It’s been almost five years since we brought you our very first season: Coal at Sunset: A Colorado Town in Transition. In 2021, we went to Craig, Colorado, as it grappled with the forthcoming closure of the coal plant and mine that economically anchored the town. 

Now, a federal emergency order is upending the plan to close the plant. In our new mini-series, Coal at Sunset: Still Burning, we revisit this story to learn where Craig stands now in 2026, as economics, politics, and science continue to collide, and ask: where do they go from here?

This transcript is from the award-winning podcast, Laws of Notion, hosted by Kristan Uhlenbrock, Executive Director of the Institute for Science & Policy. For more information and resources from this episode, check out the episode summary page. Enjoy the transcript, and listen to the audio version at coalatsunset.org.

 

Episode One | From the Top

The Announcement

DUANE HIGHLEY: We were on vacation with the family. We were in Branson, Missouri, getting ready to have some fun. Most of my kids were with me, and many of the grandchildren, and we were actually celebrating New Year's Eve Eve, and had just poured a bunch of Old Fashioneds.

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: This is Duane Highley, the CEO for Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association.

DUANE: I literally had taken the first sip when my phone lit up, and I could see it was a 202 area code. So hence, Old Fashioned in hand, phone rings. It was Washington D.C. calling, saying, "We're giving you an order."

KRISTAN: One sip of bourbon, one phone call, one stroke of a pen, and a decade of careful planning got halted, leaving an electric co-op, the community of Craig, Colorado, and many others in a state of uncertainty.

Welcome to Coal at Sunset: Still Burning. I'm Kristan Uhlenbrock, and this is a follow-up to our very first season of Laws of Notion, a podcast that encourages us to think critically about the world around us. Over the next two episodes, we're going back to Craig, Colorado, a story we took on in 2021 about the pending closure of a local coal plant that has served as the town's financial backbone for half a century. Now, a federal emergency order is upending the plan to close the local coal plant one day before it was officially set to retire. We'll look at the order itself, the economics underlying it, and the decisions that drove the transition away from coal in the first place. And we'll talk with the people living in Craig, trying to find ways to keep their town alive.

Episode 1: From the Top.

Back to Craig

KRISTAN: Craig is a town of about 9,000 people and lies in the northwest corner of Colorado, where the high desert folds up into the Yampa River Valley of Moffat County. Craig bears the official trademark, "The Elk Hunting Capital of the World." Beyond the sprawling sage grass and hills, two coal mines and a three-unit power plant have had a profound influence on the area for half a century.

And on one of my recent visits, I noticed that the local liquor store's marquee still has the same sign from when I was there in 2021: "We support coal." So I went back to listen to what people shared with me five years ago in our first season.

JENNIFER HOLLOWAY [SEASON 1]: You go down into a coal mine every night because you're providing something for the rest of the country.

KRISTAN: Here's Jennifer Holloway, the executive director of the Craig Chamber of Commerce.

JENNIFER [SEASON 1]: We are raised to feel good about going to the coal and power plants to provide electricity for the rest of the country. And so that's so much part of our identity. How can we take those basic things – like we're hardworking, we love our families, we'll do anything for our neighbors – how do we take that and transfer it to a different opportunity?

KRISTAN: Many people struggled to see their place in a future without coal.

GRAHAM ROBERTS [SEASON 1]: To see this all go away and the circumstances of it, it does sadden me a little bit because it's been a great operation.

KRISTAN: This is Graham Roberts, the environmental supervisor for one of the nearby coal mines.

GRAHAM [SEASON 1]: This is one of the best examples of a coal mine in the state and the country, both from a production standpoint, a safety standpoint, our reclamation, and our community involvement. To see it go away, it's going to be a real hole in this community.

KRISTAN: Kirstie McPherson, a local business owner, told us about planning for a transition away from coal.

