Latest news with #FederalPowerAct
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
FERC ALJ order threatens competitive transmission cost caps: CAISO
This story was originally published on Utility Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Utility Dive newsletter. An order by a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission administrative law judge threatens cost caps included in competitive transmission solicitations across the United States, according to the California Independent System Operator. A May 22 ruling by FERC ALJ Joel deJesus could also upend FERC's framework for providing refunds to electricity customers when the agency finds a company has been overcollecting revenue, CAISO said in a filing with the commission on Tuesday. The California grid operator urged FERC to overturn deJesus' findings, saying they 'will harm ratepayers, undercut the consumer protections afforded by the Federal Power Act …, and cast doubt on the CAISO's and customers' ability to rely on voluntary, binding cost caps proposed and agreed to by project sponsors in competitive transmission planning processes.' The issue centers on a dispute over a proposal by a Lotus Infrastructure Partners affiliate to recover more than double a cost cap for the 500-kV Ten West Link transmission project between California and Arizona. CAISO selected the DCR Transmission project in 2014 following a solicitation that grew out of its transmission planning process. The transmission line started operating a year ago. DCR in June 2023 asked FERC to approve a transmission tariff based on a $553.3 million estimated project cost compared to a $259 million binding cost cap. Three months later, FERC accepted DCR's proposal, subject to refund, but ordered hearings and settlement procedures, according to CAISO. The proceeding was moving under the Federal Power Act's section 205, according to CAISO. However, deJesus said FERC's initial order was 'ambiguous' as to what FPA section the case should advance under. He contends FERC should have determined that the DCR rate filing was an 'initial rate filing' to be handled under section 206 of the FPA and that FERC should have established a refund date under that part of the law. In his order, deJesus noted that in section 205 filings, the burden of proof for the justness of a rate falls on the applicant — while in section 206 cases, the burden is on the entity challenging a utility's rate. DeJesus plans to move forward with the case under the FPA's section 206, unless FERC acts on appeals to his decision by June 6. Parties appealing the ALJ's order include CAISO, FERC staff, the Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition and a group that includes the California Public Utilities Commission. Recommended Reading CAISO asks FERC to reject Starwood affilate's request to blow past transmission cost cap Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump administration orders Consumers Energy to keep Michigan coal-fired power plant open
The Trump administration has ordered Consumers Energy to continue operating a coal-fired power plant in west Michigan that was slated for shutdown May 31, citing the potential for an energy emergency due to heightened summer demand. But the chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission says no energy emergency exists and the move will increase customer costs. U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright announced the emergency order May 23, calling for Consumers Energy's J.H. Campbell plant in Ottawa County's West Olive to remain open beyond its slated closure May 31. The Campbell plant is the last coal-fired power plant operated by Consumers and one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the state. "(The) emergency order ensures that Michiganders and the greater Midwest region do not lose critical power generation capability as summer begins and electricity demand regularly reach high levels," he said. "This administration will not sit back and allow dangerous energy subtraction policies (to) threaten the resiliency of our grid and raise electric prices on American families." But Michigan Public Service Commission chairman Dan Scripps said there is no existing energy emergency either in Michigan or with MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the regional energy transmission organization that includes Michigan, 14 other U.S. states and the Canadian province of Manitoba. "We currently produce more energy in Michigan than needed," Scripps said. "The unnecessary recent order from the U.S. Department of Energy will increase the cost of power for homes and businesses across the Midwest." More: DNR halts state land leases for utility-scale solar projects More: Trump emergency order will expedite permitting process for Enbridge Line 5 tunnel The J.H. Campbell Complex began operating in 1962 and generates up to 1,450 megawatts of electricity — enough to serve a million people. The 2,000-acre facility was named after James H. Campbell, a former president of Consumers Energy from 1960 to 1972. The utility in recent years announced plans to provide coal-free power generation and reduce its carbon emissions by 90% by 2025, 15 years faster than earlier projections. By 2040 Consumers Energy officials expected 90% of their electric generation to come from cleaner energy sources. Consumers Energy officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Trump administration cited its emergency authority under the Federal Power Act, which allows the secretary of energy to require temporary connections of facilities and generation, delivery, interchange or transmission of energy as the secretary determines will best meet an emergency and serve the public interest during a time that the U.S. is engaged in a war "or when an emergency exists by reason of a sudden increase in the demand for electric energy, or a shortage of electric energy, or of facilities for the generation or transmission of electric energy" or other causes. Greg Wannier, senior attorney for the nonprofit environmental group Sierra Club, said in a statement that the emergency order "is an illegal abuse" of Trump's presidential authority. 'If Trump's made-up energy emergency had an ounce of truth to it, he wouldn't be banning wind energy and canceling renewable energy projects," Wannier said. "This so-called energy emergency is a sham and we will not stand by and let this administration prop up a dying industry so Trump's fossil fuel buddies can make more money at the expense of Americans." Contact Keith Matheny: kmatheny@ This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trump orders Consumers Energy to keep coal-fired plant open
