Trump Orders The Military To Buy Electricity From Failing Coal Plants, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Free Market Was Still Allowed To Retire Them
WASHINGTON. Calling coal "beautiful" and "clean" in the same breath he used to call it essential to the survival of the republic, President Donald J. Trump on Feb. 11 signed an executive order directing the United States military to begin buying its electricity from the aging coal-fired power plants that the open market has spent two decades trying to shut down.
The order, titled "Strengthening United States National Defense With America's Beautiful Clean Coal Power Generation Fleet," instructs the Secretary of War and the Secretary of Energy to enter long-term power purchase agreements between coal plants and military installations, guaranteeing the plants a paying customer that cannot, as a matter of national security, decline to pay. Administration officials explained that the contracts would supply the stable revenue necessary to keep open facilities that private utilities had been retiring because cheaper natural gas and renewable power kept outcompeting them.
"This protects the grid, it protects the warfighter, and it protects an industry that has been treated very unfairly by the weather and by math," said one official within the administration, who described the falling cost of competing energy sources as a threat the Department of War was uniquely positioned to neutralize. The Energy Department has reportedly identified more than three dozen coal plants that could be wired to nearby bases, a figure officials presented as evidence of how many plants still required saving.
The order builds on the national energy emergency the President declared on his first day in office, an emergency that has so far been addressed exclusively by producing more of the fuels responsible for it. By reclassifying the purchase of coal-fired electricity as a defense necessity, the administration has positioned the burning of the dirtiest available fossil fuel as a patriotic act performed on behalf of the troops, who will receive the same electricity they would have received anyway, generated in the manner most harmful to the air around the base.
Supporters noted that the plan resolves a contradiction at the heart of American energy policy, in which a free market the President routinely praises had been permitted to decide that coal was no longer worth burning. Under the new arrangement, that decision will instead be made by the federal government, which has determined that coal is worth burning indefinitely, on terms favorable to the plants and billed to the public.
At press time, the Secretary of War was reviewing a Department of Energy list of coal plants ranked by how close each one sat to a military base and how far each one sat from ever turning a profit on its own.