KIRSTIE MCPHERSON [SEASON 1]: My dad started working at Colowyo pretty much when the mine started. So my family has been talking about the potential of the mines closing since I was little, and so we've had a gigantic amount of time to be able to prepare for all of this. And even after they officially made the announcement, we still have way more time than a lot of places were ever afforded. If you look at Kentucky, they all went into work on a Wednesday and were sent home by 10:00 AM. We at least have nine years to be able to, from the time it happened, to really start thinking about how we're going to transition and move on.

KRISTAN: Saying goodbye to coal was never going to be easy or agreeable. It started with a regional haze settlement under the Clean Air Act in 2016 that set the wheels in motion to close the Craig Unit One plant. Then in January 2020, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, along with the other four utility co-owners, announced that they would retire all three units of the plant and close the associated mines over the coming decade. Since then, the politics and economics surrounding the energy transition have been messy.

For all the plans being made, the belief that coal wouldn't really go away never quite died. And in 2025, the political winds shifted.

PRESIDENT TRUMP [INAUGURAL ADDRESS, JANUARY 20, 2025]: The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.

KRISTAN: That was President Trump during his second inauguration speech from the Capitol floor. And in March and April of that year, he began signing executive orders aimed at creating energy security and reviving American coal.

PRESIDENT TRUMP [ABS-CBN NEWS, APRIL 8, 2025]: We will end the government bias against coal, and we're going to unlock the sweeping authorities of the Defense Production Act, to turbocharge coal mining in America.

KRISTAN: Then emergency orders issued by the Department of Energy started landing: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington State, Indiana, and then Colorado.

9NEWS CLIP [DECEMBER 31, 2025]: The Trump administration is ordering a retiring coal plant in Northwest Colorado to stay open just a day before it was set to close. Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency order requiring that Unit One of the Craig Station in Moffat County stay available.

KRISTAN: To try to understand what this all means, let's start with the man holding an old fashioned, ready to celebrate a new year, and then getting one of those emergency orders.

The Stroke of a Pen

KRISTAN: Duane Highley has run Tri-State for the last seven years, but he's been in the electric cooperative business since 1982. His wife likes to remind him that he's been married to the co-op a week longer than he's been married to her.

DUANE: My very first day on the job, I'm talking to my boss, and he does the briefing and asks, "Okay, do you have any questions?" And I'm like, "Yeah, can I have Friday off?" And he's like, "Well, that's a little bold of you to ask for a day off. You haven't even worked an entire day. Do you have some kind of good reason?"

I said, "Well, I'm getting married on Saturday, and I'd like to wash my car." And he was like, "Okay, well, I guess we'll give you a day off, but are you going to be back at work on Monday?" I'm like, "Yes, sir." So that was the wedding, the honeymoon, everything right there, and it's been like that ever since.

KRISTAN: It's worth taking a moment to describe what kind of company Tri-State is. Tri-State is a generation and transmission cooperative, a wholesale power supplier owned by its members. It's a not-for-profit organization that serves 39 electric co-ops and public power districts across four states: Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming. They don't have shareholders waiting on a dividend. The owners are the rural co-ops made up of ranchers and small-town families and Main Street businesses who buy the power. This means when costs go up, there's no corporate parent to absorb it. The bill flows straight down to its members.

DUANE: Our members' service territories stretch from the Montana border all the way to the Mexican border, and if you add it all up, it's about 200,000 square miles of service territory, which is larger than the state of California, but not nearly as populated because we're serving those parts of the West that are some of the least dense. So just imagine the challenge of keeping an affordable rate when you have to build that much infrastructure.

KRISTAN: Tri-State generates and supplies energy through renewables, natural gas, coal, and contracts with other electricity providers, and the Craig Station is just one part of their portfolio. Unit One of that plant had been scheduled to be retired on December 31st, 2025.

Then on December 30th, 2025, Tri-State received its first federal emergency order number 202-25-14. It declares that an emergency exists in the region, that there is a shortage of electricity and of the facilities to make it, and that keeping Craig Unit One available will "best meet the emergency and serve the public interest." Tri-State and its co-owners were directed to keep the unit available to operate and barred from winding it down until the order lifts.

