An aging coal power plant that was supposed to shutter last week will run throughout the summer at the order of President Donald Trump’s Energy Sec. Chris Wright, a decision that could cost Midwest energy customers tens of millions of dollars.
The last-minute federal order to keep the J.H. Campbell plant operating came as a surprise to Michigan officials, including the head of the state’s Public Service Commission, given it was at the tail end of a multi-year retirement process that was approved in 2022.
“The grid operator hadn’t asked for this, the utility hadn’t asked for this, we as the state hadn’t asked for this,” said Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission. “We certainly didn’t have any conversations with the (Energy Department) in advance of the order, or since.”
Wright’s May 23 emergency order cited concerns the Midwest could face a summer electricity shortage due to a lack of available coal, gas and nuclear plants that can provide stable baseload power. But Consumers Energy, the utility that owns the coal plant, told CNN in an email it already purchased another natural gas-fired power plant to carry the load when the coal plant went offline.
Scripps said the cost to keep the over-60-year-old plant operating, even for 90 days, will be high, and customers in 15 states will foot the bill.
“I can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that we’re looking at multiple tens of millions of dollars at the low end,” Scripps said. “I think there’s a range between there and the high end of getting close to $100 million.”
It’s unclear so far what that will mean for individual electricity bills, Scripps added, given the uncertainty about final cost.
“For years, American grid operators have warned decommissioning baseload power sources such as coal plants would jeopardize the reliability of our grid systems, which has raised alarm bells,” Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich said in a statement.
Dietderich didn’t say whether the Energy Department had conducted a cost analysis before issuing the emergency order. It’s unclear whether the department realized the company already had a plan to maintain baseload power after its closure.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said she is considering legal action against the federal government. Nessel and energy experts said such an emergency order from the federal government is extremely rare and usually reserved for the aftermath of severe storms or natural disasters.
“This is a novel case for us,” Nessel said. “We’ve not had to do this before.”
She reiterated keeping the plant open would “significantly” raise electricity rates, saying, “The whole point of closing this plant down was to save money.”
Michigan and the plant’s operator have mounds of evidence that closing the 63-year-old J.H. Campbell plant on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan won’t create a shortage of electricity. But the Trump administration adopted a different view, claiming the Midwest is overly dependent on intermittent wind and solar power. Energy Secretary Chris Wright exercised rarely used federal authority to block the closure, which had been scheduled for May 31. His order requires the plant to continue operating for three more months — and possibly longer.
The move will collectively increase electric bills for ratepayers in the Midwest by tens of millions of dollars, according to Michigan officials. More broadly, it was seen as an opening salvo in President Donald Trump’s effort to reverse America’s transition to clean energy and restore the nation’s dependence on burning fossil fuels. The administration’s strategy includes using federal power to overturn the plans of local utilities and regulators.
The administration’s view that renewable energy destabilizes energy supplies is disputed by many experts, who say batteries and enhanced distribution systems allow power grids to thrive on wind and solar energy.
“The view that we need to prioritize these traditional resources is stuck in the past,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “The cost of falling back on this kind of techno-pessimism is you lose momentum to build a more modern grid. Instead, you are doubling down on plants that need to be replaced because they are dirty and expensive.”
Michigan’s Campbell plant, according to the Sierra Club, is the largest source of greenhouse gas and local air pollution in western Michigan. It opened in 1962 and at one point was planned to run until as late as 2040. But plant owner Consumers Energy opted to close it this year as part of a 2022 settlement with the community and its broader plan to transition off coal altogether. Scripps said economics were a major driver in the early retirement, as the utility can generate energy more cheaply from gas, wind and solar.
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Consumers Energy announced its plan to retire the coal facility in 2021, and MISO, the regional grid operator, approved that plan three years ago, in March 2022. MISO operates the electricity market and power grid for a 15-state region in the central U.S. that runs from Louisiana north to Minnesota and into the Canadian province of Manitoba.
