Biden administration aims to speed up the demise of coal-fired power plants

Operators of about 250 coal plants also dumped toxic ash into unlined pits regulated more loosely than household garbage landfills.

One of the sites that will face more stringent federal oversight is the former Waukegan Generating Station on Lake Michigan, a former ComEd coal plant ringed by two unlined ash ponds and an unlicensed landfill. Others include a Joliet quarry where ComEd and other companies dumped coal ash and a coal plant in Michigan City, Indiana, owned by the Northern Indiana Public Service Co., which had planned to excavate and safely dispose of only half of its waste.

Donnita Scully, environmental justice chair at the LaPorte County branch of the NAACP, said the only thing keeping the Michigan City plant’s waste from spilling into Lake Michigan is a fast-deteriorating steel wall.

“I’m concerned about the people who don’t know about this threat to their health,” Scully said.

The new regulations come at a time of rapid change in the nation’s energy mix.

Coal provided just 17% of the electricity generated in the United States last year, down from more than half a decade ago. Gas accounted for 42%, but in some states a combination of wind and solar energy, paired with battery storage for when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun doesn’t shine, provides most of the electricity during various times of year.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced the Biden administration will attempt to add more renewable energy to the electric grid by speeding up environmental reviews of new transmission lines and providing regulatory incentives to overhaul existing lines to carry more energy.

In many ways, Illinois is ahead of the federal government in moving toward cleaner energy.

A state law brokered by Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the Democratic-controlled General Assembly outlaws coal- and gas-fired electricity by 2045.

But Illinois also provides a cautionary tale about the transition.

During the mid-2000s, five Chicago suburbs and dozens of Downstate communities agreed to help pay off more than $5 billion in debt for the Prairie State Generating Station — one of the Top 10 industrial sources of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the United States.

Municipal investors in the massive coal burner, including Batavia, Geneva, Naperville, St. Charles and Winnetka, helped block Pritzker’s more aggressive plans. So did Springfield, the state capital, which built a new coal plant around the same time even as private investors abandoned dozens of similar projects, scared off by skyrocketing construction costs and the likelihood that climate pollution eventually would be regulated.

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