Washington’s ‘Beyond Coal’ Blackout

Washington’s ‘Beyond Coal’ Blackout

Michael Bloomberg’s campaign left little spare electric capacity.

From the Wall Street Journal

Several federal agencies were forced to shut down Tuesday amid a power outage in Washington, and while most of the country might not care, the role of anti-coal crusaders deserves more attention.

A mechanical failure and fire at a transfer station in Maryland caused a dip in voltage that cascaded across the grid. The White House, Capitol and State Department briefly lost electricity and switched to backup generators, but the Energy Department (really), companies that couldn’t do business, tens of thousands of consumers, drivers who lacked traffic lights and so forth were not so fortunate.

The blackout was relatively minor, but it likely could have been prevented if D.C. was still served by a coal-fired power plant called Potomac River Generating Station in Alexandria, Virginia. That “must run” 482-megawatt unit used to help manage electric demand in downtown Washington at peak times and would have been tripped as a substitute in emergencies like the one in Maryland.

While the 60-year-old Potomac station was rarely run, it was a particular target of the anti-fossil fuel movement given its proximity to Washington. In 2011 Michael Bloomberg even announced a $50 million donation to the Sierra Club on a boat docked in front of the station, with its smoke stacks as the political backdrop. The former New York City mayor’s gift financed the “Beyond Coal” campaign that targets individual plants for closure. “Ending coal power production is the right thing to do,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

The project claims credit for 188 coal scalps so far, and one of them was Potomac River Generating Station, which was shut down in late 2012. “Retiring this major source of pollution in our nation’s capital signals a huge symbolic step towards moving the nation beyond coal,” the Sierra Club’s executive director Michael Brune said in a statement at the time. “But the win today didn’t happen overnight. It is a culmination of many years of hard work by local activists and concerned residents.”

The result is that Washington has little margin for electric error. Three years ago the head of the D.C. public utility commission told Congress that her staff “prayed for mild weather” during the high summer weeks so air conditioners don’t overload the grid.

The greens pretend there is no cost to killing coal, but they should at least be honest about it. On Wednesday Mr. Bloomberg returned to Washington to announce another $30 million for Beyond Coal. He didn’t mention the blackout.