As part of its deal with fossil fuel billionaire donors, the Trump administration has ordered several expensive and obsolete coal plants, slated to be closed, to remain open, using specious “emergency” powers to keep ordering 90 day extensions.
In other words, the same half assed corrupt way they’ve been running everything else, from the War for Oil to the Protections for Pedophiles.
One of those plants is the J.H. Campbell plant near Lake Michigan.
The Trump administration has once again ordered the J.H. Campbell power plant in West Michigan to remain open, despite Consumers Energy’s plan to shut the plant down last year.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office last year. After that, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a 90-day order for the coal-fired power plant on the shore of Lake Michigan to remain in operation. That order has been renewed every 90 days since then. The latest order was set to expire Monday, when Wright issued his 5th renewal.
The current order expires August 16.
The May 23, 2025, order was the first of more than a dozen 90-day emergency orders U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has issued to utilities and power grid operators in four other states, forcing them to extend the life of fossil fuel plants otherwise destined for closure. Wright said their power was needed to protect against shortages.
Advocacy groups and Democratic states tied to the Midwestern electricity grid, including Michigan, are challenging Wright’s use of federal emergency powers, claiming he falsified an energy emergency to prop up the coal industry and overrule local decision-makers. They made their case Friday before a panel of judges on a federal appeals court.
Even officials in Republican states are pushing back after seeing their share of the Campbell Plant’s bill.
“We didn’t even know the plant existed,” said Chris Nelson, South Dakota Public Utilities Commission chair, who estimated his state’s customers already are on the hook for well over $1 million in Campbell costs. “Certainly, the plant is of no benefit to our customers in South Dakota. Now, all of a sudden, we are faced with paying our proportional share of those ongoing costs. Our contention is that that, just frankly, is absolutely unfair.”
Campbell runs at a loss. The remaining tab — $180 million for the first 10 months — will be spread to customers of 11 states on the grid managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO. Michiganians, including those who aren’t Consumers customers, and people as far away as eastern Montana will pay a share.
Burning coal releases particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, mercury, lead and other pollutants that harm people’s health. The J.H. Campbell plant released 62.1 pounds of mercury in 2024, as well as 26.1 pounds of lead, 75,663 pounds of ammonia and other toxic pollutants, according to the latest available U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air emissions data.
–
The J.H. Campbell plant released 6.64 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, EPA data show, as much as more than 1.4 million passenger vehicles release in a year.
That’s a driving reason Consumers Energy, the Michigan attorney general, and environmental and community advocacy groups agreed on a plan to close Campbell in 2025, 15 years before its previous retirement date. To replace the power, Consumers bought the natural gas-fired Covert Generating Station in Van Buren County and agreed to build new solar power and battery storage.
The early retirement would save Consumers Energy customers an estimated $600 million by 2040, the groups said at the time.
In his most recent renewal of the order, Wright cited Campbell’s output during a late January storm, when the plant generated more than 650 megawatts per day.
“The energy sources that perform when you need them most are inherently the most valuable — that’s why beautiful, clean coal was the MVP of recent winter storms,” Wright said in a February statement. “Hundreds of American lives have likely been saved because of President Trump’s actions, saving America’s coal plants, including this Michigan coal plant, which ran daily during Winter Storm Fern. This emergency order will mitigate the risk of blackouts and maintain affordable, reliable, and secure electricity access across the region.”
Grifting Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who ordered Campbell, and several other plants to stay open past their closure dates, repeatedly makes the suspicious claim that Winter Storm Fern was proof that the plant was needed for grid reliability.
Fortunately, the Niskanen Center, a conservative Republican, but Science literate policy center, conducted an analysis of that very question.
–
Niskanen Center
Fern’s impact was especially severe in the regions covered by the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), and the PJM Interconnection, which together serve 130 million Americans. Storm-related data show that:
Wind and solar resources performed well, while fossil-based generation faltered.
In Fern as in other recent cold snaps, fossil generation accounted for the majority of generator outages. The coal units that the Department of Energy (DOE) had ordered to continue operating past their closure dates provided minimal support.
Natural gas prices spiked during Winter Storm Fern and other recent severe cold-weather events, costing con- sumers billions of dollars.
Generator outages and derates were primary reasons that fossil-based generators underperformed. Table 2 shows each resource type’s outage rate as a percent of its installed capacity4 during each region’s period of peak demand during Winter Storm Fern. In PJM,5 gas generators were 1.8 times more likely than wind generators to experience an outage, while coal was 2.7 times more likely. In SPP,6 the outage rates for gas and coal were 28 and 13 times higher, respectively, than wind; in MISO,7 outage rates for gas and coal were 4 and 6 times higher than wind.
The data also confirm that these coal units were not needed to maintain system reliability. The output from these three MISO coal units sum to 965 MW. Data released by MISO show that it had significantly more spare capacity than that throughout the event, and therefore could have met the power demand without these plants.25 MISO only reached Energy Emergency Alert stage 2 during Winter Storm Fern, which is step 2 out of 5 on its emergency procedures. Steps 3 and 4 involve additional load management, emergency energy purchases, and deploying oper- ating reserves, so MISO had many more tools in its belt before it would have resorted to shedding load in Step 5.
