In a move that promises cleaner air in Chicago and other cities as far away as New York and Boston, a Texas-based company announced Tuesday it will close its Illinois fleet of coal-fired power plants within a decade.
Vistra absorbed nine of the state’s coal plants during a corporate merger just two years ago. Like its predecessors, the company found it increasingly difficult to profit from burning coal amid competition from cheaper, cleaner natural gas and renewable energy.
Scuttling the Illinois plants — and two others in Ohio — is part of Vistra’s plan to gradually shift its investments to solar installations and industrial-size batteries that store power for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow.
“Vistra’s commitment to our transformation to a low-to-no-carbon future is unequivocal and offers unique opportunities for growth and innovation,” Curt Morgan, the company’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
Only 15% of the electricity generated in Illinois last year came from Vistra coal plants. But the company’s fleet was responsible for nearly half the heat-trapping carbon dioxide and lung-damaging sulfur dioxide emitted by the state’s power plants during 2019, according to federal records.
Closing the Illinois and Ohio plants will reduce pollution that drifts into other states and contributes to dirty air problems throughout the Midwest and Northeast. It also will eliminate the same amount of climate-changing pollution as taking more than 10 million cars off the nation’s roads would.
Nonprofit groups welcomed Vistra’s announcement as another sign the global transition from coal to clean energy is accelerating.
“Supporting a fair and robust economic and community transition is a critical next step for Illinois and Ohio,” said Mary Anne Hitt, the Sierra Club‘s national campaigns director.
Vistra is the latest company to abandon coal in the Midwest, though it plans to keep operating its coal plants in Texas, including one of the nation’s largest industrial sources of sulfur dioxide, a key ingredient in acid rain and smog.
Two decades ago, that infamous designation belonged to the Baldwin plant, 275 miles southwest of Chicago in Randolph County.
One of Vistra’s corporate predecessors spent $1 billion on pollution-control equipment at Baldwin as part of a 2005 settlement with federal prosecutors, who accused various owners of dodging the Clean Air Act while charging customers billions to keep the plant operating.
Baldwin once burned enough coal to fill the Willis Tower every two months. Today, Vistra only operates one of the plant’s three coal-fired units.
Fast-declining prices for wind and solar power are pushing Baldwin and other coal plants out of the marketplace faster than analysts once predicted. Businesses and households also are becoming more energy efficient, a durable trend that makes power plants built for another era increasingly obsolete.
“I don’t believe (coal) is going to have a renaissance,” Morgan, Vistra’s chief executive, told a television interviewer in April 2018. “I think it’s on its way out.”
This year coal plants are expected to generate less than a fifth of the nation’s electricity, down from more than half a decade ago, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
In addition to Baldwin, the coal plants scheduled for closure by Vistra are Joppa Steam on the Ohio River near Metropolis, Kincaid south of Springfield and Newton in Jasper County.
The company already closed its coal plants in Canton, Coffeen, Havana and Hennepin and agreed to shutter another south of Peoria as part of a legal settlement with environmental groups.
A coalition of clean energy and labor groups is promoting legislation in Springfield that would allocate funding to help workers find new jobs and protect communities from financial hardships when coal plants close.
Vistra is pushing its own measure that would require ratepayers to subsidize the company’s shift to solar power on the sites of its former coal plants.
mhawthorne@chicagotribune.com
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