MAEVE ALLSUP | The Trump administration today is announcing more than $700 million in federal funds to support coal power infrastructure, including $185 million from 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure law that Congress appropriated for carbon capture and storage projects.
That funding will help build two new large coal power plants, the first to come online in the U.S. since 2013. It would also restart a 200-MW plant in Maryland, which was shuttered by AES in 2023 because, as the Independent Market Monitor for PJM wrote at the time, it was “not just uneconomic but extraordinarily uneconomic.”
The rest of the $700 million will come from the Defense Production Act, which gives the president significant authority over domestic industries in the interest of national defense. The GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill, passed last summer, appropriated $1 billion for that purpose. Now, the administration will draw from the fund to support 13 existing plants as well as the development of a coal export terminal in Oakland, California.
The funding announcement comes in the midst of a national debate over whether the general public should foot the bill for the energy infrastructure needed to power the AI boom. The White House itself orchestrated a “ratepayer protection pledge” signed by hyperscalers in March, which is a non-binding commitment by the tech companies to pay for the energy and associated grid upgrades needed to power their growing number of data centers.
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