As families make tough choices between paying the power bill or buying groceries, there are mandates and market manipulations keeping expensive coal online and consumers paying the price.
By Marcia Dinkins
Marcia Dinkins is the founder and executive director of Black Women for Change, and she leads the Black Appalachian Coalition.
The sky-high price in PJM Interconnection’s latest capacity auction for electricity has sent shockwaves across the grid operator’s 13-state Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley region, including my coalition’s home base in Appalachia.
Politicians have rightly recoiled when learning of the nearly $15 billion coming onto people’s power bills next year, and utility experts are highlighting flaws and needed fixes in PJM’s markets and resource interconnection process. But I want to ensure officials at PJM, and in states throughout our region, are also thinking about the stakes for the communities closest to the power plants.
PJM tells us this capacity auction result is driven by increasing demand for electricity and signals a need to keep existing power plants running — even those long slated for retirement — and also to fast track new power plants. Given that the vast majority of PJM’s power generation is from gas and coal, that means keeping some aging and polluting fossil fuel resources online longer.
I understand the need for sufficient energy resources, but for those living near coal-burning plants, we know all too well the true cost of that energy.
Coal plant emissions lead to twice the mortality rate of other air pollutants, according to a Harvard study, and lead to grave health impacts, including higher rates of cancer, developmental delays, and premature birth. In fact, over 10% of the nation’s healthcare costs — as much as $880 billion per year — are directly linked to burning coal. In the states served by PJM, burning coal has led to nearly 900,000 missed school days and a quarter-million missed work days since 2015.
As families make tough choices between paying the power bill or buying groceries, there are mandates and market manipulations keeping expensive coal online and consumers paying the price.
West Virginia’s Public Service Commission requires utilities to keep their coal-fired power plants operating at 69% or more of their maximum capacity no matter what — far higher than the typical 42% use rate for coal plants nationally. That means West Virginia utilities have to burn coal even when cheaper and cleaner alternatives are available, and consumers pay the price. Because the utilities now have to maintain old coal plants and buy and burn much more coal than they otherwise would, they now want West Virginians to pay more than $600 million to cover more than two years’ worth of coal plant losses.