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November 12, 2025 - The Trump administration appears poised to force more coal plants to stay open past their planned closing dates — an unprecedented intervention in the power sector that is already making energy even more expensive for Americans.
The first signal of the strategy came in late May. A week before the J.H. Campbell coal plant’s scheduled shutdown, the Department of Energy directed the 63-year-old facility in Michigan to keep operating for 90 days. The agency has since re-upped that order, and the power plant’s owner, Consumers Energy, expects another extension later this month. Through the end of September, the move had already cost Consumers’ customers a total of $80 million, or roughly $615,000 per day.
But the J.H. Campbell plant is unlikely to remain the lone example. Despite the costs, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive who denies the severity of the climate change crisis, is reportedly intending to interfere in more long-planned coal plant closures — this time in Colorado.
Late last month, the Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association revealed that DOE officials have indicated they will issue a Section 202(c) order to keep Unit 1 of the electric cooperative’s Craig Station coal plant online past its scheduled closure later this year. Tri-State provides power to member utilities that collectively serve over 1 million customers in rural Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
“Based on conversations with the U.S. Department of Energy, we believe that it is likely that we will receive an emergency order before the end of the year,” Tri-State spokesperson Mark Stutz told Canary Media. That puts the cooperative in a bind, given that “we do have legal requirements to close that unit, but we also are closing it for economic reasons,” he said.
Tri-State declined to disclose the costs it would incur due to an emergency order. But the cooperative’s broader plans to expand clean energy and close coal plants are expected to save its members $422 million over 20 years.
Another Colorado coal plant slated for closure this year is also likely to stay online, whether via DOE fiat or more typical state processes.
U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican representing a district in western Colorado, wrote a letter to the DOE last month asking it to stall the planned retirement of Comanche Unit 2, a more than 300-megawatt power plant owned by Xcel Energy. The utility estimated in 2018 that shutting down two Comanche units and building out renewables would save customers about $213 million over time. This week, Xcel Energy and state agencies petitioned Colorado regulators to delay the retirement of Comanche Unit 2 until the end of 2026 due to repeated failures at the newer Unit 3.
In both Michigan and Colorado, regulators and utilities had previously determined that shutting down the coal plants in question would not compromise grid reliability.
Still, the Trump administration said the J.H. Campbell plant needed to stay online due to summertime grid emergencies. No such emergencies came to pass this summer. In fact, the regional grid operator “had 10 times the amount of unused resources available to it than the amount of energy Campbell was providing,” said Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney with Earthjustice who’s leading litigation by nonprofits challenging the DOE’s stay-open orders.
The Trump administration has also issued Section 202(c) orders forcing the Eddystone oil- and gas-fired power plant in Pennsylvania to stay open.
These eleventh-hour orders come with both direct and indirect costs.
Power plants on the verge of closure reassign workers and defer maintenance. They stop purchasing fuel; the J.H. Campbell facility likely had to make an expensive rush order after receiving last-minute notice that it would have to operate. These direct costs associated with reversing closure plans can range from the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plus, as is the case in Colorado, utility customers are often already paying for energy infrastructure that will replace coal units, said Matthew Gerhart, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club’s Denver office. If the DOE orders Craig Unit 1 and Comanche Unit 2 to keep running, those customers will end up “paying twice, since they’re already paying for the replacement resources.”
Threats across the country Coal provided about 15% of electricity in the U.S. in 2024, a far cry from the 51% it provided in 2001. Swapping renewables and fossil gas in for the dirty power source has been a major driver of decarbonization for the nation’s grid.
About 8.1 gigawatts’ worth of coal-fired capacity, or 4.7% of the U.S. coal fleet, was scheduled to retire this year as of February, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That list includes the 1,800-megawatt Intermountain Power Project in Utah, the 670-megawatt Unit 2 of the TransAlta Centralia plant in Washington state, and 847 megawatts of generation capacity at the R.M. Schahfer plant in Indiana.
These facilities are some of the most expensive plants to run within the coal fleet, which is itself the costliest source of electricity on the U.S. grid today, said Michelle Solomon, a manager in the electricity program at Energy Innovation.
The think tank reported in June that coal-plant owners spent $6.2 billion more in 2024 than they would have spent for the same amount of electricity generated by coal in 2021. The 28% increase was driven by the rising costs of maintaining a power-plant fleet with an average age of 44 years.
The plants set to retire this year “are on the higher end of the cost increases we saw” compared to the U.S. coal fleet as a whole, Solomon added.