Axios
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Axios
Michigan order signals next stage of Energy Department's coal support
The Energy Department's order to keep a Michigan coal plant running this summer is short in duration but could signal bigger battles to come. State of play: Secretary Chris Wright on Friday demanded that Midwest grid operators and utility Consumers Energy keep the J.H. Campbell plant online until at least Aug. 21. It had been slated to retire May 31. Wright's order using emergency authorities cites "insufficiency of dispatchable capacity and anticipated demand during the summer months." Wright's separate statement says it ensures regional residents "do not lose critical power generation capability as summer begins" and demand gets high. The other side: Michigan's top utility regulator called it unnecessary given the state's "robust" planning and excess production, and said it will raise costs. "There is no existing energy emergency in either Michigan or MISO," said Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission. Public Citizen's Tyson Slocum said he's unaware of these Federal Power Act emergency authorities — specifically Section 202(c) — being used to extend the life of a soon-to-retire plant. "Neither MISO nor Consumers [Energy] initiated the request. This is Trump abusing emergency authorities to play politics," Slocum, head of the advocacy group's energy program, said via email. What we're watching: Other Trump 2.0 moves to slow coal's ongoing decline in the U.S. power mix.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Michigan coal plant was about to close. Trump ordered it to stay open.
The Trump administration has followed through on a threat to use emergency wartime powers to force expensive and polluting coal-fired power plants to stay open — even if the utilities that own them, the states in which they operate, and the grid operators responsible for maintaining reliability all agree it's safe to shut them down. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy issued an order demanding that the J.H. Campbell plant, a 1,560-megawatt coal-burning power plant owned by Michigan utility Consumers Energy, must abandon its plans to shut down on May 31 and instead continue operating through at least late August. The order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive and a vocal denier of the climate change crisis, states that 'an emergency exists in portions of the Midwest region of the United States due to a shortage of electric energy.' It cites this rationale to invoke the DOE's emergency authority under the 1935 Federal Power Act to unilaterally order any power plant in the country to keep running. 'This administration will not sit back and allow dangerous energy subtraction policies threaten the resiliency of our grid and raise electricity prices on American families,' Wright said in a Friday press release. President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders in April aimed at 'bringing back' the industry, including an order authorizing the DOE to cite grid reliability as justification for keeping coal plants open. Environmental and consumer watchdogs decried Friday's announcement as an unlawful abuse of power that serves the administration's pro-coal agenda. They warned that keeping this coal plant open will worsen pollution, harm nearby communities, and increase costs for utility customers. 'Donald Trump invoking the Federal Power Act is an illegal abuse of his presidential authority. Coal is expensive, outdated, and deadly,' Greg Wannier, senior attorney with the Sierra Club Environmental Law Program, said in a Friday statement. '[A]ll of the relevant parties, including MISO, the grid operator ultimately responsible for keeping the lights on in Michigan, concluded years ago that J.H. Campbell could retire without causing any grid reliability problems.' Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, accused the DOE of 'making up a manufactured emergency to accomplish a crass political outcome — Trump being able to say, 'I saved a coal-fired power plant.'' Wright's order comes just eight days before J.H. Campbell's scheduled May 31 retirement under a plan that has been in the works since 2021. The planned shutdown is part of a broader agreement between Consumers Energy and state regulators to end coal use by 2025 and put the utility on a path to meeting the state's mandate of 100% carbon-free power by 2040. Consumers Energy has estimated that the switch from costlier coal to cheap gas, solar, and energy storage will save customers $600 million through 2040. Consumers Energy has bought a 1,200-MW gas-fired power plant to make up for the energy and grid support that the J.H. Campbell plant provided, and has continued to build and contract for utility-scale solar power and battery storage. The DOE's order ignores this preparation for keeping Michigan's grid reliable, Wannier said. The DOE's claims that the coal plant is necessary to ensure regional grid reliability do not hold up, he said. Michigan regulators, Consumers Energy, and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the entity that manages grid reliability across Michigan and 14 other Midwest states, have had years to plan for losing the coal plant's energy and capacity services, and have found no reason to delay its closure, he said. MISO has the power to order power plants to stay open if it determines