WILKES-BARRE, PENNSYLVANIA/USA – OCTOBER 10, 2016: Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump holds a 'Trump Digs Coal' sign during a rally Oct. 10, 2016, at Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre, PA.
A Trump administration order to keep an aging and unneeded Michigan coal-fired power plant open and online reportedly is costing taxpayers about $615,000 per day, or $113 million to date. Closing the plant would save taxpayers about $640 million by 2040.
“The Trump administration in May ordered utility giant Consumers Energy to keep the 63-year-old JH Campbell coal plant in western Michigan, about 100 miles north-east of Chicago, online just as it was being retired,” according to The Guardian.
“The costs of unnecessarily running this jalopy coal plant just continue to mount,” Michael Lenoff, an attorney with Earthjustice, which is suing over the order, told The Guardian.v
President Donald Trump signed a national energy emergency order on his first day in office this year, rolling back regulations.
In court documents, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said that the administration’s latest order is “arbitrary and illegal.”
Consumers Energy, the operator of the plant, did not ask the Trump administration for the order to keep the coal plant running, and the Trump administration did not consult local regulators, a spokesperson for the Michigan public service commission (MPSC), told the Guardian in May.
“The unnecessary recent order … will increase the cost of power for homes and businesses in Michigan and across the midwest,” the chair of the MPSC, Dan Scripps, said in a statement at the time.
Reporting on what it called Trump’s “pro-fossil fuel agenda,” The Guardian in January quoted the president:
“We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it – let me use it,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”