March 18, 2026 - In Washington state, the Trump administration’s crusade to force aging coal plants to stay online is meeting resistance from lawmakers — and confronting the reality that the state’s power grid is doing just fine without coal.

On Monday, the Department of Energy issued its second 90-day emergency order demanding the continued operation of Unit 2 of TransAlta’s power plant in Centralia, in southwestern Washington. The DOE had first ordered the facility to keep running in December, the same month it was set to stop burning coal under an agreement with the state that’s been in place since 2011.

The order comes less than one week after Gov. Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, signed legislation that would impose hefty costs on TransAlta should the Centralia facility begin running again. The law, which passed Washington’s Democratic-controlled legislature in February, revokes TransAlta’s exemption from a requirement to buy allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade program. It also eliminates an exemption that allowed TransAlta to avoid paying the state sales tax on the coal it burns at the Centralia plant.

These changes will make it “extremely expensive for them to generate power at that facility,” Washington state Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, the bill’s lead sponsor, told Heatmap News last week. Fitzgibbon, a Democrat, added that the goal was to forestall the threat of the Trump administration getting “more aggressive” in its use of emergency power by putting the state “in a stronger position to ensure that the plant did not restart operations.”

The DOE has trotted out familiar justifications for ordering the Centralia plant to continue operating. The Monday order stated that the “reliable supply of power from the Centralia plant is essential to maintaining grid stability across the Northwest, and this order ensures that the region avoids unnecessary blackout risks and costs.”

But no such risks exist. According to an Environmental Defense Fund analysis of power generation data from the DOE’s Energy Information Administration, the Centralia plant hasn’t generated any meaningful electric power since January. The state has not suffered from any grid emergencies or supply shortfalls so far this year.

“The data proves that forcing this coal plant to stay open is just a wasteful charade,” Ted Kelly, the Environmental Defense Fund’s director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy, said in a Tuesday press release. “The Centralia plant hasn’t been producing any power over this supposed ‘emergency’ period because the grid has more than enough electricity without it — yet families and businesses will bear the costs of keeping it operational.”

There’s little reason to expect the state will need the power plant over the next three months, either, Kelly told Canary Media. “We’re heading into the spring period, when there’s generally less demand than during the winter period, and at a time when we have robust hydropower reserves,” he said.

TransAlta President and CEO John Kousinioris echoed this view in a February earnings call. He said that the company was “fully in compliance with the order in the sense of being available, should we be asked to run.” However, he added that TransAlta doesn’t expect to operate the plant this spring, given “how flush the hydro situation is in Washington state right now.”

TransAlta is one of six fossil-fueled power plants forced to remain in operation by Energy Secretary Chris Wright under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. Before last year, DOE had used that emergency authority only temporarily on request from utilities and grid operators facing immediate energy threats.

Wright has taken the unprecedented step of invoking this authority to prevent the closure of power plants that utilities and grid operators have determined were too costly to keep open and weren’t needed to maintain grid reliability. He also appears to be using it indefinitely.

The agency has issued three continuous 90-day orders to force a coal plant in Michigan and an oil- and fossil-gas-fired plant in Pennsylvania to keep running. It is expected to soon extend the forced operations of a coal plant in Colorado and two coal plants in Indiana.

Meanwhile, the costs of restarting operations at plants on the verge of being shut down are mounting — and will be borne by customers who are already struggling with rising utility bills The Sierra Club estimates that DOE’s orders have added up to $269 million as of Tuesday afternoon. DOE’s orders have been silent on how to assign those costs, leading state utility regulators and grid operators to dispute how to apportion them out to utility customers across their regions.

Washington state operates under a set of regulatory and energy market structures that complicate the matter of forcing TransAlta to generate power and foist those costs on utility customers. The Centralia facility is a “merchant” plant, meaning it cannot recover the cost of fuel and maintenance from captive utility customers, and must sign contracts with utilities or other energy buyers to earn enough money to stay open.

For the past decade, Washington state and TransAlta have planned to convert the Centralia plant to run on fossil gas. Kousinioris said last month that this plan remains in place. TransAlta has also secured an agreement to sell future gas-fired energy to utility Puget Sound Energy, he said. Meanwhile, the company has no contracted customers for the plant’s coal-fired power, making it unclear how it would be compensated if forced to generate that power.

Critics accuse the DOE of twisting the law and fabricating grid emergencies to serve the Trump administration’s pro-coal agenda. State attorneys general and environmental groups have brought legal challenges against each of DOE’s must-run orders. The first of these challenges, to DOE’s order for the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, now awaits a hearing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

In a Tuesday email, a DOE spokesperson did not address Canary Media’s questions regarding the critiques raised by these legal challenges, stating that such questions could be answered by reading the agency’s orders. “The Trump Administration is committed to preventing the premature retirement of baseload power plants and building as much reliable, dispatchable generation as possible to achieve energy dominance,” the spokesperson said.

The DOE has not responded to a clarification request from environmental groups on how the agency plans to use its Section 202(c) authority as the language of the law intends. That includes ensuring it forces the Centralia plant to operate “only as necessary to address a ‘loss of power to homes, businesses, and facilities critical to the national defense,’” as DOE’s order states it will do.

DOE has relied on broad and unsubstantiated claims of the risk of longer-term grid supply shortfalls to justify its emergency must-run orders, in Washington state and beyond. But the underlying law that the DOE is using doesn’t allow that, Kelly said.

“The core point here is that 202(c) is intended for real emergency situations, like an act of war, which is specified in the statute, or extreme weather situations that require specific responses,” he said. “Never before this administration has it been used as some sort of long-term planning tool.”

The legal challenges against DOE make this point clear, he said. “We hope we’ll see strong decisions that show how 202(c) is meant to be used and overturn these unlawful orders.”