their closure could threaten grid reliability. MISO used that authority most recently during the Biden administration to order Missouri utility Ameren to keep its Rush Island coal plant open. To do so, it filed a 'reliability must run' request that was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the standard practice for such emergency stay-open orders. The DOE's emergency powers, by contrast, have historically only been used in rare cases to protect utilities, states, or regional grid operators from being penalized for violating air-quality regulations, contractual obligations, or other such barriers to keeping the plants running during emergencies, he said. The DOE's order provided no evidence that either MISO or Consumers Energy had made such a request for J.H. Campbell. MISO spokesperson Brandon Morris told Canary Media in a Monday email that MISO did not request that DOE issue the emergency order. "MISO will coordinate with Consumers Energy to support compliance with the federal order as we prepare to maintain grid reliability throughout the summer season,' he said. The DOE justified its emergency order by citing a December 2024 report from North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit regulatory authority that includes utilities and grid operators in the U.S. and Canada. In that report, MISO was the only grid region in North America to rank as 'high risk' for future grid reliability challenges. Like many other parts of the country, MISO is struggling to add new generation resources to the grid fast enough to keep up with demand. The vast majority of projects waiting to connect are solar, wind, and batteries, which could help replace the aging and money-losing coal plants being shut down. Wannier emphasized that such broad findings about potential future reliability don't justify emergency stay-open orders. 'DOE's citation to NERC is definitely overbroad,' he said. NERC's risk assessment for MISO 'does not create an 'emergency' sufficient to take an action as drastic as DOE has taken here.' The DOE also cites statements MISO issued after its April capacity auction, which secures resources to keep the grid running during times of peak power demand. MISO said at that time that summer months present the 'highest risk and a tighter supply-demand balance.' But Wannier pointed out that MISO's auction in fact 'ensured that each zone within MISO has sufficient resources to meet its resource adequacy objectives for the summer, as it does every year.' The DOE's order appeared to acknowledge this fact, noting that MISO also stated that it had 'demonstrated sufficient capacity' for all its regions. Slocum said these gaps in the DOE's explanation for taking this drastic step are evidence that the agency is 'looking for an emergency, and looking for a chance to deploy it.' 'There's no methodology here. There's no fact-based assessment,' he said. 'Summer is now an emergency to the Trump administration.' The DOE's order also fails to make clear how Consumers Energy, MISO, and state and federal regulators should determine the cost of forcing this coal plant to keep running over the summer, and who will end up paying for it, Wannier said. Power plants operating in MISO rely on the grid operator's energy market prices and dispatch signals to decide whether they should start up and run or stay idle from one hour to the next. The costs of running coal plants often exceeds the payments they can realize from selling electricity into these markets. But many utilities operating in MISO territory, including in Michigan, are already pushing billions of dollars of unnecessary costs onto their customers by running coal plants at times when other power sources would be cheaper, according to studies of data conducted over the past half decade. The DOE's order directed MISO to take 'every step to employ economic dispatch of the Campbell Plant to minimize cost to ratepayers.' But the order also instructs MISO to 'effectuate the dispatch and operation of the units for the reasons specified herein.' The problem, Wannier explained, is that it's highly unlikely that the prices being offered to generators on MISO's energy market will be high enough to recoup the costs of running the aging coal plant. This lack of profitability is the main reason why so many coal plants are being shut down. That means that the safest way for Consumers Energy and MISO to attempt to meet the DOE's order that the coal plant be up and running through the summer is to allow it to 'self-schedule,' or run 'no matter what and accept whatever the clearing energy prices are,' Wannier said. That, in turn, makes it very probable that the coal plant will be losing money. 'DOE is saying Consumers and MISO need to work out how much Consumers has to get paid for operating the plant, and if they can't work it out, DOE will impose something,' he said. 'But none of this makes clear who DOE thinks should end up holding the bag if they can't agree. And it's bad news for whoever has to pay because there's no way Campbell gets enough reimbursement from MISO energy markets to financially justify its continued existence.' Slocum highlighted that utilities and grid operators have a legal obligation to operate power plants and markets in ways that do not unjustly or arbitrarily force costs onto utility customers. That's the issue on which Public Citizen intends to launch its first challenge to the order — not against the DOE, but in the proceeding that the order requires Consumers Energy to launch before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 'DOE's order explicitly directs Consumers Energy, as the owner of the coal-fired power plant, to file a cost-recovery filing at FERC,' Slocum said. 'We're going to be challenging that filed rate as unjust and unreasonable, because the emergency is fake.' 'It's one thing for Trump to say he wants to bring coal back. It's another thing to abuse emergency powers that trigger forced payments by ratepayers,' he continued. 'Once again, Trump is asking other people to pay for his nonsense.'
