A Michigan coal plant was about to close. Trump ordered it to stay open.
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy issued an order demanding that the J.H. Campbell plant, a 1,560-megawatt coal-burning power plant owned by Michigan utility Consumers Energy, must abandon its plans to shut down on May 31 and instead continue operating through at least late August.
The order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive and a vocal denier of the climate change crisis, states that 'an emergency exists in portions of the Midwest region of the United States due to a shortage of electric energy.' It cites this rationale to invoke the DOE's emergency authority under the 1935 Federal Power Act to unilaterally order any power plant in the country to keep running.
'This administration will not sit back and allow dangerous energy subtraction policies threaten the resiliency of our grid and raise electricity prices on American families,' Wright said in a Friday press release. President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders in April aimed at 'bringing back' the U.S.coal industry, including an order authorizing the DOE to cite grid reliability as justification for keeping coal plants open.
Environmental and consumer watchdogs decried Friday's announcement as an unlawful abuse of power that serves the administration's pro-coal agenda. They warned that keeping this coal plant open will worsen pollution, harm nearby communities, and increase costs for utility customers.
'Donald Trump invoking the Federal Power Act is an illegal abuse of his presidential authority. Coal is expensive, outdated, and deadly,' Greg Wannier, senior attorney with the Sierra Club Environmental Law Program, said in a Friday statement. '[A]ll of the relevant parties, including MISO, the grid operator ultimately responsible for keeping the lights on in Michigan, concluded years ago that J.H. Campbell could retire without causing any grid reliability problems.'
Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, accused the DOE of 'making up a manufactured emergency to accomplish a crass political outcome — Trump being able to say, 'I saved a coal-fired power plant.''
Wright's order comes just eight days before J.H. Campbell's scheduled May 31 retirement under a plan that has been in the works since 2021. The planned shutdown is part of a broader agreement between Consumers Energy and state regulators to end coal use by 2025 and put the utility on a path to meeting the state's mandate of 100% carbon-free power by 2040. Consumers Energy has estimated that the switch from costlier coal to cheap gas, solar, and energy storage will save customers $600 million through 2040.
Consumers Energy has bought a 1,200-MW gas-fired power plant to make up for the energy and grid support that the J.H. Campbell plant provided, and has continued to build and contract for utility-scale solar power and battery storage. The DOE's order ignores this preparation for keeping Michigan's grid reliable, Wannier said.
The DOE's claims that the coal plant is necessary to ensure regional grid reliability do not hold up, he said. Michigan regulators, Consumers Energy, and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the entity that manages grid reliability across Michigan and 14 other Midwest states, have had years to plan for losing the coal plant's energy and capacity services, and have found no reason to delay its closure, he said.
MISO has the power to order power plants to stay open if it determines their closure could threaten grid reliability. MISO used that authority most recently during the Biden administration to order Missouri utility Ameren to keep its Rush Island coal plant open. To do so, it filed a 'reliability must run' request that was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the standard practice for such emergency stay-open orders.
The DOE's emergency powers, by contrast, have historically only been used in rare cases to protect utilities, states, or regional grid operators from being penalized for violating air-quality regulations, contractual obligations, or other such barriers to keeping the plants running during emergencies, he said. The DOE's order provided no evidence that either MISO or Consumers Energy had made such a request for J.H. Campbell.
MISO spokesperson Brandon Morris told Canary Media in a Monday email that MISO did not request that DOE issue the emergency order. "MISO will coordinate with Consumers Energy to support compliance with the federal order as we prepare to maintain grid reliability throughout the summer season,' he said.
The DOE justified its emergency order by citing a December 2024 report from North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit regulatory authority that includes utilities and grid operators in the U.S. and Canada. In that report, MISO was the only grid region in North America to rank as 'high risk' for future grid reliability challenges. Like many other parts of the country, MISO is struggling to add new generation resources to the grid fast enough to keep up with demand. The vast majority of projects waiting to connect are solar, wind, and batteries, which could help replace the aging and money-losing coal plants being shut down.
Wannier emphasized that such broad findings about potential future reliability don't justify emergency stay-open orders. 'DOE's citation to NERC is definitely overbroad,' he said. NERC's risk assessment for MISO 'does not create an 'emergency' sufficient to take an action as drastic as DOE has taken here.'
The DOE also cites statements MISO issued after its April capacity auction, which secures resources to keep the grid running during times of peak power demand. MISO said at that time that summer months present the 'highest risk and a tighter supply-demand balance.'
But Wannier pointed out that MISO's auction in fact 'ensured that each zone within MISO has sufficient resources to meet its resource adequacy objectives for the summer, as it does every year.'
The DOE's order appeared to acknowledge this fact, noting that MISO also stated that it had 'demonstrated sufficient capacity' for all its regions.
Slocum said these gaps in the DOE's explanation for taking this drastic step are evidence that the agency is 'looking for an emergency, and looking for a chance to deploy it.'
'There's no methodology here. There's no fact-based assessment,' he said. 'Summer is now an emergency to the Trump administration.'
The DOE's order also fails to make clear how Consumers Energy, MISO, and state and federal regulators should determine the cost of forcing this coal plant to keep running over the summer, and who will end up paying for it, Wannier said.
Power plants operating in MISO rely on the grid operator's energy market prices and dispatch signals to decide whether they should start up and run or stay idle from one hour to the next. The costs of running coal plants often exceeds the payments they can realize from selling electricity into these markets.
But many utilities operating in MISO territory, including in Michigan, are already pushing billions of dollars of unnecessary costs onto their customers by running coal plants at times when other power sources would be cheaper, according to studies of data conducted over the past half decade.
The DOE's order directed MISO to take 'every step to employ economic dispatch of the Campbell Plant to minimize cost to ratepayers.' But the order also instructs MISO to 'effectuate the dispatch and operation of the units for the reasons specified herein.'
The problem, Wannier explained, is that it's highly unlikely that the prices being offered to generators on MISO's energy market will be high enough to recoup the costs of running the aging coal plant. This lack of profitability is the main reason why so many coal plants are being shut down.
That means that the safest way for Consumers Energy and MISO to attempt to meet the DOE's order that the coal plant be up and running through the summer is to allow it to 'self-schedule,' or run 'no matter what and accept whatever the clearing energy prices are,' Wannier said. That, in turn, makes it very probable that the coal plant will be losing money.
'DOE is saying Consumers and MISO need to work out how much Consumers has to get paid for operating the plant, and if they can't work it out, DOE will impose something,' he said. 'But none of this makes clear who DOE thinks should end up holding the bag if they can't agree. And it's bad news for whoever has to pay because there's no way Campbell gets enough reimbursement from MISO energy markets to financially justify its continued existence.'
Slocum highlighted that utilities and grid operators have a legal obligation to operate power plants and markets in ways that do not unjustly or arbitrarily force costs onto utility customers. That's the issue on which Public Citizen intends to launch its first challenge to the order — not against the DOE, but in the proceeding that the order requires Consumers Energy to launch before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
'DOE's order explicitly directs Consumers Energy, as the owner of the coal-fired power plant, to file a cost-recovery filing at FERC,' Slocum said. 'We're going to be challenging that filed rate as unjust and unreasonable, because the emergency is fake.'
'It's one thing for Trump to say he wants to bring coal back. It's another thing to abuse emergency powers that trigger forced payments by ratepayers,' he continued. 'Once again, Trump is asking other people to pay for his nonsense.'
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