People and businesses nationwide are reckoning with rapidly rising electricity costs. Last year, 80 million people struggled to afford their utility bills. At the same time, electricity demand is newly surging from the AI-driven buildout of massive data centers, threatening even higher electricity costs to come.

The need for change is clear, and so is the solution: boosting investments to deliver an affordable, reliable and clean electricity system.

By repeatedly using taxpayer dollars to bail out the coal industry, the Trump administration is instead pursuing a reckless and costly gambit that fails on all three counts. This is not the path to a better future; this is a short-sighted attempt to yoke the nation to faltering relics of the past. For this failure in vision, we all will pay the price, in higher costs, less reliable power, and a worse climate and health.

In this newest action, the administration announced plans to sink another round of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to prop up over a dozen expensive and unreliable coal plants; support the speculative development of several more; and facilitate the construction of a highly contested coal export terminal.

This comes on the heels of already attempting to force the nation’s military to run on coal-fired electricity generation, spending hundreds of millions of additional taxpayer dollars on prior subsidies for coal plant repairs, requiring ratepayers to pay hundreds of millions of dollars and counting to keep online a handful of would-be-retired coal plants, and slashing safeguards around harmful coal plant pollution, including mercury, toxic wastewater, coal ash and carbon dioxide.

Given how much the Trump administration is asking “we the people” to pay to bail out the coal industry, it’s worth interrogating what we the people are really getting in return.

We are not getting a more affordable electricity system. Coal-fired power plants are expensive, so much so that they are routinely more costly to continue running compared to building new renewables, the overwhelmingly most cost-effective resource available. If we want a more affordable electricity system, we should be doubling down on supporting the buildout of renewable resources. By forcing the perpetuation of coal-fired power plants instead, the Trump administration is driving electricity costs up, not down.

We are not getting a more reliable electricity system. Coal-fired power plants are now the least reliable resource in our electricity system. Despite the towering cost, the administration’s subsidization of plant repairs will amount to little more than bubble gum and string. The nation’s coal fleet is old, outdated, and increasingly unsuited for a modern grid — meaning hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars sunk into propping up power plants that are doomed to obsolescence.

We are not getting a cleaner electricity system. Coal-fired power plants are heavily polluting, full stop. Repeatedly invoking “beautiful, clean coal” won’t make it so: from harmful air pollution, to toxic wastewater discharged into local waterways, to hazardous coal ash, the consequences of coal use on public health, worker health and the environment are severe. Worse, the administration is slashing even the most basic of existing polluter accountability safeguards, meaning long-fought-for gains are rapidly being erased.

So neither affordable, nor reliable, nor clean — and in reality, the full picture is even more damaging. That’s because the Trump administration is attempting to hardwire coal into the nation’s electricity system; it’s also doing everything it can to block the construction of solar and wind projects nationwide.

These resources are overwhelmingly the fastest and cheapest resources to bring online. When coupled with investments in energy efficiency, energy storage and a strategic expansion of the electricity grid, the pieces are in place to chart a real and true forward course to an affordable, reliable and cleaner electricity system.

Meanwhile, in the one way coal workers and coal communities most need support — through policies that actually reckon with the individual- and community-level implications of a rapidly evolving energy future — the Trump administration is leaving them out in the cold, abandoning worker health protections, abandoning forward-looking investments, abandoning commitments to reality in favor of cynical, empty promises of a future that will never come.

In this moment, people need leaders to provide real solutions to real challenges. This reckless, costly coal bailout, which will enrich a handful of coal executives at the expense of everyone else, unequivocally isn’t it.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Julie McNamara is the federal energy policy director with the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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