The Trump administration has ordered the J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in Michigan to stay open for the next 90 days, citing an energy “emergency” that state utility regulators and regional grid operators say does not exist.
It’s the latest move in the administration’s expanding agenda to force aging and costly coal plants to keep running, despite warnings from energy experts and lawmakers that doing so will burden Americans with billions of dollars in unnecessary energy costs and environmental harms.
Tuesday’s emergency order from the Department of Energy was anticipated by Consumers Energy, the utility that owns and operates the 63-year-old facility. It’s the third such emergency order for the plant; the DOE issued its first directive in May, one week before the plant was scheduled to be retired, and then re-upped the decision in August.
“The costs of unnecessarily running this jalopy coal plant just continue to mount. Coal is more expensive than modern resources like wind, solar, and batteries,” Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney with Earthjustice who’s leading litigation by nonprofits challenging the DOE’s stay-open orders, said in a Wednesday statement.
Consumers Energy reported in an October earnings call that the cost of keeping the plant running past its planned closure had added up to $80 million, which is more than $615,000 per day, from May to the end of September.
An analysis from the consultancy Grid Strategies found that a broad application of the DOE’s emergency authority to the more than 60 gigawatts of aging coal, gas, and oil-fueled power plants likely to face closure by 2028 could add nearly $6 billion in costs to U.S. consumers by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term.
In the emergency order issued late Tuesday night, Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated, “I hereby determine that an emergency exists in portions of the Midwest region of the United States due to a shortage of electric energy, a shortage of facilities for the generation of electricity, and other causes.” The DOE has authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to order utilities regulated by states to keep plants running under emergency circumstances.
But that claim of an emergency is belied by analysis from Consumers Energy and Michigan utility regulators, who determined in 2022 that the plant’s closure would not threaten grid reliability and that replacing it with fossil gas, solar, and battery resources could save customers $600 million through 2040.
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