What the Department of Energy was leaning on is called a 202(c) order. It's a section of the Federal Power Act written in 1935 and sharpened during the Second World War. It allows the Secretary of Energy to order a power plant to keep running during an emergency, a shortage caused by, say, war or a hurricane. And in April 2025, through executive order, President Trump directed the DOE to streamline, systemize, and expedite its processes for issuing emergency orders when "the relevant grid operator forecasts a temporary interruption of electricity supply is necessary to prevent a complete grid failure."

The administration's argument was about increasing energy demand in the West, mostly from data center growth, and that the grid could be short on power because of retiring assets and supply chain issues. Duane doesn't deny that there are places around the country where that potential for power shortages exists, but Tri-State's region isn't one of those.

DUANE: They consistently said, "Look, we think there's a grid emergency. There's a need for energy to power growth and data centers.” And there are areas of the country where it's absolutely true. There are areas of the country that do not have sufficient capacity. We've planned ahead. We have surplus capacity. We're not short. Maybe some other people are, but that should not be our problem, and our members should not have to pay for someone else's lack of planning.

There's a fable in there somewhere that we planned ahead, and yet others have an emergency, so the federal government says, "Keep your plant on," but we're having difficulty in finding those others with their checkbook ready to write us checks to pay for the cost of keeping it on.

KRISTAN: I think the fable he's referencing is Aesop's fable about an ant and a grasshopper. The ant stores food all summer while the grasshopper sings and plays. Winter comes, and well, the grasshopper is unprepared and finds itself without anything to eat. Tri-State is the ant, and the federal government has just informed the ant that because some grasshoppers didn't plan ahead, the ant must keep its pantry open and hand out the food.

To understand why that phone call hit so hard, you need a piece of jargon: surplus. Tri-State, Duane argues, is not short of power in the near term, and that's not a coincidence.

DUANE: If you look at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission resource adequacy report, Tri-State has the largest degree of surplus of any provider in the state, and I would challenge you to say maybe any provider in the region. We have planned ahead. It was part of our responsible energy plan, and we knew we would be retiring Craig.

KRISTAN: Balancing supply and demand as a utility is a complicated equation, but planning ahead and leaning conservative is what utilities do. Tri-State hired outside modelers, ran the numbers on how wind and solar actually perform on a frozen January night, and proposed a plan that ensures reliability. And when we talk about reliability in the electricity sector, we mean having a consistent, uninterrupted supply of power available whenever people and businesses need it. So utilities plan for peak demand.

DUANE: Our members don't want their lights to go out, and that's who we work for, right? So I get to face democratically elected board members. They care about reliability, and they want to hold us accountable for reliability. So when they saw us going into the responsible energy plan, and we said, "We're going to build hundreds and hundreds of megawatts of wind and solar and battery capacity, and we're going to keep your lights on," they're like, "Prove it. Prove that if you retire coal, you can keep the lights on." So, through the modeling, we said, what if you get a wind drought at the same time as you're having the coldest days of winter, and you have to go four or five days without wind power? So then those wind farms aren't doing anything for you.

As a result of all that work, the Colorado Public Utility Commission agreed with our work, and the environmental NGOs agreed with our work, and all supported a capacity plan that included fossil fuels in the mix because we knew we didn't need them often, but we needed them some. So our members rely on us to prove to them, and through that whole process, we said, "We can comfortably retire Craig, and we know we can keep your lights on."

KRISTAN: The Craig Power Plant is an aging facility. The units were built in 1979, 1980, and 1984.

DUANE: We're not retiring it because we hate coal. It's costing us more to keep it available to run than what it's doing for us on the few days it runs. It's a non-economic plant, and it seemed to me like a pretty clear business decision. That just did not buy us any compassion from the administration.

KRISTAN: Getting the Craig Unit One plant ready to operate is no small cost, but neither is keeping it ready and idle.

DUANE: Just because you're not running it doesn't mean there's not a lot of expense for a coal unit, which is part of the reason why we're retiring it. You can imagine if you had your car sitting in your garage for a year, and then you decide today I want to start it, that's not going to work. You have to continually be maintaining it even if you're not running it. And so just having it there means you have lots of equipment, and you have to keep a lot of it spinning because if you don't keep it spinning, it's going to be eventually unable to spin. And keeping everything lubricated and ready to go so that when somebody pushes a button, it will literally start and not fail to start.

