Trump orders Rick Perry to figure out how to keep coal power plants open

Coal-fired power plants.
(Image credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

President Trump has ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to determine how to keep U.S. coal and nuclear power plants operating even though they struggle to compete against plants using natural gas and renewable energy sources.

"Impending retirements of fuel-secure power facilities are leading to a rapid depletion of a critical part of our nation's energy mix and impacting the resilience of our power grid," said White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in an email briefing on the subject Friday. Trump has asked Perry "to prepare immediate steps to stop the loss of these resources and looks forward to his recommendations," Sanders added.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.