A coal company and Interior teamed up to save a power plant

A major coal company had plans to save one of the West's largest coal plants from closing. It just needed help from the Trump administration. So in September 2017, Peabody Energy Corp. sent the Interior Department a game plan for keeping the 2,100-megawatt coal-burning behemoth in Arizona rumbling. The company's mine supplies coal to the plant.Included on the coal company's wish list was eliminating environmental requirements for reducing haze. Peabody also asked the government to push the plant's largest customer to continue buying its electricity instead of renewable energy. Together, that could help prevent the plant from shuttering years ahead of schedule, the company told administration officials.It seemed to find supporters in Washington, D.C."I think these are reasonable requests that don't put us at risk," Scott J. Cameron, Interior's principal deputy assistant secretary for policy, management and budget, wrote in a September email to his boss, Assistant Deputy Secretary James Cason.It was originally scheduled to run until 2044. Then, last year, four utilities with an ownership stake in the facility voted to shut it down at the end of 2019, citing competition from natural gas.The plant's fate might have been sealed if not for the federal government. The Bureau of Reclamation owns a 24 percent share in the plant, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has made personal appeals to keep it open