KRISTAN: Which is why Tri-State had already made a calculated business decision when the Craig Unit One went down in mid-December, just weeks before Duane's call from the DOE and the unit's official retirement.

DUANE: So, we had a steam valve failure, and we just said, this unit hasn't had to run yet this fall. It’s not likely to be needed those last two weeks either. So how about we just not fix it? And so actually on the day that DOE called, the unit was literally unable to run on that day, and we had to then commence repairs to have it ready to run. So that was money that was spent that we would have preferred not to spend.

KRISTAN: And the issue isn't just about the cost to keep the plant in operation, but also the fuel supply.

DUANE: Knowing that we were closing Unit One and Unit Two and Unit Three, there's a schedule for this. And it's costly to operate the mine that Tri-State owns there, called the Colowyo Mine. So, we closed that mine in August 2025. Anticipating the closure of the units, we had mined enough coal out and had coal on the ground ready to burn, sufficient to carry the expected times it would need to run, mainly summer peak and winter peak conditions, between now and 2028 when the units would retire. And by December, it was already well under reclamation. We're filling the hole in, unable to get more coal out of there.

KRISTAN: And it's not like Tri-State can just easily get more coal from another location.

DUANE: Another complexity of the Craig Power Plant is it was designed to burn that coal. And people think a coal plant's a coal plant; you can burn any kind of coal in a coal plant. That is absolutely not true. The characteristics of every coal are different. Some coal has more sulfur dioxide or produces more nitrous oxides or has more mercury. And so, the air pollution control equipment that you design into the plant to manage that is specifically for that type of coal.

KRISTAN: Adding to the nuance of the surplus concern, Tri-State actually tried to plan for the very demand growth the federal government is worried about. It proposed a special rate structure, called a high-impact load tariff, to handle big new customers like data centers and to shield ordinary ratepayers from their costs. In October 2025, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, rejected that tariff, finding it strayed into retail rate-setting that belongs to the states. So, you have a utility that planned for surplus, planned for demand growth in their service area, and got told no on both fronts, then got ordered to keep a money-losing plant alive for an emergency it says it isn't facing.

There's one more piece to this complex story, and it's the one that would take a whole other series to do justice: energy markets. But here's the short version. For most of their history, utilities in the West ran like a bunch of neighbors who each kept their own generator in the garage. Everybody managed their own supply and demand, trading power only in a pinch, mostly because of geographic challenges, little coordination, and a lack of regional transmission lines. But that's starting to shift. Organized regional markets in the West are coming online. These new regional markets allow a wide range of energy providers to pool their resources and buy the cheapest available power first. Right as all of this was unfolding, Tri-State joined one.

DUANE: After years of work, we were able to see the Southwest Power Pool begin managing the grid in parts of the West, primarily a large part of Colorado and Wyoming at this point now, where they've expanded to. So that provides better reliability, greater affordability, and the ability to integrate renewables across a broader area so that there's not as much dump energy. And so it's a very, very good thing for us, the ability to have regional transmission planning that crosses multiple states, and it's all very good.

KRISTAN: Tri-State plugged itself into a much larger grid expressly designed to make running short of energy less likely. And the thing about markets: they are a good indicator of the most efficient, cost-effective way to keep electricity costs down.

The Math

KRISTAN: Duane can only legally share so much, but that doesn't mean that someone hasn't run the numbers. Is Craig Unit One actually needed? And is it worth what it costs to keep it active?

MICHAEL GOGGIN: My name is Michael Goggin. I'm the executive vice president at Grid Strategies. Grid Strategies is a consulting firm that works for a variety of interests in the transition of the generation mix, as well as the transition of power markets and the transmission system.

