By Kennedy Maize
The administration’s unstated but operationally obvious policy of trying to prevent any U.S. coal-fired power plant from closing during Trump’s final term has suffered a major blow.
In a scathing rebuke to the Trump administration’s coal-centric energy policy, a federal appeals court in Washington on Friday (Sept. 11) said the Department of Energy’s May 2025 order keeping an aged, uneconomic coal-fired power plant in Michigan running was unlawful. The court vacated DOE’s order.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned DOE’s order to Michigan-based electric utility Consumers Energy to keep its vintage 1962, 1,450-MW J.H. Campbell coal fired power plant in service for 90 days, citing alleged reliability threats during the coming summer. DOE has subsequently issued four more identical 90-day orders for the Campbell plant.
After the initial Michigan order, DOE subsequently ordered five other coal plants scheduled to retire and one gas-fired plant to keep running and extended the those 90-day orders as well.
In rejecting the DOE order, the appeals court essentially said DOE’s legal analysis, based on an obscure and seldom-used emergency provision in the Federal Power Act, Section 202c, was contrived and the factual evidence the agency offered flimsy. The DOE orders were largely the work of Deputy Secretary James Danly. He is a former Trump-appointed Federal Energy Regulatory Commission general counsel, later a commissioner, and briefly (77 days) FERC chairman. Before taking office Danly was a frequent contributor to the “Count on Coal” blog, commenting on coal and reliability. The DOE orders echo his earlier private citizen blog comments.
Writing the appeals court’s decision, Judge Cornelia Pillard said “Our reading of the text, structure, and history leaves us unpersuaded by DOE’s sweeping conception of its ‘emergency’ authority under section 202(c). The Department’s position would empower it to pick its preferred power sources in Michigan—or, presumably, any other state— and order them to operate without regard to the multiple procedural and substantive constraints built into state reliability planning processes.”
Pillard noted that the utility began detailed planning of the shutdown of the inefficient plant in 2022 and engaged in coordination with the Michigan Public Service Commission along with the regional transmission grid operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). The utility had taken necessary steps, approved by the MPSC and MISO, to assure adequate generating capacity in an emergency.
She pointed out that DOE’s order was a Washinton-based power grab inconsistent with federal law and practices. “It is the states— informed by federal, regional, and load-serving entities’ assessments of available supply and reliability needs—that bear the responsibility to plan for and avert reliability risks on an ongoing basis. To that end, states decide which generation resources must be built, expanded, reduced, or shut down.”
Pillard added, “Michigan has authority to protect energy supply in the face of risks of imminent shortage. The Michigan Commission regularly monitors energy supply in the state and publishes a semiannual ‘energy appraisal’ that highlights recent events affecting supply and prices, expected conditions, and changes over the upcoming six months.”
She wrote, “Just days before Campbell’s scheduled retirement, however, DOE sidestepped Michigan’s coordinated, years long process of planning, including the detailed, judicially reviewed, multiparty settlement.”
As for the evidence of a pending reliability crisis DOE offered, Pillard was scornful, accusing DOE of cherry-picking. “DOE pointed to fragments of two documents as showing that the region faced an emergency within the meaning of section 202(c),” she wrote. “First, it quoted a statement in a North American Electric Reliability Corp. report that MISO is ‘at elevated risk of operational reserve shortfalls during periods of high demand or low resource output.’” She then added, “DOE characterized that statement as describing an emergency even though the very same report concluded that MISO had ‘adequate anticipated resources’ for ‘peak load conditions.’”
Pillard continued, “Second, DOE quoted a slide from a deck describing MISO’s planning resource auction results for its North/Central region, which stated that ‘new capacity additions were insufficient to offset the negative impacts of decreased accreditation, suspensions/retirements and external resources’ and that the summer months reflected the ‘highest risk and a tighter supply-demand balance.’”
This was a flimsy hook on which to hang the DOE order, she found: “DOE acknowledges that both ‘MISO and Consumers had incorporated [Campbell’s] planned retirement into their supply forecasts,’ and that MISO procured ‘sufficient capacity’ for summer 2025.”
Pillard was joined in the order by Chief Judge Sri Srinivason and Judge Robert L. Wilkins.
Howard Lerner, executive director of the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center, said, “This ruling confirms what we’ve said from day one: there was no energy emergency in Michigan, and DOE manufactured one to prop up a coal plant that utilities and regulators had already agreed to retire. For months, DOE’s order forced Michigan families to pay an unfair and unnecessary tax just to keep a dirty, uneconomic coal plant burning.”
Lerner added that the ruling “comes as similar DOE emergency orders face challenge at coal and gas plants in Indiana (Schahfer and Culley), Pennsylvania (Eddystone), Washington (Centralia), and Colorado (Craig). ELPC continues to represent parties in the Indiana case, where the same legal question is at issue. A separate proceeding remains pending before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over whether Consumers Energy can pass the cost of the forced Campbell extension on to ratepayers.”
The Quad Report, covering energy policy and politics