Forced coal plant operation cost Michigan's Consumers Energy $295 million

A unanimous federal appeals court panel has ruled that the Energy Department's emergency orders keeping a Michigan coal plant running past its retirement date were illegal, finding no genuine emergency existed to justify overriding Michigan's regulators. The J.H. Campbell plant in West Olive has cost Consumers Energy $295 million to operate since May 2025, after wholesale market revenue — set against nearly $600 million in savings that closing the plant was supposed to deliver.

The instrument is Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, written by Congress in 1935. Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, says the provision sat dormant for decades and has been used over the past twenty to thirty years almost exclusively for weather-related events, with orders lasting only days. In every prior instance, a utility, a grid operator or a state regulator had asked for the order. President Donald Trump's energy secretary, Chris Wright, issued the coal mandates unrequested; some parties, Peskoe notes, had asked the department not to.

Wright invoked the provision in May 2025 to keep the Campbell plant online past its planned May 31 retirement and renewed the order five more times, with similar mandates for the Craig plant in Colorado and the Schahfer and Culley plants in Indiana, each justified by grid reliability. Craig Unit 1 had suffered a mechanical failure eleven days before Wright's December 30 order and was not running when it was ordered to keep burning coal.

The lawsuits come from the Craig plant's own owners. Tri-State Generation and Transmission, a nonprofit rural cooperative, and Platte River Power Authority, a public power agency, argue that the orders violate the Constitution and federal law, and their fight for the right to close their own plant has reached a federal appeals court in Washington. The September 11 ruling, written by Judge Cornelia Pillard, struck down the first two Campbell orders; the administration has until roughly the end of October to decide whether to appeal, and Peskoe expects the remaining orders to fall quickly if it stands.

The costs, meanwhile, travel through electricity bills rather than the budget. In August, federal regulators allowed Consumers Energy to spread the Campbell costs across the grid's north and central regions, which run from North Dakota onward, and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's office has cited the $295 million figure. With weeks until Election Day, polls show broad opposition to the artificial-intelligence build-out over utility bills and grid strain, and campaigns in Michigan, Colorado and Indiana are folding forced plant extensions into an affordability argument. None of these issues polls as high as affordability.

Wright's most recent renewal, issued September 25, keeps Craig Unit 1 running through Christmas Day — a full year past the retirement date its owners chose.