KRISTAN: Michael has spent more than 20 years watching wind, then solar, then batteries each go from the margins to mainstream. And his work with Grid Strategies has largely focused on where the electricity market is heading. Last December, using public data, he estimated the cost of the emergency orders specific to Craig Unit One. His finding: keeping it open is expensive and likely will never pay off.

MICHAEL: These plants are at the end of their useful life. They have increasing maintenance costs. They are not particularly efficient. And they also often break down and don't show up when they're needed for these peak periods of electricity demand. It's got two big strikes against it. It can't economically run very much, and there's a lot of cost involved in just keeping it open.

KRISTAN: Two strikes. Let's take them one at a time. The first strike is what it costs to keep the plant ready, what an economist would call a fixed cost. The second strike is what it costs to actually run it, the variable cost, which is mostly fuel, meaning how much it costs to buy and transport coal to the station. And to understand why that matters, you have to understand how the market chooses which power to pull into the grid and dispatch.

MICHAEL: The general way that power markets work is that they use the least cost resources first. For those who have taken economics, you basically move up the supply curve. You start with the cheapest stuff, and then you move up from there. And so the cheapest stuff is wind and solar. It doesn't have a fuel cost.

KRISTAN: Grid operators call this the merit order. Wind and solar typically go first. The fuel is sunshine and wind, so pretty cheap. Then efficient gas plants, hydropower, and on up the line. An old coal unit like Craig sits near the expensive end of that stack.

Power markets are complicated, so this is a simplified explanation. But the point is that this sorting isn't abstract or a once-a-season decision. Every five minutes, the regional market Craig sells into, the Southwest Power Pool, reruns the math and posts a price at thousands of specific spots on the grid, including one right near the plant.

MICHAEL: We looked at the closest pricing node in that market to the Craig unit, and it shows that 90% of the time Craig's cost of producing power is higher than the market price. And as in any market, that's an indicator that the plant should not be running. You could buy power cheaper in the market. The market is telling you, don't use this expensive, inefficient plant. Use the cheaper stuff in the market.

KRISTAN: Michael's report said that running Craig Unit One for a single 90-day order would cost around $20 million. A full year, around $85 million. Cost that because Tri-State is a not-for-profit co-op, would land on its members.

Craig isn't a one-off. Michael has tracked every one of the six federal emergency orders, and there's a pattern.

MICHAEL: The common thread across all six is that they are steam units. Steam units are also the ones that are being retired the most because they're the least efficient. On the gas side, most new gas generation is combined cycle, which can reach up to about 55, 60% efficiency. Steam plants max out at about 30-35%. They're just an older technology, and they're less efficient because of that. It begs the question of why the Department of Energy is bailing out these least efficient plants that are out there. You know, there's a reason why they were being retired.

KRISTAN: The emergency orders lean heavily on one word: reliability. As we electrify homes, cars, and industrial processes more, and as data centers drive demand up, that reliability can feel tenuous.

MICHAEL: Certainly, demand is growing, but I think it was just a bit of an overstatement of the near-term need and the risk, and also just ignoring how markets are already dealing with this. You have power markets that also send, through a different mechanism, a supply and demand price signal, basically, that says, when the power prices and the capacity prices go up, you need more generation in those areas to meet demand. And so there are already these built-in mechanisms that are ensuring that supply meets demand.

KRISTAN: One of Michael's sharpest critiques in all of this is about the assessment used to justify the emergency orders. The reliability warnings the administration cites come largely from NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. Their modeling looks at the regional level, which Michael argues does not capture the specifics of an individual plan, such as Tri-State's, and he also questions some of their assumptions.

MICHAEL: First of all, these regional reports have less resolution in terms of looking at the actual utilities and their needs. The NERC report uses relatively high projections for demand growth. More importantly, the NERC report doesn't account for the generation that is being developed today.

KRISTAN: The report says that across the Western region, most states could face generating capacity issues starting in 2031 if additional resources aren't brought online.

MICHAEL: There are already these built-in mechanisms that are ensuring that supply meets demand, and I think the NERC report takes a static view and doesn't look at how supply is responding.

KRISTAN: And then there's another component that's important to remember: the value of being connected to your neighbors. Because peak demand, the moment the whole order is built around, tends to be local.

