Families and businesses across Wisconsin will likely help pick up the tab once again to keep coal burning in another state. The Trump Administration has ordered two aging coal plants in Indiana to stay open, even though energy regulators there say they are not needed. The plants have been plagued by mechanical problems—one needs extensive repairs before it can operate at all. The costs to bring the plants online are expected to reach tens of millions of dollars and will likely be paid through price increases on customers across the Midwest grid, including here in Wisconsin.

“This is a reckless waste of money. There is no reason these old, broken-down coal plants should be forced to start up again,” says Clean Wisconsin Energy and Air Manager Ciaran Gallagher. “Everyone in Wisconsin should be outraged. This is putting ideology over common sense, and it’s costing us money.”

Last May, the Trump Administration used an emergency order to force an empty coal plant back online in Michigan. The price tag for that order has reached more than $80 million, or $615,000 a day. Wisconsinites will pay higher bills to help the company that owns the plant recover its costs.

“The Trump Administration is pushing chaos into our carefully planned energy system. It’s expensive, wasteful, and there is absolutely no benefit to customers or utilities. Coal plants are retiring because they don’t make economic sense anymore, and the health harming pollution they emit is devastating,” Gallagher says.

Wind and solar are now the cheapest ways to produce energy, far cheaper than coal. Gallagher says the Trump administration’s focus on expensive fossil fuels, along with tariffs that make building energy infrastructure more expensive, is raising the price of energy across the country. Meantime, Congress has eliminated clean energy incentives that had been available in the Inflation Reduction Act to lower electricity prices.

“We are moving in the wrong direction, and everyone who pays an energy bill can see it,” she says. “Burning fossil fuels like coal pollutes the air we breathe, contaminates the water we drink, and costs us more money.”

Center Point Energy, which owns the Indiana coal plants, had projected that their plan to close the plants and invest in wind and solar would save its customers $80 million over the next 20 years and reduce carbon emissions by as much as 95%.