November 20, 2025 - 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.

State attorneys general are challenging the DOE’s authority to keep J.H. Campbell running. Environmental groups have also filed lawsuits to try to block the DOE’s emergency must-run orders for the J.H. Campbell plant, as well as similar directives for another fossil-fueled power plant in Pennsylvania. Opponents say the move is a blatant attempt to prop up a dying industry at the expense of everyday utility customers.

“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.

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), the entity that manages the transmission grid supplying power to about 45 million people in 15 states, including Michigan, has also determined that the J.H. Campbell plant is not necessary to maintain grid reliability.

“Michigan’s Public Service Commission, grid experts, and the utility all agree it’s time for Campbell to go,” Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, said in a Wednesday statement.

Those reliability analyses focused on the summer months, when MISO’s grid is under the greatest stress from demand for electricity to support air-conditioning during heat waves. MISO does not face a near-term reliability challenge in winter months at present, according to a winter readiness assessment issued in October.

Aging coal plants are less reliable and more prone to unplanned outages than more modern power plants, according to a recent analysis of data from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund. Environmental Protection Agency data shows that the J.H. Campbell plant stopped generating for multiple stretches this summer and fall, indicating it may not be a reliable resource during emergencies, Lenoff noted in a November interview.

“Mandating aging, unreliable and costly coal plants to stay open past their retirement is a guaranteed way to needlessly hike up Americans’ electricity bills and make air pollution worse,” Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at Environmental Defense Fund, said in a Wednesday statement.

The DOE may soon issue Section 202(c) orders requiring two coal plants set for closure this year in Colorado to stay running, according to reports.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration in February reported about 8.1 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity scheduled to retire this year, including the 1.8-gigawatt 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.

Lenoff warned that the Trump administration appears ?“ready to issue additional orders to prevent the long-planned retirement of some of the dirtiest and oldest coal-burning power plants in the U.S. That amounts to a corporate bailout of coal at our expense.”