What’s more, “all these plants are likely to be less reliable and efficient, because the owners are reducing the amount of maintenance they’re doing,” she said. That means, ironically, they’re more likely to be offline when needed for the emergencies that are the DOE’s rationale for keeping them open.
Lenoff highlighted U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data that shows the J.H. Campbell units “kept going on and off” from July 1 through Sept. 30. “They’d operate for 24 hours, days on end — and then shut off.”
That’s problematic for two reasons, he said. First, under Section 202(c), the DOE is “only allowed to order the units to run during designated hours of emergency. But these units have been running 24 hours a day.” Second, weeks-long shutdowns indicate that the plants are unlikely to be available when the grid really needs them.
“Meanwhile, Campbell was racking up costs and polluting its neighbors and polluting Lake Michigan,” he said.
Rising costs, growing political rifts The Trump administration could foist enormous costs onto consumers if it ultimately pursues a policy of blocking most fossil-fuel retirements.
Americans are already struggling with utility bills that have been rising at more than twice the rate of overall inflation this year. Democratic candidates focused on energy affordability won races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and won two of five seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission.
In an August analysis, consultancy Grid Strategies estimated that if the DOE forced about 35 gigawatts’ worth of large fossil-fueled power plants scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028 to keep running, annual costs for utility customers could reach $4.8 billion by the end of Donald Trump’s term.
Add in the risk of forced operations of another 31.4 gigawatts of fossil-fueled power plants that are not slated for retirement but are around retirement age, and the yearly costs rise to $5.9 billion.
Michael Goggin, Grid Strategies executive vice president and author of the report, said that the latest data from Consumers Energy on the costs of J.H. Campbell indicate that “our August estimate stands, and if anything appears conservative.”
The DOE isn’t responsible for every coal plant that remains running past its sell-by date, Goggin noted. Grid operator PJM Interconnection has ordered the Brandon Shores coal plant and H.A. Wagner oil-fired plant in Maryland to run years past their planned closure, under a longstanding process to determine when retirements could threaten critical grid reliability. Xcel’s Monday petition asking state regulators to postpone the closure of Comanche Unit 2 is another example of how coal plants can be kept open through traditional processes.
That “reliability must-run” process has its critics. But it also has well-established rules that regional grid operators, state utility regulators, and other stakeholders follow.
The DOE’s use of Section 202(c) emergency authority under the Trump administration, by contrast, has broken with these decades-old rules. Critics fear the administration’s true goal is not to ensure grid reliability, but to unilaterally carry out a political agenda to bolster the fossil-fuel industry and undermine clean energy.
It’s not an outlandish argument. The Trump administration has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to propping up coal-fired power plants. It has also ordered the DOE to create a process by which the agency could usurp state and regional grid planning decisions to unilaterally declare any power plant in the country as critical. In July, the DOE issued a heavily criticized report claiming that coal-plant closures represent a major threat to grid reliability.
Meanwhile, the costs being pushed onto utility customers by the DOE’s existing must-run orders are starting to cause political tensions.
Last month, Kentucky’s attorney general and an electrical cooperative in the state filed a joint protest before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, challenging PJM’s plan to spread the costs of keeping plants forced to remain open under DOE order across all utilities within the grid operator’s 13-state footprint.
Regulators are working out similar cost-sharing arrangements across the Midcontinent Independent System Operator region for the extra expenses borne by Consumers Energy to keep the J.H. Campbell plant running. The logic is that the DOE’s orders claim that the plant is necessary for region-wide grid reliability, and that consumers across the region must therefore bear part of the burden.
These extra costs are coming at a time of rising utility rates in PJM, in MISO, and across the country, which intensifies the likelihood that individual states and utilities will balk at being asked to carry costs for power plants that nobody but DOE has said need to keep running.
“It’s a strange environment,” Goggin said. “There’s large load growth, and resource-adequacy concerns, and there are always going to be people arguing about not paying for something. But in this case it’s complicated by the fact that everyone wants to retire a plant that everyone has already signed off on.”
Legal challenges from state attorneys general and nonprofit groups are underway, but moving slowly. Lawsuits against the DOE’s Section 202(c) order for the J.H. Campbell plant are now awaiting review at the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure this case is heard” quickly, Earthjustice’s Lenoff said. But that process will likely stretch into the middle of next year, he said.
Meanwhile, Goggin said, with the DOE only forcing J.H. Campbell and Eddystone to stay open so far, “this has been flying under the radar a little bit.” But if the DOE moves ahead on Section 202(c) orders for the rest of the coal power plants set for closure this year, “we’re getting people ready to understand that this thing may be coming to your utility very soon.” |
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