On December 22, 2022 temperatures plunged to a near-record -7 degrees across much of Missouri. For millions of residents, the furnace kept running through the bitter cold spell, thanks largely to the four coal power plants operated statewide by Ameren.
At the Meramec Energy Center — an older plant that had been demoted to "backup" status in recent years — operators worked busily as the plant churned away, cranking hundreds of megawatts into the utility company’s grid.
"We were running all four units as far as we could run them," plant employee John Gordon* told Lake Expo.
It was a frigid few days before Christmas, and the Meramec Energy Center helped keep Missourians’ heat and lights on, when they needed it the most.
A week later, Ameren closed Meramec for good.
"I don’t understand it," John lamented. He had labored at Meramec for years; but since the plant's closure, he says only a handful of employees are left at the station, powering down, dismantling, and cleaning things up. Ameren has — ostensibly — moved on to greener pastures.
Meramec is just the first to fall: Ameren has already pledged to power-down two more of its three remaining Missouri coal stations by the end of 2030. The company had hoped to shut down the Rush Island Energy Center in 2022 but was forced to keep it open when the organization that operates the grid in the Midwest, MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) warned that the loss of the Rush Island Center would put the grid’s stability in jeopardy. Now Ameren plans to close it in 2025.
Of the three Missouri coal plants still in operation today, Labadie Energy Center will be the last to go: Ameren hopes to shut it down partly in 2036 and completely by 2042. Labadie is the plant that worked in conjunction with Bagnell Dam to keep Missourians’ lights and furnaces running during the catastrophic winter storm of 2021.
Ameren promises to replace these coal plants with solar and wind stations, touted as producing the same number of megawatts as the coal stations the company is closing down.
But John says the rhetoric about megawatt-for-megawatt replacement of coal plants with solar and wind is all smoke and mirrors. "It’s not possible," he said. "It’s a joke. It’s people’s idea that it’s gonna happen. I know that the sun don’t shine all the time and the wind don’t blow all the time."
The biggest difference between coal and its more-in-vogue counterparts? On-demand power.
In his 2022 book Fossil Future, New York Times Bestselling author Alex Epstein argues solar and wind aren’t the same as coal, nuclear, and hydro power sources because, critically, solar and wind fall short in on-demand situations. Solar only produces energy for half of a 24-hour day (at best), and scarcely at all on a cloudy winter day. Wind turbines too are dependent on the vicissitudes of the weather. But humans’ electricity needs don’t wait for the sun to shine: people need power on-demand, and in fact, power usage tends to have an inverse relationship with the productive capacity of solar and wind. Electricity use spikes in the evenings when people get home from work... just as the sun is setting. People need more watts in the winter as furnaces and space heaters keep homes and offices warm... all while the days are the shortest and solar panels are at their lowest production levels of the year.
Wind production has problems too: Texans suffered amid bitter cold temperatures in 2021 as fields of frozen wind turbines sat motionless. Meanwhile recently-shuttered coal plants were as cold as the many thousands of powerless Texas homes. Awkwardly, Ameren’s turbines are leaving piles of dead bald eagles and other protected birds of prey: an environmental sin for which more traditional power plants would not likely be forgiven.
Coal has long been the backbone of Ameren’s power-generation picture. It remains cheap, trusty, and abundant, yet Ameren makes no bones about its plans to abandon coal completely, and soon. John speaks with pride about his career in power generation, and says his employer was long known for providing cheap, reliable power to its customers.
"I think most people wanna keep it cheap… dependable… reliable," he said. "As Ameren [and Union Electric], we were one heck of a reliable company over the years!"
But if Ameren — and other power companies — move their generation infrastructure into weather-dependent rather than on-demand power, how will they bridge the gap between supply and demand?
John says the attitude of energy companies across the Midwest is: if there's a spike in demand (or drop in supply), we’ll just buy energy from somebody else on the grid. But he wonders, if other power companies like Ameren keep closing their plants, will there be enough energy to buy, when people need it the most?