Plant closures and adding new generation are not decisions that are made arbitrarily. The utility worked extensively with both the Michigan Public Service Commission and MISO to get the approvals needed to replace the power capacity of the aging generators and ensure the closure of Campbell did not affect grid reliability. As part of that effort, Consumers has brought online 502MW of wind generation since 2020, bought the 1,055MW Covert combined cycle gas plant in 2023, and is in the process of adding 515MW of solar generation to its system by 2027.
These capacity replacement moves were clearly enough for MISO. The system operator’s endorsement is critical, since it has the authority to require plants to continue operating if it believes grid stability or shortages could occur. And MISO has not been afraid to act: In 2022, it required Missouri-based Ameren to keep its 1,195MW Rush Island coal plant open for reliability reasons. The decision was upheld by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the plant remained open for two additional years. MISO found no similar problems with Consumers’ plan to close the Campbell plant, saying as recently as May 8 that the region has sufficient resources to meet projected demand this summer. Despite this, the Department of Energy said in its May 24 emergency order that it was directing MISO and Consumers to keep the plant open due to an expected “insufficiency of dispatchable capacity” during the summer.
Then there is the issue of who will pay for keeping the Campbell plant open. The order says nothing about who will end up footing the bill, but Michigan ratepayers almost certainly will be forced to pay for these costs, which will total millions of dollars. For example, in a case in West Virginia in 2023, the utility First Energy told regulators that it would cost at least $3 million a month simply to keep the Pleasants coal plant, a smaller and newer facility, open and capable of operating—and that was without the costs of actually generating power.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp. is overstating the reliability risks faced by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, according to David Patton, president of Potomac Economics, the grid operator’s market monitor.
In its 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment released in December, NERC said MISO was at a high risk of having a shortfall in electricity supplies at the peak of an average summer or winter season in the next five years — the worst ranking of all North American regions.
“I’d love to work with NERC to figure out where they got their numbers from, because I don’t think they’re accurate,” Patton said Thursday during a technical conference on resource adequacy challenges in the United States held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
NERC understates MISO’s capacity for demand response, behind-the-meter generation and firm capacity imports by more than 8 GW, Patton said in written testimony to FERC. Also, NERC considered possible power plant retirements that have not occurred, according to Patton.
Potomac Economics also acts as the market monitor for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ISO New England and the New York Independent System Operator. “MISO is the most reliable of any of them,” Patton said. “If I was concerned about the lights going out somewhere, it would not be MISO.”
In recent winter storms, MISO exported power to neighboring grid operators to help meet their needs, Patton said, noting the exports reflected the value interconnections between grid operators can have.
Further, MISO has been vastly overestimating the power supplies it will need in coming years to meet demand for electricity, Patton said. In its 2024 Regional Resource Assessment, MISO said its footprint may need 17 GW of new resources every year for the next 20 years.
“That’s a result of a clearly flawed planning process,” Patton told FERC. In its modeling, MISO assumed utilities would build almost exclusively intermittent renewable resources, even though their reliability value under MISO’s future marginal accreditation approach will fall to close to zero, according to Patton’s testimony.
If utilities and others in MISO build hybrid renewables, storage and dispatchable resources, the annual need for new resources falls to about 2 GW to 3 GW, Patton said. Some near-term needs will likely be met by delayed power plant retirements, he said.
In the last 10 years, MISO has lost about 9.5 GW of accredited capacity, according to a chart shown by FERC Chairman Mark Christie at the conference.
Even so, MISO has adequate power supplies for now — and the pace of the decline in capacity has slowed in recent years, according to Todd Ramey, MISO senior vice president of markets and digital strategy.
I’m going to say what’s already very well known here: these people are lying.
Baseload is poison. Adding renewables to a grid increases the grid’s reliability, including wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and storage. This is nothing but insane corruption.
When are we going to have the courage to remove them from power and wealth?