Feds order a Florida power plant to keep burning dirty coal

Walt Disney World is supposed to be the Happiest Place on Earth. It’s certainly the most popular tourist destination. Fifty million people, some from Florida but most from elsewhere, flock to the rodent-themed amusement park every year to spend big bucks seeking a good time.

Now imagine all those people coming down with big coughing fits.

Sing it with me, Mouseketeers: “It’s a foul world after all! It’s a foul, foul world!”

This is what popped into my head last week when I heard that the U.S. Department of Energy had ordered the Orlando Utilities Commission to keep burning stinky old coal in its 39-year-old Stanton Energy Center Unit 1 power plant.

I checked the Orlando air quality for that day. It was officially listed as “poor.” The decrepit old coal plant had been slated for a shutdown this month. But the DOE said “N-O!” — which means the tourists will get no relief from the onslaught of air pollution.

“Obviously, this is a clear federal overreach by the Trump administration to tell a local government what they can and can’t do,” said Susannah Randolph, an Orlando resident who leads the Sierra Club’s Florida chapter.

Why, you may ask, would a federal agency issue such an order? Because the feds have decided that there’s a looming energy emergency in Florida.

But it’s not driven by the need to keep the ghosts afloat in the “Haunted Mansion,” or to maintain the Monorail moving around, or to keep all the lights on in Cinderella’s Castle. Heck, this emergency isn’t even Disney-related.

“Although Florida is at ‘normal risk’ for long-term energy adequacy, the unit near Orlando needs to remain online partly to help serve potential data centers in the state, the department said,” a power industry publication called “Utility Dive” reported.

Considering the widespread Florida opposition to new power-hogging, water-guzzling data centers, that DOE edict benefiting “potential data centers” isn’t going to be a popular decision.

I contacted the Orlando power commission to ask whether this keep-coal-and-carry-on command is something it requested or something it plans to fight. Except for saying it didn’t ask for it, a spokeswoman for the utility that calls itself “the Reliable One” told me the commission had nothing to say. It is going to comply and keep quiet.

The acronym for the Orlando Utilities Commission is OUC, but I think its lack of resistance to this dopey DOE order requires the utility to add another word to its name — Helpless? Hapless? HeckWithYou? That way, its 288,000 customers can call it “OUCH.”

Because that’s what they’re going to say about their declining air quality and rising utility bills.

Wright is wrong

If I ran the Game Show Network, there’d be a new program called “The Prevaricators.” The theme song would be the Eurythmics singing “Would I Lie to You?” Contestants would listen to government officials make statements and then see if they can sniff out all the bat guano.

I think the debut of such a show would have to feature the sitting secretary of the Department of Energy, Chris Wright, because most of what he says is wrong.

He’s a former oil company executive, so he’s got a certain, shall we say, point of view. For instance, here’s what Wright has said about the growing threat of climate change: “There is no climate crisis… (sic) We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fear mongering of the media, politicians and activists.”

Of course, we Floridians know first-hand that that’s some Pulitzer-level fiction. We’ve seen a LOT of evidence of hurricanes growing more intense and doing so more rapidly. And we’ve seen more and worse flooding than ever before thanks to sea level rise.

Now check out Wright’s explanation for forcing the Orlando area to keep inhaling the smoke from burning coal.

“Taking reliable generation off the grid compromises energy reliability and needlessly raises energy costs for Americans,” he said, according to a Department of Energy press release. “During peak summer demand, Floridians deserve continued access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power and cool their homes.”

This is a colossal load of what experts call “hooey.”

OUC wasn’t simply shutting down one of its two coal-fired plants. It spent about $100 million three years ago to buy a gas-powered plant in Osceola County that was idle. OUC planned to put that one online to replace the coal-powered plant. There would be no gap in the amount of power available.

The other problem with Wright’s statement is calling coal power “affordable.”

“Coal is the most expensive form of electricity,” said Raymer Maguire of the CLEO Institute, a nonprofit that offers educational information on climate issues (sounds like Wright could use some).

Maguire pointed out that the expense is a big reason why the state’s largest utility, Florida Power & Light, gets less than 1% of its power from coal, while the No. 2, Duke Energy gets 9%. The OUC, by contrast, has been generating about a quarter of its power from coal — but it would like to stop.

The OUC’s own financial statements show that coal costs more than its other sources of fuel. You can see why the OUC wanted to switch, but now it can’t.

“Forcing this coal plant to remain open past retirement will needlessly jack up electricity bills for Central Florida families and businesses, right as they’re struggling with high energy costs,” said Ted Kelly of the Environmental Defense Fund.

But Wright doesn’t care about driving up energy prices in our increasingly unaffordable state.

He also doesn’t care that coal is the dirtiest fuel. In fact, his department keeps calling it “beautiful, clean coal.” As any contestant on “The Prevaricators” could tell you, that’s at least another gigaton of hogwash.

Think of the children

Coal is the most polluting fuel for generating electricity.

Its carbon-loaded emissions are bad news for our rapidly warming planet, of course — assuming Gov. Ron DeSantis will let us talk about that. But what I want to point out right now is coal’s dire health effects.

