By HANNAH NORTHEY
The Energy Department says it’s legally sound to shift more than half a billion dollars to help revive old and closed coal plants. Department officials, legal experts and lawmakers disagree.
The Energy Department is planning to prop up old and shuttered coal plants using more than half a billion dollars that Congress originally set aside to advance carbon capture technologies and improve energy resiliency and environmental protection in rural areas.
It’s a move that former and current agency officials, legal experts and some lawmakers and appropriators say undermines congressional intent in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. That statute authorized and appropriated almost $3 billion to capture heat-trapping gases from big emitters through demonstration and pilot programs.
“DOE has zero authority to repurpose the funds without going through Congress,” said one career staffer, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “DOE leadership is doing something with those CCUS funds that is obviously counter to the [bipartisan infrastructure law].”
DOE’s about-face is laid out in a recent notice of funding that provides $525 million to build, restart, overhaul or retrofit coal-fired plants that are shuttered or scheduled to retire before 2032. In the notice, the agency states that the funding being offered up is unobligated money that lawmakers originally set aside under the bipartisan infrastructure law for the now-defunct Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, or OCED.
Congress directed the office, which was dissolved during a recent reorganization, to use the money for carbon capture demonstration and large-scale pilot projects, and energy improvements and environmental protection in rural or remote areas.
While DOE instructed applicants to “integrate carbon capture demonstration phases,” current and former department staffers say the notice is vague, doesn’t describe in detail when to incorporate CCUS, and allows applicants to move ahead with near-term “reliability upgrades” without requiring carbon capture at the outset.