MICHAEL: The NERC reports underestimate the value of transmission ties. Again, they look regionally, but there's a lot of power that moves around, particularly during periods of peak need on the grid. Peak demand is usually driven by a heat wave or a cold snap when everybody's using air conditioning or heating. The good news is that those extreme weather events are pretty localized, and so you can often depend on imports from your neighboring utility or a neighbor of that neighbor to bring in extra power because their time of peak need is not going to be the same as your utility's time of peak need.

KRISTAN: That's the importance of working across a big interconnected grid. The same reason an insurance company tries to diversify its service area, which helps spread the risk. Typically, not everyone files a claim on the same day. Not every town hits its hottest hour at the same time. Not every power plant breaks at once. String enough places together across enough geography, and the spikes and the dips start to smooth out. Michael calls this the value of transmission.

MICHAEL: Not everybody's going to turn on the air conditioner at the same time. Not every power plant is going to fail at the same time, and that works. And having these large aggregations of supply and demand over large regions helps make that happen. You get weather diversity; you get climate diversity. Particularly in the Western US, there's a lot of value because Pacific Northwest has very different weather and climate than the Southwestern US. They also have different resource mixes. The Southwest is obviously very good at solar. Places like Wyoming and New Mexico are good at wind. Northwest is also good at wind. Montana has both.

You put them all together, and you've got the resource mix you need to give you a much more stable output profile across the wind and solar resources. And so really that role of transmission and aggregating supply and demand over a large area and canceling out these short-term fluctuations in supply.

KRISTAN: This is exactly why Tri-State spent years working to join the Southwest Power Pool. The emergency order warns of scarcity. The market Tri-State just joined is built to make scarcity less likely.

MICHAEL: Renewables and battery storage have been one of the main things that the market is adding, and this continues to this day. If you look at what generation is planned and in the interconnection queue to interconnect to the grid, it's about 87% renewable and battery resources right now. This really shows that is the direction the market is going, that the economics of these wind, solar, batteries is very compelling.

KRISTAN: Of all the new power sources lined up to connect to the grid, nearly 9 in 10 are renewables and batteries because renewables are the cheapest thing to build right now. That's the market doing what it does. So again, it raises the question: Why is the federal government keeping these old, more expensive plants online? Historically, a 202(c) order has been used as a tool for a short-term crisis, like during heat waves, hurricanes, winter storms, or when a pipeline breaks, and it usually lasts for a matter of hours or days. Michael isn't against the authority. He's seen it help just this past winter.

MICHAEL: In January, we had Winter Storm Fern in many parts of the Eastern US. It was a cold snap for about a week. The Department of Energy issued 202(c) orders that were not particularly controversial to power plants that needed to run on fuel oil or needed to exceed their emission waivers for short periods of time, because they were operating more than they usually do because it was so cold, and that was needed to keep the lights on.

KRISTAN: By law, a 202(c) order can only last 90 days at a time. But the way that the administration is applying it is prompting legal scholars to raise their eyebrows and reach for their law books, because they keep reissuing these orders again and again. Craig is on its third one so far, which makes it start to look less like an emergency and more like a policy.

MICHAEL: The fact that these orders can only last 90 days also confirms that the Department of Energy is not using them as intended. They keep having to reissue these orders every 90 days. And that 90-day timeframe is totally at odds with the ability for utilities and other plant owners to plan around these resources being kept around. They do decade-plus planning. They look out 10 or more years into the future and decide what power plants they want. And an order that is issued every 90 days and keeps their plant around is not something they can really fit into that type of timeframe. They're looking decades out; they're not looking 90 days out.

KRISTAN: The clock is only the first problem. The second is what the Department of Energy can see and what it can't.

MICHAEL: There's also confidential data that is used to inform those decisions as well. And this is market-sensitive information about the cost of producing electricity from a plant, detailed information about the plant's condition, and about maintenance needs. The Department of Energy does not have access to that information. They were not a party to these proceedings where these plans were hashed out before the utility commission. And so, they're at a handicap. They're having to step in and override these decisions that were made with higher quality information than they themselves have.

