Protecting Coal, Gouging Consumers, Greenwashing - It's The Money-Grubbing Manchin Way
Selling the scrap coal has earned Manchin millions of dollars over three decades, and he has used his political positions to protect the fuel — and a single power plant in West Virginia that burns it — from laws and regulations that also threatened his family business. That was evident in 2009 when Manchin, a Democrat, used one of his last actions as governor to sign a renewable energy law. The measure was described as a way to increase the state’s amount of clean power to 25 percent by 2025.
But it also shielded the waste coal that helped build Manchin’s fortune. Classifying it as an alternative energy source allowed utilities to count it toward their renewable electricity goals. That infuriated some members of his own party, who saw the law as a way to jump-start the state’s transition to a cleaner future. It hasn’t worked. More than a decade after the law was enacted, just 6 percent of the state’s power is derived from renewable sources. Eighty-eight percent comes from coal.
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Those maneuvers occurred as Manchin’s family business, Enersystems Inc., continued to sell waste coal to a power plant in his home state named Grant Town. He earned $500,000 from Enersystems last year, according to Senate financial disclosure reports. Manchin has said he has no control over the family coal business, which is run by his son Joe Manchin IV and resides in a blind trust. Manchin did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Yet over the arc of Manchin’s political career he has pushed measures to promote the coal that Enersystems removes from abandoned mines, nominated officials who helped ensure that the power plant that buys most of that company’s coal did not close and waged political battles against environmental regulations that threatened the same plant. Without any one of those decisions, Grant Town might have closed, leaving Manchin’s family business without its top customer.
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By 2006, when Manchin was governor, the plant’s owners went before the West Virginia Public Service Commission and claimed it was on the verge of shutting down. The commission, then chaired by Jon McKinney, a Manchin appointee, raised the rate that Grant Town could charge for its electricity from $27.25 per megawatt to $34.25. They also gave the plant a way to stay in business longer, by extending its power purchase agreement with FirstEnergy by eight years to 2036. Those changes still reverberate today. West Virginia has seen some of the highest electricity rate increases in the nation. Its loyalty to coal is one reason for that.
The price of residential power in a dozen other states that share the PJM grid with West Virginia has declined, according to a report released last month from the West Virginia University’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research. “Over the past 10 years, West Virginia’s residential prices have risen, while PJM’s average price has come down considerably,” the report found. Between 2010 and 2019, utility bills in West Virginia rose at five times the national average, according to calculations by James Van Nostrand, a West Virginia University professor who spent 22 years as a lawyer representing energy clients in state regulatory proceedings.
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https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-manchin-used-politics-to-protect-his-coal-company/