Why Maryland’s ‘zombie coal plant’ has to stay open—even though everyone wants to shut it down

When it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the dirtiest of them all. The energy source is the most carbon-intensive to burn, playing a significant role in climate change. It also emits heavy metals and other particles that have dire health effects : Emissions from coal power plants are associated with twice the mortality rate of other types of air pollution. 



Across the country, hundreds of coal-fired power plants have been closing in recent years, saving millions of tons of carbon emissions from entering our atmosphere as well as thousands of lives. But about 15 miles south of downtown Baltimore, along the Patapsco River, there’s a coal plant that can’t close—despite the fact that state officials, activists, and even the company that owns the plant want it to shut down. 



The Brandon Shores Power Plant was set to close in 2025, but concerns about how that closure could impact the grid, plus a lack of long-term grid planning, have left the plant in a kind of limbo. A proposal from PJM, the local grid operator, now suggests keeping Brandon Shores open until at least 2028—at a cost of up to $250 million a year, which would fall on utility customers.



The situation illustrates how, despite growing interest to decommission coal plants and to build up renewable power, a lack of grid planning can delay efforts to transition to clean energy. Brandon Shores is just one example of a so-called “zombie coal plant,” and if state regulators, power plant owners, and grid operators aren’t aligned on how to transition away from coal, experts say it may not be the last. 



[Photo: Jstuby/Wiki Commons]



Trying to close a coal power plant



In 2020, Talen Energy, which owns Brandon Shores, announced that that plant, as well as its adjacent (and smaller) plant, the H.A. Wagner Generating Station, would stop burning coal by 2025. Instead, they would switch to alternative fuels like natural gas. But when Talen looked at the costs to convert Brandon Shores, it decided to close the coal-fired power plant altogether. Such a conversion was “uneconomic,” the company said in documents. 



That news was a win for the state of Maryland, which aims to reach 100% clean energy by 2035 , and for the Sierra Club, which has long advocated replacing coal with clean energy through its local Beyond Coal campaigns. Despite that advocacy work and the statewide goal, though, closing Brandon Shores was Talen’s decision—a significant detail that hints at the decline of coal.



“States are considering the environmental cost of coal, natural gas is getting cheaper and boxing out coal, the power plants are getting older,and so companies like Talen look at the market and say, ‘You know, we’re not making money off this plant. We don’t want to operate it anymore , ‘” says Josh Tulkin, director of the Sierra Club’s Maryland chapter. “I’ve heard some people ask, ‘Why did the state or the utility choose to shut the plant down?’ They didn’t. The company chose to shut down Brandon Shores.”



In every one of the world’s energy markets, from the U.S. to Europe to China, it’s now c heaper to invest in renewable energy than in coal. In many cases, it’s also more expensive to run coal power plants than to build new renewable power. 



But that doesn’t always align with the reality of the grid. When Talen announced it would retire the coal plant rather than convert it, it sparked concerns about energy reliability from PJM, which coordinates electricity across 13 states and D.C. PJM says it received Talen’s notice that it would deactivate Brandon Shores in April 2023. 



It then conducted an analysis which found that retiring Brandon shores “would result in over 600 reliability violations,” which could mean issues for “over 1,000,000 Maryland consumers during peak hours,” according to a letter PJM CEO Manu Asthana wrote to the Sierra Club. Brandon Shores generates 1,283 megawatts of power; H.A. Wagner generates 834 megawatts. Without that power, PJM says, customers could see “ voltage collapse ” or system overloads, which occur when electricity demand outweighs the supply; these could lead to blackouts.



PJM is now planning transmission projects to address those reliability issues (like increasing the capacity of the transmission likes, or shifting the power around to prevent lines from overloading). But those updates aren’t expected to be completed until 2028. They’re also expected to cost nearly $800 million. PJM requested that Talen continue to operate Brandon Shores until those upgrades are completed under a “reliability must run,” or RMR, agreement. That agreement, which PJM and Talen negotiated together, awaits approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; it could cost taxpayers around $225 million a year.



Maryland’s Office of People’s Counsel (which is a state agency that advocates for utility consumers) has asked the FERC to reject that offer. It argues it would cost electricity customers in Maryland hundreds of millions of dollars. The average customer could pay at least $5 more a month for the years it takes to make the transmission upgrades (which could actually stretch past 2028), on top of other rate increases.



Talen also stands to profit if Brandon Shores stays open, according to a statement from Maryland People’s Counsel David Lapp on May 16 . “Talen’s proposal would give it an undue windfall for the continued operation of old and polluting fossil-fueled electric power plants,” he said. “These plants have profited from participating in the competitive power market for decades, but now Talen wants to be paid for old, sunk investments as though the plants had never participated in the market. Its proposal is fundamentally unfair to customers and must be rejected.” (Talen says it will incur costs from continuing to operate the plant, and that it needs relief from a settlement it has with the Sierra Club that says it must stop burning coal at Brandon Shores in 2025.)



Lack of power grid planning—and lessons for the future



At the crux of the Brandon Shores situation, Tulkin says, is “a big disconnect between the state’s desire to move toward clean energy and the support that they are getting, or lack of support they are getting, from PJM about the steps that are necessary proactively to set themselves up for this grid.” 



There’s a lack of planning at nearly every step of the process. In a December 2023 letter to PJM, Talen said the grid reliability issues in the Baltimore region “are not new or unanticipated.” The power grid is outdated across the country , requiring many transmission upgrades that take years to build. In California alone , Pacific Gas & Electric says it needs $900 million in transmission upgrades over 10 years. 



There’s also a lack of communication when a coal power plant operator wants to shut down. Power plants are only required to file deactivation notices 60 days before they close, which means grid operators can’t analyze the impacts of such closures until close to the deadline. 



Though Maryland legislators have set renewable energy goals for the state, until recently, utilities companies didn’t actually have to plan for the grid updates needed to achieve those goals. The Maryland Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022 requires them to develop a plan in line with the state’s climate goals, but Tulkin says progress on that is still slow.



Though PJM says Brandon Shores should keep burning coal until transmission upgrades are completed, advocates have proposed alternatives. The Sierra Club, for example, suggested that adding battery storage to the plant would address reliability issues: It could store energy from the grid when wind and solar were plentiful, and provide energy back to the grid when needed. PJM said that adding battery storage “is not a realistic option at present,” in part because of the time it would take to complete that work. 



Modernizing the power grid with upgrades like battery storage, building up solar capacity, and enabling bidirectional charging (which would allow electric vehicles to send power back to the grid) can be costly up front. But failing to modernize the grid will also have a cost. With Brandon Shores, and the proposed $225 million a year to keep it running, “we’re seeing the cost of not making those investments in grid planning,” Tulkin says. 



He hopes this is a lesson for policymakers in Maryland and across the country. The next time there’s an energy proposal that seems expensive, he says, “policymakers need to realize, while that number may seem high, it’s not as high as what they might pay for failing to act.” In order to actually retire coal-fired power plants and deploy more clean energy, there needs to be more alignment between policymakers, power plant owners, and grid operators, and more investment in grid modernization.



There’s also more than a monetary cost when it comes to extending the life of coal power plants. “There is always a cost of energy production beyond just what the ratepayers are paying. There’s a health cost, there’s an environmental cost. So there is an urgency—a real, acute urgency—to get off of coal,” Tulkin says. “But we have to be just as urgent about making the upgrades to our grid.”