Trump aims to boost coal, partly by ordering power plants to stay open

The directive ordering DOE to establish a process to keep power plants operating if reserve margins fall below certain thresholds could lead to a wide range of impacts, depending on how it is implemented, according to Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute.

“At worst, it could be used as a really disruptive intervention that has marginal reliability value at best and really deters actually a lot of new resources from coming online by creating barriers to exit for existing resources,” Hartman said Wednesday.