Trump’s Energy Department Keeps Ordering Coal Plants To Stay Open After Losing In Court

The Energy Department is still ordering aging coal plants to stay open after a federal appeals court ruled it overstepped its emergency powers.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered units at Indiana’s R.M. Schahfer and F.B. Culley coal plants to remain available through Dec. 18, the department announced Sept. 19. The orders came a week after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated Wright’s first emergency order for Michigan’s J.H. Campbell coal plant, which he issued in May 2025 to keep it running past its planned retirement.

“DOE [the Energy Department] disagrees with the decision and is working with DOJ [the Justice Department] to assess potential rehearing and appeal options,” Energy Department Press Secretary Ben Dietderich told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Wright said in the department’s release that forcing coal generation off the grid “would compromise energy reliability and needlessly raises energy costs for Americans.”

Judge Cornelia Pillard, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, wrote for the panel that states “bear the responsibility to plan for and avert reliability risks on an ongoing basis.”

The Campbell ruling also bears on a separate challenge to the department’s orders for Colorado’s Craig Station Unit 1, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association public relations specialist Mark Stutz told the DCNF.

Stutz said the D.C. Circuit paused Tri-State’s first appeal on June 6 until 60 days after it ruled in the Campbell case, and that Tri-State and co-owner Platte River Power Authority have since filed three petitions challenging the department’s orders, the latest on Sept. 22.

He said the department has issued three emergency orders for the unit, the latest on June 26, and that each of the owners’ requests for rehearing was denied automatically when the department did not act on it.

Democratic Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Keeping the Campbell plant open past its May 2025 retirement date had cost about $259 million as of Sept. 11, according to financial filings cited by the Associated Press.

The plant earned about $33.7 million selling electricity between late May and June 30, 2025, leaving its owner, Consumers Energy, with a profit of nearly five million dollars for that period, The Washington Free Beacon reported in 2025, citing federal figures.

Stutz said Tri-State has not disclosed what keeping Craig Unit 1 running has cost, and that generator-specific performance information is confidential.

Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO), which owns Schahfer, told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that both units covered by the orders remain offline for inspections, maintenance and repairs.

The utility asked federal regulators in August to approve about $38 million in cost recovery for the first quarter of 2026, according to the Capital Chronicle.

CenterPoint Energy, which owns Culley, told the DCNF in a statement that it is “reviewing” the Campbell ruling and “evaluating its potential implications for Culley 2,” but that the decision “does not change” the department’s direction for the unit and that it will continue to comply.

“At this time, there are no direct bill impacts to CenterPoint customers, but we remain committed to keeping customer affordability top-of-mind as we plan for recovery of costs associated with operating the unit,” the company said.

Republican Indiana Gov. Mike Braun praised the latest orders, saying they would “help protect Hoosiers from higher energy costs and keep the power on,” the Capital Chronicle reported.

The department said in its release that the Indiana plants have been critical to the regional grid, running during periods of high demand and low output from intermittent sources such as wind and solar.

Dietderich, the department’s press secretary, said the emergency orders, including at Campbell, “prevented blackouts and likely saved hundreds of lives during peak capacity events this past year.”

He said the Campbell plant ran at more than 650 megawatts every day from Jan. 21 to Feb. 1 during Winter Storm Fern, and that coal generation in affected regions rose 25% at the storm’s peak compared with the same time the previous year.

Jason Hayes, a senior research fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment, told the DCNF that the ruling limits how the department can write future orders but does not remove the Midwest grid’s elevated risk of reliability problems.

“The court did not find that the Midwest has spare firm power,” Hayes said, referring to power plants that can run whenever they are needed.

He said Campbell’s closure was moved up 15 years and that Schahfer’s retirement appears to be following a similar timeline, with state regulators approving plans to replace coal with wind and solar.

“People angry about the cost of keeping the Schahfer and Campbell plants running should actually be angry at the policies that retire dispatchable [on-demand] plants before a reliable replacement option is proposed,” Hayes said.

He said state legislatures and Congress should “require firm capacity to replace firm capacity” before the next polar vortex.

Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF that Congress designed the emergency authority “for wartime emergencies” and that the D.C. Circuit “correctly found” the department’s reliance on a possible future power shortfall “too open-ended.”

Fisher said environmental groups sued to force Campbell’s retirement while Consumers Energy had “every incentive” to close the plant and build newer, more expensive plants in its place.

“The missing person in this … coalition is the ratepayer, whose bills go up when environmentalists and utilities team up to shut down existing plants,” he said.

Fisher said the government should let power plants compete and allow uneconomic ones to retire, adding that plants “that pass the market test should neither be sued into oblivion nor micromanaged by the DOE.”

“Not only are Secretary Wright and DOE doing the right thing ordering operators of these coal plants to maintain their availability in times of baseload constraints, the Trump administration should be doing more,” energy analyst and writer David Blackmon told the DCNF.

Blackmon said the administration should also approve new coal plants in areas where natural gas and other dispatchable power sources are not feasible because the infrastructure is lacking.

“America’s regional grid operators can no longer afford to pretend that intermittent generation is a viable substitute for real baseload,” he said.

Nessel, whose office is challenging the orders in court, said in a statement after the ruling that “this administration does not get to invent fake emergencies to bypass the rule of law.”

The latest Campbell order runs through Nov. 14, according to Nessel’s office.

The department’s emergency orders also cover coal plants in Colorado, Florida and Washington state, the AP reported.

The department said in its Sept. 19 release that more than 17 gigawatts of coal generation were kept from going offline in 2025.