22 January 2019 — 1024 mst

Only a financial moron would want to buy Colstrip’s
dirty old power plants for $500 million — or even $1

Colstrip’s coal fired power plants are old, dirty, and of dubious profitability. The two oldest, smallest, plants will be shut down by the end of 2020. The two larger plants might stay on line a bit longer, but they’re nearing the end of their economic lives, and are likely to be shut down sooner than later.

That’s no surprise. Coal fired power plants are closing across the nation — see the IEEFA’s report, Record Drop in U.S. Coal-Fired Capacity Likely in 2018 — and are being replaced by natural gas, solar, and wind.

Those facts have not, however, deterred Rep. Rodney Garcia (R-Billings, HD-52) from offering HB-203, a scheme for the State of Montana to raise $500 million to purchase Colstrip’s cranky old power plants and keep them running so that the residents of Colstrip can keep their jobs running the filthy old polluters.

It’s a scheme, wrote Don Pogreba at The Montana Post, that would have made Hugo Chavez proud.

Yesterday, Garcia’s bill was heard by the MT House’s Energy, Technology, and Federal Relations committee. Montana Public Radio has an excellent report on the hearing. Environmental groups, the Montana Chamber of Commerce, and the Montana Taxpayers Association, opposed the bill.

Not surprisingly, Rosebud County and the city of Colstrip supported HB-203. Sadly, so did the Montana AFL-CIO, which seems increasingly inclined to support any crackpot scheme that produces jobs.

Garcia’s coal smoke in the sky scheme won’t pass. And by offering such a fiscally unmoored, bill, Garcia isn’t passing muster as a responsible legislator.