By Valerie Volcovici

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration’s plans to cancel nearly $8 billion in Energy Department grants are illegal because contracts had already been signed and will cause consumer energy prices to skyrocket, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate energy committee said.

Earlier this month, the Energy Department canceled $7.56 billion in funding for clean energy projects that it claimed would not provide sufficient returns to taxpayers.

“These are projects that would have added energy to the grid and added flexibility,” Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said. “The administration is constraining the energy that we can put on the grid, and at the end of the day, this is going to raise energy costs for consumers.”

Heinrich said that 218 of the 233 projects ran

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