While electric utilities quietly support the rollback of the Clean Power Plan via rulemaking comments (see below), they loudly boast about abandoning coal as fast as they can. What’s really going on is that the Clean Power Plan rollback has become almost irrelevant to the future of coal. Utility promises to abandon coal far exceed in scope and timeframe what would be required under the CPP. Taking their comments at face value, the utilities quietly support the CPP rollback to preserve their options — i.e., so they back out of closing coal plants when their natural gas/wind/solar/battery storage plans inevitably fail.