Meramec, Ameren’s oldest coal plant in Missouri, could have been a reliable and profitable power generator for years to come, John says, but he thinks the company gave up on it long ago. "They quit putting money into the plant because they decided they were gonna close it," he said. "They weren’t fixing the precipitators, they weren’t fixing the boilers… they bought pumps 15 years ago and they never put them in!"
"We just don’t understand it," he said of his fellow plant employees.
Missouri State Representative Lisa Thomas has a theory. She points to federal energy policy: the rhetoric coming from the Biden White House makes it clear that the Biden regime plans to punish fossil fuels and pump-up wind and solar. Ameren has taken the hint, Thomas offered, and is going the direction the wind’s blowing, in order to avoid punishment and also pick up hefty incentives.
John agrees. "They’re trying to appease so many people," he said, mentioning negative attention from groups like the Sierra Club. "I think a lot of electric companies are just trying to stay going by appeasing the population or government."
Ameren's obeisance to the green order of the day is readily visible on the company's website. ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance — is an indicator used by mega investment groups like Blackrock as they decide which companies' stock they'll buy. Ameren’s ESG page is an unmistakeable overture to investors who have been told ESG is a stronger way to grow their portfolios.
But politics — and White House residents — invariably change. The ESG formula is beginning to show cracks as some investment groups like Vanguard eschew ESG for more traditional signs of health, like profit. The asset management group’s CEO Tim Buckley recently told the Financial Times, "Our research indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing."
In Missouri, Secretary Jay Ashcroft has scrutinized companies for whom ESG is a driver in decision-making, noting investors should be made aware when a publicly-owned company’s motives are not profit-based.
Is Ameren's abandonment of coal a profit-centered motive? Or is it about ideology? Or just about survival? Lake Expo sent multiple emails to Ameren with a series of questions (listed below) for this article, but received no reply. (Editor's note: since publication of this article, Ameren has reached out and Lake Expo will be publishing a follow-up story.)
In the wake of Meramec's closure, Ameren is negotiating an 11% rate hike for its Missouri customers. And the company is clear about the reason for the increase: VP of legislative and regulatory affairs Warren Wood told St. Louis Public Radio the utility company needed the additional revenue in order to pay for the changeover to so-called renewable energy.
Back at the Meramec Energy Center, some employees have already been transferred to work at another (doomed) coal plant. Others have been moved to the Bagnell Energy Center hydroelectric station at Lake of the Ozarks, and others have decided to retire.
Only a skeleton crew remains to finish the process of powering-down the plant that powered homes for decades. And in those homes, thousands of people who rely on Ameren as the only available utility company in their region have little recourse other than to attend the company’s online public hearings, read its brochures on the benefits of renewable energy, and watch their rates go up.
Questions We Asked Ameren:
1) Ameren characterizes solar/wind as 1:1 replacements for the power plants it’s powering down. How do solar and wind specifically make Ameren’s grid more stable, when they’re inherently less consistent/predictable sources of power?
2) A major winter storm took place on Dec. 22-23, plunging the Lake of the Ozarks area into negative temps for more than a full day. Presumably all of Ameren’s coal plants were running at max or near-max capacity to keep Missourians’ lights on and furnaces running. We know Meramec was running hard. Yet it was powered down permanently, a week later, with Ameren saying solar/wind will replace its production. Were those solar & wind operations running at their full (or rated/max) capacity during that storm?
3) Does Ameren expect the move away from "on-demand" coal plants and toward weather-dependent generation (solar/wind) will result in the company having to buy more electricity in order to serve Ameren customers?
4a) Was the Meramec Plant operating profitably? Is Ameren able/willing to share what its generation cost was in $/MW ?
4b) If the Meramec Plant was operating profitably, why power it down?
5) If federal incentives were different — e.g. - if there were no solar/wind incentives — would Ameren be making these changes? In other words, are these changes in energy production being driven largely by federal policy? Or are they driven more by stockholder and ESG-related motivations?
6) Does Ameren have (and can you provide) a breakdown of the average cost-per-MW of:
-coal
-solar
-energy purchased (from other power companies)
*Name changed to protect employee's identity.