KRISTAN: Time, information, and underneath both, a much older argument: who gets to decide how we manage our energy system?

MICHAEL: Under our approach of federalism, states have had the primary authority over generation mix choices, not the federal government. The federal government's authority over power is quite limited. It's limited to just and reasonable rates as well as some oversight of reliability, but not second-guessing generation mix choices that were made at the state level. And so, I think the courts will look on that as they should, as an abuse of the law.

KRISTAN: And the courts are already involved. The first of these orders was the Campbell plant in Michigan, which went before a federal appeals court, and challenges to the Craig order have been filed too. Michael is careful to say he's not a lawyer.

MICHAEL: I'm confident the courts will ultimately stop this. It's just a question of the damage and the cost that's incurred in the interim.

KRISTAN: He agrees with the administration in part that the demand is growing. Many worry that the grid is about to get leaned on hard.

MICHAEL: A lot of the things that we need for data centers are the same things we need to be doing anyway, and that's building low-cost generation. It's building transmission. That's all stuff we need to be doing, whether we build data centers or not. Many people are overestimating the growth rate and there's a lot of uncertainty there, and I think we should be responding and doing the things that make sense to do anyway, regardless of what's happening with data centers.

Waiting in Limbo

DUANE: Look at how simple we've made it for a person to use electricity.

KRISTAN: Here's Duane Highley again.

DUANE: One of the national engineering groups declared the grid the greatest machine mankind ever invented, and we get to be part of that. A switch. I mean, it's just like on or off. How much more simpler? It's binary. On or off, that's it. And yet behind that switch is all this complexity of transmission, distribution, generation, multiple technologies. The whole machine has to work in synchronism together.

KRISTAN: Synchronism. The opposite of this is disagreement, disharmony, opposition. Words I would use to describe our politics around the energy transition in general. Yet there are places of agreement.

DUANE: I'm sympathetic to reliability. That's really important. And there are very concerning parts of the grid today. If you look at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, NERC, and their reliability assessment report, a whole bunch of the United States is shaded red, which is bad. And so, there are areas that are short of capacity or likely to be short in the near term. We don't consider ourselves one of those. So, we kind of think it's not our emergency, it's somebody else's emergency.

KRISTAN: The Craig order wasn't requested by the utility or the state regulators. It was issued from Washington over the company's own plan to close the plant. And there is disagreement over whether the grid is in a state of emergency or might be in the future. Duane, like many in his line of work, is an engineer. And the one thing that I know about engineers, besides their desire for good data to inform their decisions, is their ability to plan. And Duane has a word for when there is upheaval.

DUANE: It’s what we call the pen risk. I mean, it's the fact that the stroke of a pen from a regulator or a legislator or a judge can change your world instantaneously. We don't know how to plan for that risk. I mean, we can see things happening, but the stroke of a pen, now you have a new order, or you have a judge decision. And so, it's just what we live with. We're a heavily regulated industry. Many people say we're born in politics, we'll die in politics, or we'll figure out how to manage it.

KRISTAN: Tri-State runs on razor-thin margins for an organization of their size. An unexpected expense like this can wipe out a year's margin and start pressing on members' rates.

DUANE: We operate a system with a billion and a half dollars of annual revenue from our members with a net margin of $20 million. So that's not much shock absorber to cover things that are unexpected to happen. Most businesses wouldn't try to operate on that kind of annual revenue with that slim of a margin, and basically we just want to cover our costs. So, if you have an event like this that unexpectedly adds expense, and it might mean rate impact to our members, they don't want to have their rates go up. No one likes uncertainty. Our members are feeling that and frustration over that we don't think we should have to pay for a problem that we didn't create.

KRISTAN: And then there's a worker's version of limbo. A workforce had been told when the end was coming. People had made plans for retirement or new chapters.

DUANE: Staffing is a concern for the employees. I mean, if you're planning to retire, and some employees were, they were concerned that the order might require us to keep them or them change their life plans. We were able to accommodate everybody that had to make those kind of life choices. It just means that we maybe don't have as much staff as we'd like.

