President Donald Trump has directed Energy Secretary Rick Perry to take immediate steps to keep both coal and nuclear power plants running. | Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images Trump calls for coal, nuclear power plant bailout

President Donald Trump pressed for a quick regulatory bailout for struggling coal power plants on Friday — a move that would buoy a mining industry that offered him crucial support in 2016, but is riling other energy companies and even some free-market conservatives.

The White House called on Energy Secretary Rick Perry to take immediate steps to keep both coal and nuclear power plants running, backing Perry’s claim that plant closures threaten national security. An administration strategy to do that laid out in a memo to the National Security Council circulated widely among industry groups on Friday, but it was not clear that intervention could survive the inevitable political and legal challenges.


It was the latest step in more than a year of efforts by the administration to compel power companies to keep operating the money-losing plants that are suffering from the rise of competing energy sources like natural gas. Those proposals have drawn opposition from most utilities, along with environmentalists, gas producers, power grid operators and conservatives who say it would be an unwarranted intrusion to the energy markets.

The White House statement calling for action came after days of Trump making similarly aggressive moves on international trade, slapping tariffs on the European Union, Canada and Mexico to protect U.S. industries like aluminum and steel. In this case, the president is acting on behalf of what he likes to call “beautiful, clean coal,” a once-dominant fuel that still plays a major role in his stump speeches.

Trump “has directed Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to prepare immediate steps to stop the loss of these resources,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement Friday, referring to coal and nuclear plants.

She added that Trump believes "keeping America's energy grid and infrastructure strong and secure protects our national security… Unfortunately, impending retirements of fuel-secure power facilities are leading to a rapid depletion of a critical part of our nation's energy mix, and impacting the resilience of our power grid."

The statement came five months after federal energy regulators rejected Perry's call that they adopt his proposal to keep the struggling coal and nuclear power plants operating. That proposal would have overwhelmingly benefited mining magnate Bob Murray, an outspoken Trump supporter whose operations supply coal to several endangered plants in the Midwest and Northeast, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Trump’s National Security Council gathered Friday to discuss the draft memo that lays out arguments why the administration should use federal authority to keep the money-losing power plants open — despite the assurances from some of the nation's grid operators that no such emergency exists.

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"Any federal intervention in the market to order customers to buy electricity from specific power plants would be damaging to the markets and therefore costly to consumers," said the PJM Interconnection, which operates the nation's largest power grid and stretches from the Midwest the Atlantic Coast, in a statement. "There is no need for any such drastic action."

A broad swath of trade associations representing oil and gas, wind and solar power, consumer groups and advanced energy technologies slammed the plan, and they were joined by some congressional Democrats.

“This would be an egregious abuse of power,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement. “I fought this proposal before, and I will continue to fight this corrupt scheme to prop up the coal industry at the expense of American consumers.”

That new 41-page memo, first revealed by Bloomberg News on Thursday evening, says that under the 2015 highway and transit bill known as the FAST Act, DOE must identify critical energy infrastructure, a process the agency is undertaking now with the help of its national labs. But because that is likely to take two years, DOE in the meantime should use the 1950 Defense Production Act and the Federal Power Act to require the plants to keep operating, the memo says.

Power sector experts have said using the two laws to keep specific plants operating would stretch both those measures, and would certainly trigger a major legal fight. Critics of the administration's strategy said the memo appears to signal that the White House is preparing for a fight.

"One way to view the release of this draft is that it is a trial balloon to see how fierce and fast the opposition will be," said Dena Wiggins, CEO of the industry lobby group Natural Gas Supply Association, which opposes the DOE plan. "We’ve known for some time that all of these federal authorities ... were in play, so the fact that we’ve now seen it in writing doesn’t really change anything. It does, however, underscore how hard it is to cobble together a sound legal rationale to bail out otherwise uneconomic coal and nuclear plants."

And critics say the push to bail out the plants is simply Trump's effort to reward backers like Murray, the coal baron, and live up to his campaign promise to revive coal country. Perry first began work on the power plant issue in March 2017, when he met with Murray at DOE, and Trump himself personally directed Perry to take action on the issue since last summer.

Murray's coal mines have been a major supplier for power plants owned by FirstEnergy Solutions, a unit of Ohio-based utility giant FirstEnergy that sank into bankruptcy this spring. FirstEnergy Solutions has said it plans to close or sell five of its money-losing coal and nuclear power plants.

But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the grid operator have said that even with the planned closures, the region has ample power to supply the market's needs. Stagnant power consumption growth, coupled with the rise of natural gas and renewable power sources like wind, has displaced many of the older coal and nuclear facilities in the markets.

The memo also calls for establishing a new requirement for the electric grid based on "resilience,” a term Perry injected into the regulatory conversation last fall with a proposed rule that would have rewarded plants that could keep 90 days of fuel on site. FERC rejected that rule, but it also created a new proceeding to try to define "resilience," which some in the industry say pertains to the grid's ability to withstand and recover from a physical or cyberattack.

The memo largely focuses on the issue of resilience, which it says would suffer if coal and nuclear power plants retire. It specifically targets natural gas as a weakness, because the plants that burn the fuel rely on pipelines that could be disrupted, while coal and nuclear power plants can keep months' worth of fuel on site.

"Natural gas pipelines are increasingly vulnerable to cyber and physical attacks," the memo says. "The incapacitation of certain pipelines through the United States would have severe effects on electric generation necessary to supply critical infrastructure facilities."

