President Donald Trump’s decision to invoke little-used emergency powers to bolster the American coal industry left energy analysts alarmed and uncertain about what would happen next.
Kent Chandler, the former chair of the public service commission in Kentucky and now a fellow at the center-right R Street Institute, found himself having flashbacks.
Many phrases and concepts in the executive order almost exactly mirror those in a law passed in Kentucky in 2023 — which the coal industry lobbied for — that uses the declaration of an emergency to make it difficult for coal plants to retire. That law employs similar language of reserve margins, discussion of fuel source and mix and other technical specifics in Trump’s Tuesday executive order, which invokes the emergency powers section of the 1935 Federal Power Act, called section 202.