By Danielle Lemmon

January 2, 2026 - When I worked at the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, I helped the office launch some of the largest federal investments in clean energy in U.S. history. So it has been jarring to watch those same funds – appropriated by Congress for carbon capture and rural energy resilience – now being repurposed to help bring aging coal plants back online.

Over the past several months, the Energy Department has rolled out $625 million in coal-focused programs aimed at recommissioning and modernizing coal facilities. But nearly no one is talking about where this money is actually coming from: carbon capture technology programs under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and carbon capture demonstration and large scale pilot programs under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, along with funding for rural and remote energy resilience. Arguably, these statutes were not written to bankroll coal restarts, yet that’s exactly what they are doing.

Two recent Notices of Funding Opportunity tell the story. One of them, titled Coal Recommissioning and Modernization, explicitly draws $350 million from unobligated balances appropriated for carbon capture demonstrations and large-scale pilots. This is money Congress set aside to commercialize carbon capture, not to recommission coal plants. Yet projects originally selected under these programs in the Biden administration, already underway, were abruptly cancelled by Secretary Chris Wright, seemingly to make room for the new coal-revival agenda.

So how is the Department of Energy justifying using these funds for coal? Through creative phasing language. The Coal Recommissioning and Modernization program states that projects “may be staged so that near-term reliability upgrades are federally cost-shared without requiring immediate Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage installation, while later phases incorporate … carbon-management components.”

In practice, this means a coal plant can accept federal dollars for upgrades now as long as they mention carbon capture in their applications, but with no practical mandate to install it later. Federal grant awardees are not obligated to continue into later phases. They can opt out at any point with no penalty. That means the government can give out millions upgrading coal plants under the statute, on the premise of future carbon capture that never actually happens.

And even if carbon capture is implemented in the project, the program prioritizes projects that involve carbon utilization rather than storage, and explicitly permits enhanced oil recovery as a valid use of that carbon – further undermining the statute’s stated goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Likewise, up to $175 million of these funds was set aside for “Rural Capacity and Energy Affordability Coal Projects.” But the underlying statute was never written to privilege coal. Congress authorized this funding to support a broad suite of energy resilience solutions that are suited to rural or remote communities, including microgrids, solar and storage, transmission and distribution upgrades, grid modernization, and energy efficiency. There was an explicit clean energy lens to this statute, with stated goals of improving environmental protection and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from energy generation by rural or remote areas.

But now this money, too, will go toward prolonging the life of coal, which has shown declining economics for decades. And for this topic area, the Energy Department has said that there will be no requirement for carbon capture at all — really taking the “clean” out of clean energy funding.

The second Notice of Funding Opportunity, comprising another $100 million in federal funds, follows a similar logic, selectively invoking statutory language about “increasing the performance of coal electric generation facilities.” Yet it sidelines the central purpose of those Carbon Capture Technology programs, to develop carbon capture technologies.

Congress wrote these programs in order to accelerate carbon capture and strengthen rural energy resilience, not to provide no-strings-attached capital upgrades to coal plants. If members of Congress or the public believe these programs stray from their statutory purpose, the window to intervene is narrowing. The first Notice of Funding Opportunity closed Dec. 8, and the second one closes Jan. 7, and the Energy Department will soon start making awards. If you believe congressional intent is being overridden, now is the time to say so.

Danielle Lemmon, Ph.D., is an energy consultant based in Washington and a former employee of the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. The views expressed in this op-ed do not reflect those of the author’s current or previous employers.