KRISTAN: So when does the back and forth stop? The answer Duane got wasn't a date.

DUANE: Their authority under 202(c) is limited to 90 days. They can't order you to keep something on for three years. They can only order you for 90 days at a time. So, when we get an order, it's for 90 days. And of course, we're asking what happens at the end of 90 days. The answer was, "You'll get another 90-day order." And we've seen that since March of last year. Some plants have received one after another after another. In our own experience now, we're on our second order. And so, I'm like, "Okay, so how long does that happen?" And they said, "For at least as long as President Trump's in office," because literally this initiative is an initiative of the president to keep coal units online.

KRISTAN: This order was written to serve the public interest and then was sold in part as a favor to the community by saving jobs, by keeping a plant alive. So I asked Duane what the order actually does for Craig. His answer was about a promise that existed long before the order did.

DUANE: Cooperatives live by the seven cooperative principles. Principle number seven is concern for community. We know we live in the community, the community supports us, and we support them. So, I think one of their immediate concerns was if the plant doesn't retire, does that mean the economic benefits that were going to come to the community upon retirement wouldn't be there?

For example, in our settlement agreement under the resource plan, we were on the hook and agreed to support a $22 million donation to the county Economic Development Association to offset some of the pain of the plant closing and the loss of tax revenue. In addition, another $48 million in the later years of support or other revenue, maybe because we would build another power plant there and generate tax revenue or something. So, I think there was a concern, "Well, if the plant keeps going, does that mean you're not going to continue to fulfill that obligation?" In January, we did make the first payment on that $5.5 million to economic development. We intend to continue to fulfill that commitment to the community. And at the same time, we're hopeful that we don't have to bear all the cost of continuing to run a plant that we didn't need to run.

KRISTAN: Tri-State wrote the first check, even while fighting the order to keep the plant open. And new plans for Craig's future are already underway. A 145-megawatt solar project sited in the county, a big battery project planned, and maybe one day, a natural gas plant. So the town's economic health doesn't fall downhill when coal goes away.

DUANE: We've made a commitment, and so those investments, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, help with the tax base and then the construction, obviously, workforce. And not as large of a workforce as a coal plant would have, but still workers and employment that continue as ongoing.

KRISTAN: Duane doesn't quite know how or where this will all end. When I asked what he most wants the people of Craig to hear right now, he didn't reach for reassurance, but honesty.

DUANE: What I tell the community is it's just super uncertain. We can't tell you when the plant's going to actually retire. There are actually a number of lawsuits right now initiated on whether the government can use their Section 202(c) authority in the way they're using it. One of those may end up declaring that this isn't a legal use, and so we may be back to retirement mode, or it could just continue. But what you can count on from Tri-State is that we will maintain our commitment to the community, Moffat County and Craig, Colorado. Those communities have supported us for decades providing the workforce, providing the essential services. We're part of the community, and they're part of us.

Up Next

KRISTAN: The pen risk is now a reality in Craig, and there are questions families still ask at the dinner table. Are we a coal town, or are we becoming something else? And what happens to us in between?

Next time on Coal at Sunset, Still Burning, we'll sit down with Craig Mayor Chris Nichols, with Jennifer Holloway at the Chamber of Commerce, and some friendly folks at a local farmer's market to ask what a federal order framed as help actually feels like. The perspective on the ground is more complicated than either side of the debate would have you believe.

MAYOR CHRIS NICHOLS: As far as the workforce in Craig, it just adds to the uncertainty of when the final curtain falls. So yeah, it keeps them in the community. It keeps the paycheck. So from that regard, it's good. Long-term, who knows?

JENNIFER: The general feeling is it's giving us hope where the long-term science isn't showing us that's the way.

KRISTAN: Laws of Notion is a production of the Institute for Science and Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. To learn more, visit lawsofnotion.org. I'm your host, Kristan Uhlenbrock. This episode was produced by me, Tricia Waddell, and Jordan Marks. Sound design by Seth Samuel.