Americans on the hook for an extra $6 billion — thanks to Trump: report

President Donald Trump appears blind to consumers’ rocketing electricity costs, reports the Washington Post. If anything, the president appears willing to make consumers pay even more for their monthly power bills to protect his favored industry.

“On energy policy, the administration’s most obvious sin has been picking losers,” reports the Post. “It has attempted to halt construction for offshore wind developments, even some that were nearly complete, and suffocated massive solar projects with red tape. As the nation clamors for more electricity, this oppositional attitude makes no policy sense.”

But it is Trump’s militant embrace of the wildly outdated and expensive coal industry that has energy strategists perplexed, and consumers furious.

“The Energy Department quietly issued emergency orders in late December requiring four coal plants to keep operating that had been scheduled to retire. That was in addition to another plant in Michigan that the administration has forced to remain open since last May. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has indicated he intends to do the same for additional plants,” the Post reports.

But Trump appears to be protecting coal plants not from coal-hating liberalsbut from economics. The power industry itself has opened no new coal plants in recent history for a reason. Other forms of energy, including natural gas, are cheaper, while solar has fewer moving parts, less pollution and no capacity to poison neighbors with mercury and toxins. Coal plants are also woefully inefficient — wasting roughly two-thirds of their energy through heat, according to the Post, and they take hours for their dated technology (which is barely a step up from that of a campfire) to ramp up.

Plus, the aging facilities that were scheduled for retirement are in “disrepair and require expensive investments to keep operating safely,” according to the Posy. One facility in Michigan — which Trump is determined to drive like a zombie — has already been offline for long stretches for maintenance.

“The plant’s operator, Consumers Energy, told regulators in November that running past its scheduled retirement had cost $80 million since May, more than $615,000 per day. And who picks up that tab? Residents, in the form of higher electricity bills,” the Post reports. “Ratepayers nationally will take on as much as $6 billion in higher costs by 2028 if this pattern continues, according to analysis last year by the consulting firm Grid Strategies.”

Another plant Trump forced to stay open in the state of Washington had long been slated for closure, even going so far as to pay employees a $50,000 “parting bonus” to help with their re-education into new jobs.

“This is what it looks like when ideology drives energy policy,” said the Post. “Keeping money-losing plants online skews the market, making it harder for companies to invest in the infrastructure of the future.”

Meanwhile, energy bills across the US have increased by 13 percent since Trump returned to the White House last January.

Read the Washington Post report at this link.