Court Rules Against Trump Order to Keep Costly Michigan Coal Plant Running

A federal appeals court has struck down the Trump administration’s use of emergency powers to require a coal-fired power plant in Michigan to remain open, ruling that the U.S. Department of Energy exceeded its authority.

The 3-0 decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a rebuke of the administration’s attempt to use a policy tool designed for wartime to stop just about any coal-fired power plant from closing.

Department of Energy officials had said they were responding to a crisis in which the loss of power plants increased the chances of blackouts and brownouts. But state officials, utilities and environmental advocacy groups argued successfully that the actions exceed the narrow and short-term power specified in federal law, and that the state can meet energy needs without the plant.

“My office has been fighting this unlawful political stunt at every turn, and this ruling proves what we have been saying all along: This administration does not get to invent fake emergencies to bypass the rule of law against the best interests of Michigan residents,” said Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general, in a statement.

When asked if the Department of Energy planned to appeal the ruling, an agency spokesperson did not respond directly but said in an email, “Rest assured, the Department of Energy will continue to protect and defend energy security for all Americans.”

The spokesperson said that the agency’s emergency orders, including at J.H. Campbell Generating Station in Michigan, “prevented blackouts and likely saved hundreds of lives during peak capacity events this past year,” singling out the role they played last January, when Winter Storm Fern brought heavy snow, ice accumulation and cold Arctic air over 2,000 miles of the United States from New Mexico to New England. The spokesperson noted that coal generation in the regions hit by the storm was 25 percent higher than the previous year, and the Campbell plant operated at more than 650 megawatts every day between Jan. 21 and Feb. 1.

The agency has options for appealing the decision, including asking for the full D.C. Circuit to rehear the case or appealing directly to the Supreme Court.

The decision throws into question a central strategy that Energy Secretary Chris Wright has used to implement the Trump administration’s policy to revive the coal industry.

He has repeatedly invoked his emergency authority under the Depression-era Federal Power Act to keep open fossil fuel plants that were on the verge of closing. Previously, that authority, under the law’s Section 202(c), had been used to address potential electricity outages during extraordinary events like hurricanes; President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the law in 1941 to meet electricity demand in the run-up to U.S. entry into World War II.

But beginning with the Campbell plant in May 2025, Wright used Section 202(c) to head off closure of six coal plants and one that runs on gas and oil. In each case, he said the orders were necessary to strengthen the reliability of the grid. Although the law limits such orders to 90 days, Wright has continued renewing the orders as they expired.

The moves drew praise from coal producers; Core Natural Resources officials told investors last year that they hoped the “drumbeat” of delayed coal retirements would continue. 

The new court decision, written by Judge Cornelia Pillard, an appointee of President Barack Obama, is a broad rejection of Wright’s approach. “Our reading of the text, structure, and history leaves us unpersuaded by DOE’s sweeping conception of its ‘emergency’ authority,” she wrote.

The Campbell plant in West Olive, Michigan, has a summer generating capacity of 1,331 megawatts. The oldest of its three generation units went online in 1962.

The utility Consumers Energy owns the plant and had planned to shut it down in May 2025, following years of preparing to replace the power with less-expensive alternatives. Michigan regulators and the grid operator, Midcontinent Independent System Operator, reviewed and approved the plans.

Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel on U.S. clean energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the organizations involved in the legal challenge, said the court’s decision was a “striking rejection” of the emergency orders. 

“It really kind of cuts DOE’s legs out from under them in trying to argue that any of those orders are legal,” Kelly said. “My hope would be that they recognize that and that they withdraw those orders, let them expire, let the power plants retire.”

Campbell is the most expensive of the plants being kept alive, he said. The Sierra Club calculated that it has cost consumers more than $540 million so far to keep the plants running past their retirement dates, with Campbell accounting for about half of those costs.

It’s also one of the most polluting facilities in Michigan, with its effects on air and water felt throughout the Midwest. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates the plant pours 10,000 pounds of toxic metals into Lake Michigan and causes more than 400 asthma attacks annually, and the Sierra Club estimates that smog and soot pollution from the plant kills 66 people each year. 

Elizabeth Hauptman, a Michigan field organizer for Moms Clean Air Force, has a 15-year-old son with asthma, who she said reaches out to his friends on poor air quality days to make sure they are safe. 

“His generation are very much aware of what the adults in the room are doing or not doing,” Hauptman said. “This shouldn’t be a child’s burden.”

Hauptman said she was excited and hopeful about the court’s Friday decision and what it could mean for families like hers that are dealing with the hazards of pollution from coal plants.

“This is just the courts agreeing with what families already knew, that this was not good for us,” she said.

The latest order keeping Campbell open is still in effect, and environmental attorneys said the ball is in the Department of Energy’s court to heed the ruling. 

“The reality is that there is no real need for these plants,” said Sanjay Narayan, a managing attorney at the Sierra Club. “If DOE follows the statute … then these plants should be, in the orderly course of business, following their original plans to shut down.”

Consumers Energy will continue to comply with the emergency order while reviewing the ruling, said company spokeswoman Katie Carey.

The Energy Department faces separate legal challenges over each of the emergency orders. It’s not clear how much the Campbell plant case will affect the others.

One factor behind the decision was the extensive record of Consumers Energy coordinating with Michigan regulators and the grid operator to ensure the Campbell closure would not harm reliability. The record may be different in other cases.

In addition to the Campbell plant, Wright issued emergency orders keeping open Eddystone Generating Station in Pennsylvania, an oil and natural gas plant, and five other coal plants—Centralia Generating Station in Washington state; F.B. Culley Generating Station and R.M Schahfer in Indiana; Craig Station in Colorado; and Unit 1 of the Stanton Energy Center in Florida.

Alexandra Klass, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who has written about the history of energy emergency orders, said the court decision is significant because the orders were “casting a shadow” over the ability of states, utilities and grid operators to plan for the future. She was deputy general counsel at the Department of Energy in the Biden administration and part of a group of energy scholars that submitted an amicus brief in the case.

“You can’t invest in new energy resources if you can’t close the old ones,” she said.