The Trump administration’s arbitrary and corrupt “emergency” orders to keep obsolete, polluting coal plants burning is, like the hideous “Ball Room” monstrosity, yet another example of the rampant corruption siphoning money directly from ratepayer and taxpayer pockets to the accounts of banksters, gangsters and the big donor Epstein class.
Finally, a Court has said Hell No.
A federal appeals court on Friday struck down an order from the Trump administration that forced a coal plant in Michigan to stay open past its scheduled retirement date — dealing a blow to President Trump’s efforts to promote the coal industry.
For more than a year, the Energy Department has ordered the J.H. Campbell coal plant in West Olive, Michigan, to keep running despite its plans to close in May 2025, citing an “energy emergency.”
On Friday, a three-judge panel at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the administration overstepped in its use of emergency powers.
The Michigan plant is one of several coal plants that the Energy Department has forced to stay open using emergency orders under a provision of the Federal Power Act. The provision had been used by previous administrations for only a few days at a time during extreme weather events.
The Trump administration has repeatedly renewed its orders governing the plant every 90 days. The state of Michigan sued, joined by Illinois, Minnesota and a coalition of environmental groups.
In the ruling, Judge Cornelia Pillard emphasized that it’s up to states to decide how to manage power generation, and that the federal government should only intervene when states and grid operators are unable or unwilling to respond.
“The court rejected the Department of Energy’s use of emergency authority, and agreed with our interpretation that emergency authority is to be used for actual emergencies, not picking preferred resources or addressing issues that Congress and the law have entrusted states to deal with,” said Michael Lenoff, lead attorney for Earthjustice, one of the environmental nonprofits that joined the suit.
The Energy Department did not say if it would appeal the ruling. In a statement, spokesman Ben Dietderich said the emergency orders had helped prevented blackouts during a recent winter storm. “Rest assured, the Department of Energy will continue to protect and defend energy security for all Americans,” he said.
The federal government has, until now, issued stopgap generation orders in response only to transitory emergencies caused by war, extreme weather events, market manipulation, or unplanned, short-term unavailability of specific generation units,” the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit said in its ruling.
“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,” the court added, noting that the Michigan Public Service Commission and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator had approved the plant’s retirement after extensive reviews.
The suit was brought by Earthjustice, which represented the Sierra Club and Urban Core Collective. Also, the Michigan attorney general argued the case for Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota. Other petitioners included the Natural Resources Defense Council, Michigan Environmental Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Environmental Law and Policy Center, Vote Solar, the Ecology Center and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The court found that the DOE lacked the authority under the Federal Power Act’s section 202(c) to order Consumers Energy to run its majority-owned, 1,420-MW J.H. Campbell power plant past its May 31, 2025, retirement date.
Under section 202(c), an “emergency” means a grid reliability risk that calls for immediate action by DOE — a condition that wasn’t met in the case of the Campbell power plant, the court said.
The court said it was unpersuaded by DOE’s “sweeping conception” of its emergency authority under the FPA’s 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,” the court said.
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The justification for the “emergency” order, according to Energy Secretary, fracking millionaire and noted grifter, Chris Wright, is that coal plants are supposedly more reliable, and necessary for times of extreme weather or critical need.
The conservative Niskanen Center actually did an analysis of how various resources performed in Winter Storm Fern, in January of this year.
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.
