For quite some time, there has been a campaign that has largely flown under the radar to close down coal-fired power plants and Maryland is the latest victim.

A major power grid operator that oversees electricity supplies across the mid-Atlantic repeated its warning that the looming shutdown of a coal-fired power plant in Baltimore will threaten the region’s grid reliability and may have devastating impacts on consumers.

In a follow-up letter obtained by FOX Business this week, PJM Interconnection warned the shutdown of the Brandon Shores coal power plant is slated to occur before replacement power sources can come online, resulting in “degraded grid reliability” for more than 1 million state consumers, including the entire city of Baltimore.

PJM Interconnection coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, serving 65 million consumers.

Brandon Shores is a coal-fired electric plant located in Western Maryland on the outskirts of Baltimore and is owned by a Texas power company called Talen. In light of problems with the plant’s coal furnaces, consistent with the company’s ESG commitments coupled with the financial problems the company has been experiencing, Fox Business says Talen entered into an agreement with the Sierra Club to close the Brandon Shores plant in two years along with two other coal-fired regional power plants.

In light of this, PJM decided to weigh in since the Brandon Shores plant closure would obviously put a strain on their ability to provide power to residents of the 13 states and District of Columbia they serve. As an aside, Talen even considered converting Brandon Shores to an oil-based power plant, but later realized it wouldn’t work.

Despite Talen’s financial issues and recent virtue signalling, it should be noted that the Sierra Club has worked to completely shut down coal-fired electrical plants across the country and, so far, they’ve been succeeding. This on top of the Old Line State’s NetZero push, and the pressure of an onerous climate rules and punitive pricing market.

Even though, as Fox Business points out, PJM and Talen are negotiating with the Sierra Club and Maryland officials to come up with some sort of alternative or solution, what this all comes down to is that citizens get screwed and, for now, there’s no reliable energy source to replace the power Bandon Shores plant generated. Worst of all, the power companies handed the Sierra Club a victory on a silver platter.

PHOTO CREDIT: Brandon Shores Generating Station – By Jstuby at English Wikipedia – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17780420