Usually, dark money donors try their best to hide their involvement with the front groups they fund — that’s the whole point of setting up such a group instead of just doing it yourself.
But occasionally, there’s other reasons. Because at a press conference last month, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon proudly announced that the state would “contribute” $250,000 of taxpayer money to the Energy Policy Network.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily sound scandalous … if you don’t know what the vaguely-named Energy Policy Network does. (And unless you caught last year’s IndyStar feature on them, you probably don’t!)
Now you will though, thanks to a piece published Friday by Wyoming Public Radio and WyoFile. The story, by Andrew Graham and Cooper McKim, provides a sweeping overview of the Energy Policy Network’s nine-state campaign to keep coal plants from shutting down. Armed with internal communications, interviews and regulatory findings, the investigation shows how Wyoming taxpayers are funding the industry’s answer to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.
It started with a plant in Oklahoma, where instead of closing a dirty coal-powered plant, the utility wanted to charge ratepayers $500 million for new pollution controls. The state regulatory commission had rejected the plan twice, but EPN got Michelin Tire, American Airlines, railroad companies, and others to push back. In the end, they succeeded in keeping the coal plant open – bilking half a billion dollars out of Oklahoma ratepayers in the process. They also developed a playbook they've since used in other states.
In Colorado, instead of defending a utility, EPN opposed Xcel Energy’s decision to close coal plants by creating a supposedly local coalition of businesses and ratepayers who just really loved massively polluting coal plants. On paper that local coalition was funded by the Independence Institute, a Denver-based member of the State Policy Network that’s been funded by basically every big polluter and conservative billionaire, so it’s unsurprising that in this case it was just a pass-through for EPN money.
Even though they ultimately lost, CEO Randy Eminger wrote in an email to EPN supporters “in the end, our little ‘Ratepayer Coalition’ made it a great show.”
They put on a very similar show, with similarly unsuccessful results, in Indiana, where materials the reporters obtained show that EPN “created a local coalition, hired and directed a media relations firm, brought in an attorney to cross examine the utility’s experts and developed written testimony ‘debunking’ the need for closing the plants.”
Nevertheless, the state of Wyoming appears committed to giving taxpayer money to this group. What's more, its contribution is what’s keeping the organization afloat. As money from Peabody Coal Energy and Arch Coal Resources dried up, the state of Wyoming became EPN’s biggest funder, providing nearly half of its total fiscal intake in 2017 and 2018. In 2017, Wyoming and its local coal company Cloud Peak Energy constituted 70% of the organization’s revenue.
In 2019 though, the new Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon decided to redouble his predecessor’s support for the group, and take it further by working directly with EPN on things like outreach to Union Pacific to raise more funds for the group.
Fortunately for the climate, it turns out that when you rig the system to keep coal plants open despite everyone wanting to close them, those plants probably aren’t going to keep running as much as they used to. All four still-open plants have seen sharp declines in use — three of are using 70% less coal than they did in 2018, and the fourth is using half as much.
EPN had leaned on promises of Oklahoma’s Sooner Station burning 2.6 million tons of Wyoming’s coal a year in its pitch to Wyoming officials for funding.
Halfway through 2020, it had burned less than half a million tons.