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion - The road to energy dominance is not paved with coal
Market forces have been phasing out coal for the last decade in favor of cheaper electricity sources. Coal's decline has been steady, regardless of which party sits in the Oval Office. When President Trump took office in 2016, coal represented 30 percent of total U.S. electricity generation. By his first term's end, and despite efforts to prop up the industry, that share had plummeted to 20 percent. A recent series of executive orders throw a federal kitchen sink at bolstering this energy resource, which markets deem uneconomic, while simultaneously declaring an energy emergency. But the White House cannot erase energy market realities by presidential fiat. Executive orders cannot change the fundamental economics of coal-fired power plants, nor can they alter states' authority over electric generation facilities, which Congress delineated in the Federal Power Act. The orders also will not bring new coal plants online within the next four years, because their time horizon from investment to build, interconnection, and operation is far longer. What the orders (and related proclamation) will do is raise electricity prices, exacerbate investment uncertainty, increase pollution and reduce royalty revenue that benefits communities and taxpayers. They will also fundamentally undermine energy markets. Unfortunately, these harms will likely outlive the administration's lifespan. These measures include three actions that are especially problematic from an economic perspective. The 'Beautiful Clean Coal' order directs the Department of Interior to reduce the 'royalty rate' that coal mining companies pay to the federal government when extracting coal from public lands. Cutting royalties provides a windfall to mining companies at the expense of American taxpayers. Mining companies currently pay the U.S. government royalty rates ranging between 8 percent and 12.5 percent for coal extraction. The federal government then funnels about half of this revenue to local mining communities, funding essential services such as schools and infrastructure. By comparison, oil and gas drillers pay significantly higher royalties, ranging between 12.5 percent and 18.75 percent. Land leasing for offshore wind projects has been halted altogether. This executive order seeks to slash coal royalty rates further, under the guise of promoting 'America's economic prosperity and national security.' It is doubtful that transferring revenue from taxpayers to coal companies can help America prosper. Moreover, favoring coal over natural gas or renewables undermines energy independence and economic growth, picking winners that couldn't succeed in a fair market. Second, the 'Regulatory relief' proclamation exempts some (currently unidentified) coal plants from complying with pollutant emission standards, using presidential exemption authority under Section 112(i)(4) of the Clean Air Act. Relaxing mercury and air toxics emission limits for coal-generating units will have several problematic effects. These exemptions, granted solely at the president's discretion, will prevent pollution reduction and endanger Americans' health and well-being. Exposure to mercury can lead to brain damage in fetuses and newborns. Particulate matter pollution from these plants causes a wide range of health problems, such as cardiovascular issues and respiratory diseases like asthma. This move will also undermine fairness within the energy industry for the operators who have already invested billions to meet these emission standards. Third, an order on Strengthening Reliability would command uneconomic coal plants to keep operating when markets are pushing them out, all while passing the costs onto Americans' electric bills. This proposed misuse of the Federal Power Act to bail out coal plants uses an obscure provision (Section 202(c)) that allows the secretary of Energy to temporarily order power plant operation and compensation if an 'emergency exists by reason of a sudden increase in the demand for electric energy.' The Department of Energy's own regulations and prior statements describe an 'emergency' as 'unexpected' and explicitly exclude shortages caused by 'economic factors,' unless blackouts are 'imminent.' But the Trump administration is aiming to mischaracterize the AI-driven increase in electricity demand as a 'sudden' emergency that requires subverting grid operators and quashing market forces to keep uneconomic coal plants open when cheaper electricity is available. This distortion would directly raise electricity prices, while also complicating the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's jurisdiction over energy markets and its obligation to ensure just and reasonable, and not unduly discriminatory rates. These presidential actions introduce a menu of handouts, exemptions and market interventions aimed at bailing out the coal industry at the expense of competitive energy markets. Courts will ultimately have to grapple with this attempt to undermine our electric grid operators, utilities and markets. If the moves proceed, Americans will face lower royalty revenue, more pollution, increased investor uncertainty and higher electric bills. Jennifer Danis is the federal energy policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law, where Pello Aspuru is an economic fellow. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
