The Trump administration has followed through on a threat to use emergency wartime powers to force expensive and polluting coal-fired power plants to stay open — even if the utilities that own them, the states in which they operate, and the grid operators responsible for maintaining reliability all agree it’s safe to shut them down.
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.
“A manufactured emergency”
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 Coal is expensive, outdated, and deadly,” Greg Wannier, senior attorney with the Sierra Club Environmental Law Program, said in a Friday statement.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.’”
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.