In 2023, the National Institutes of Health released a report about how “air pollution from coal power plants is associated with greater mortality than previously thought.”

Specifically, the NIH researchers “estimated that between 1999 and 2020, 460,000 deaths would not have occurred in the absence of emissions from the coal power plants.”

Burning coal is particularly bad for infants, children, and teens, said Liz Scott of the American Lung Association.

“Their lungs are still developing,” she explained. “They breathe more air for their body size than adults and they’re frequently exposed to outdoor air.”

Her organization has calculated that air pollution in Orange County is responsible for creating 22,000 pediatric asthma cases, 710,000 cases of chronic pulmonary disease, and 97,000 cardiovascular disease cases. Continuing the life of that ancient coal plant won’t help any of those folks.

And we haven’t even talked about alllll the ash that’s produced. Not far from the Stanton Energy Center, there’s a 175-foot-tall mountain of coal ash that has the neighbors worried about what it’s doing to their air and water.

But the DOE doesn’t care about that, either. The only health issue it’s concerned about is resuscitating an industry that’s already on life support.

A gig for DEVO

The OUC order isn’t the only one of its kind.

The DOE has issued similar orders to keep coal plants alive in Michigan, Indiana, Colorado, and Washington, too. Michigan and Illinois have joined forces to sue, calling the order illegal.

The plant in Michigan, which has already cost ratepayers an extra $180 million, partially broke down after the DOE order. So did the two in Indiana. That’s not unusual, especially given the age of some of them.

Despite the expense and the breakdowns, DOE wants all of these plants to keep pumping out dirty emissions for one reason and one reason only.

“They want to keep the coal mines open,” Kelly explained.

In recent decades, the coal mining industry has been in a long, slow decline. It was the largest source of fuel for energy production in 1984, but since then it’s fallen out of fashion like big shoulder pads on women’s jackets. By 2024 it accounted for just 10% of the nation’s total energy output.

You can feel sad for all the Loretta Lynn relatives losing their dangerous livelihood, but according to free-market conservatives, that’s how capitalism works. Good government doesn’t pick winners and losers, right?

Yet now we have a president who’s been frantically giving the coal industry CPR, trying to turn that loser into a winner. He’s been so intent on reviving coal, I keep expecting him to announce that the first band to play in his renovated White House Ballroom will be DEVO doing “Working in a Coal Mine.”

Just last week, he announced plans to spend $700 million of our tax dollars on giving the industry a big boost, including creating two new coal-fired plants.

His favors for the coal industry don’t stop there, either. As ProPublica reported this week, the convicted felon in the Oval Office also killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia who happens to be one of his close allies.

Of course, just as you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, so you can’t prop up a heavily polluting industry without killing thousands of people via respiratory problems. But those are the breaks, kids!

Welcome to Tomorrowland

Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, whose campaign is backed by AI tech titans, says he fully supports the DOE order to Orlando to keep burning coal.

But he’s about the only one.

In Orlando, the order is going over about as well as you might expect. Lead balloons exhibit greater buoyancy.

The Orlando Sentinel, in its story on this, quoted state Rep. Anna Eskamani, now running for mayor of Orlando, who made it clear she’s no fan of the feds.

“They are spending public money to subsidize the dirtiest, costliest form of power we have — the exact thing we should be moving away from — while working families foot the bill,” she said.

I hoped to get a similar fiery quote from the sitting mayor, Buddy Dyer. In 2017, when our anti-science chief executive pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Dyer joined more than 80 other mayors across the country to make a commitment to switching to clean energy by 2050.

“I am proud to support a vision of transitioning entirely to 100% clean and renewable energy in our city,” Dyer said then.

But when I contacted the mayor’s office this week, that defiance appeared to have dissipated. His spokeswoman told me the mayor would leave commenting to the folks at OUC. I pointed out that OUC was keeping mum. Unfortunately, that was the end of our conversation.

So, apparently, unlike the folks in Michigan, Orlando officialdom does not plan to sue the DOE to overturn this order. The decree lasts 90 days, so maybe Dyer & Co. think they just have to keep quiet until it expires.

But I bet when that September expiration date rolls around, Wright will simply renew it for another 90 days, then another 90 after that. That’s what he’s been doing in Michigan. Heck, he’ll probably do the same thing for the Stanton Energy Plant’s No. 2 coal plant, which is supposed to switch to natural gas next year.

Meanwhile, guess who’s completely rejected the use of fossil fuels for power generation? Walt Disney World. This is one place that’s embraced the idea of being Tomorrowland.

“At Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, solar energy plays an especially significant role,” the theme park reported recently. “In total across four sites, the resort now has 212,000 kilowatts of solar capacity, with over 600,000 solar panels — generating roughly enough energy to power over 19,000 Florida homes for one year.”

Disney’s four Florida solar farms include one near EPCOT that’s in the shape of its widely recognized corporate symbol. Together, the four “can now produce up to 100% of the resort’s daytime power needs, helping support one of the largest vacation destinations in the world.”

Maybe I’m wrong, but it sure seems to me that between solar-friendly Disney and the coal-drunk DOE, the second one is the real Mickey Mouse operation.