantly increased rate over the last few years and are projected to continue doing so over the course of the Trump administration. (These plants are increasingly costly to operate compared to newer facilities and renewable power, and they are much more polluting.)
Those retirements, combined with increasing demand on the energy grid for the first time in decades, mean that there is a future risk that in some parts of the country, there may not be enough reliable resources on the highest energy demand days.
Wright cited regional concerns about adequate power, along with Trump’s declared national emergency, in the order requiring the Constellation plant to delay closure. “Americans should never be left wondering whether they will be able to turn on their lights or air conditioning,” he said in a statement. He used similar language last week for the Michigan coal plant.
Energy market insiders say there isn’t an immediate risk of such disruptions. There are already systems in place to address energy needs on the regional level and through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
They say that the Trump administration is manipulating longer-term concerns about the state of the energy system and misusing emergency energy powers to handpick old fossil-fired power plants and keep them running.
“This is an attempt to set the norm for intervention to keep power plants running based on perceived shortages, rather than actual emergencies,” Eisen said, referencing extreme weather damage or other extraordinary grid changes.
Timothy Fox, managing director at research firm ClearView Energy Partners, predicted the administration will take further actions to keep plants open, noting that more coal- and gas-fired plants are scheduled to close in the near future.
“We think more orders lie ahead,” he said in an email.
Beyond the environmental concerns, market experts said that ordering plants to remain open could be costly to consumers. Plants scheduled for closure usually stop doing maintenance and ordering fuel and begin winding down complex operations in the months before they shutter. With the last-minute orders, power plant operators will need to pay whatever it takes to undo those preparations — and the costs will likely eventually be passed on to the consumer.
In the case of the Michigan plant, the operator had stopped ordering coal and deferred maintenance, according to an expert on the Michigan Public Service Commission. Now the operator will need to pay to undo those changes — and it’s likely the consumer will be on the hook for that down the line.
The utility regulator in Michigan expressed confusion and frustration as to why the administration ordered the coal plant to stay open last week.
“Nobody asked for this order. The power grid operator did not. The utility that owns the plant did not. The state regulator did not,” Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission, told The Washington Post.
In Pennsylvania, the order on the Constellation plant “is likely to increase costs to PJM ratepayers by tens of millions of dollars, right at a time electricity customers are already struggling with higher costs,” said Abe Silverman, an energy researcher at Johns Hopkins University and the former general counsel for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. PJM is the regional grid organizer where the Constellation Energy plant is located, and it covers 13 states — including Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, as well as Washington, D.C.
The Pennsylvania governor’s office and the state’s public utility commission did not respond to requests for comment.
Constellation — which is one of the largest operators of power plants in the country — is currently seeking federal approvals for a large merger, and it also still needs federal permits for its nuclear power plant restart on Three Mile Island.
Constellation and PJM both applauded the decision from the Trump administration — despite the fact that Constellation planned to shut down the units because they were “expected to be uneconomic” and PJM approved the plans.
When asked why PJM was supporting the emergency order after approving the Eddystone shutdown in the first place, a spokesperson said: “We do not have the option to ask an owner to continue to run based on current supply and demand challenges.”
Outside experts were skeptical. “The PJM capacity market met its reliability targets for this summer without the need for these two units,” Silverman said. “So while the cost to electricity customers may turn out to be high, the reliability benefits seem negligible.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.