DOE order leaves rural electric co-ops facing millions in added expenses

Acting on behalf of President Trump, Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently issued an order that will force one of the three aging coal-burning units at the Craig Generating Station to continue operating into 2026, likely costing customers tens of millions in added expenses. Tri-State Generation and Transmission, which is the operator and co-owner of the plant, has been planning on retiring the uneconomic unit for more than seven years.

“Mountain towns like Gunnison and Crested Butte don’t need this kind of petty politicking, said Jeffery Delaney of Crested Butte, who is served by Tri-State member Gunnison County Electric Association. “We want to get on with building local clean energy infrastructure that lowers bills and boosts our rural economies. Concocting a fake emergency to artificially keep expensive and aging coal plants online does exactly the opposite. It’s such a cynical move.”

Under Section 202c of the Federal Power Act, the Energy Secretary has the authority to issue such orders, but they are supposed to be used only in rare emergency circumstances. There is no crisis or emergency involving Craig Unit 1 – which at 45 years old is nearing the end of its expected operational life anyway – to justify such an order. In its most recent resource plan, a comprehensive analysis by Tri-State concluded unequivocally that Unit 1’s closure would have zero impact on reliability. The Colorado Public Utilities Commission came to the same conclusion.

The Energy Department has exercised this authority at five plants that were slated for closure this year: the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, the Eddystone plant in Pennsylvania and most recently the Centralia coal plant in Washington state and the Shahfer and Culley plants in Indiana earlier this month. The orders are limited to only 90 days, but the Trump Administration has renewed the orders twice for the Campbell and Eddystone plants, and the expectation is that DOE will continue to re-up them illegally every 90 days through the end of Trump’s term.

The orders impose significant added costs on families and businesses. Keeping the Campbell plant in Michigan open cost customers an extra $29 million in just the first five weeks of the order ($763,000 a day). An analysis completed this week, calculates that the added fuel, operations and maintenance costs of forcing Craig Unit 1 to keep operating will run as high as $20.9 million every 90 days, or $84.7 million a year.

Those costs will be passed on directly to the 15 rural electric cooperatives in Colorado and co-ops in New Mexico, Wyoming and Nebraska that also are members of Tri-State, which owns a 24% share of the output of Unit 1. Costs will also be felt by customers of Tri-State’s co-owners in the unit: Platte River Power Authority, which provides power to Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont and Loveland, owns 18% of the unit; Xcel energy owns 10%; Arizona-based Salt River Project owns 29%; and PacifiCorp, which provides electricity to customers from the Pacific Northwest to Wyoming, owns 19%.

Tri-State has been working collaboratively with its member co-ops, state officials and stakeholders for the past seven years to thoughtfully map out the phased retirement of the Craig plant in ways that save customers money while also ensuring grid reliability, starting with Unit 1 at the end of this year.

Eric Frankowski is the executive director of the Western Clean Energy Campaign.