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The Trump administration’s campaign to force aging coal plants to keep running has entered a new phase: ordering broken-down units to come back online. Repairing those polluting plants could take months and cost tens of millions of dollars — all just to comply with legally questionable stay-open mandates that last only 90 days at a time.
In December, the Department of Energy ordered four coal plants — two in Indiana and one each in Colorado and Washington state — that were set to retire by year’s end to continue generating power for 90 days. Two of them have units that have been out of commission because of mechanical failure: Colorado’s Craig Generating Station Unit 1 has been down for three weeks and Indiana’s R.M. Schahfer Unit 18 has sat idle since July.
This means the utilities that own those plants must now race to bring them into working order, even though they’ve long ago deemed the facilities uneconomical to operate. Customers already grappling with skyrocketing electricity rates are likely to shoulder the costs of fixing and running the equipment. Complicating matters further is that the required repairs may not even be feasible to complete within the 90-day window covered by the DOE orders.
“Coal plants — and in particular the plants DOE has targeted — are these clunky old jalopies that, out of nowhere, just fail,” said Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney at nonprofit law firm Earthjustice, one of several environmental groups challenging the must-run orders. “DOE forcing these things to be available, and in some instances to run, actually creates reliability risk to the grid.”
The Trump administration claims that keeping the plants online is the only way to prevent blackouts in the near future. Last month’s must-run orders, as well as earlier ones forcing a Michigan coal plant and an oil- and gas-fired plant in Pennsylvania to stay open, were issued under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, which lets the DOE compel power plants to operate to forestall immediate energy emergencies.
Critics say the Trump administration has weaponized this authority to prop up the U.S. coal industry, which provided about half the country’s generation capacity in 2001 but now supplies about 15%. None of the plants that the DOE has forced to stay open is needed for near-term reliability, according to the utilities, state regulators, and regional authorities responsible for maintaining a functioning grid. And despite its claims of an energy crisis, the federal government is throwing up roadblocks to wind, solar, and battery projects that are a fast and cheap way to add electrons to the grid.
The costs of the Trump administration’s coal interventions are mounting. The Sierra Club estimates that the price tag of keeping those six power plants running under the DOE’s orders has added up to more than $158 million as of this week.
And utilities that have to repair units before starting to generate power again will face a new set of costs.
In Indiana, Schahfer’s Unit 18 has been offline since July because of a damaged turbine. Vincent Parisi, president of Northern Indiana Power Service Co., the utility that owns and operates the plant, told Indiana state regulators in December, “It can take six months or longer for us to ultimately be able to get that unit back to where it would need to be to operate for an extended period of time.” Parisi did not provide cost estimates for those repairs or for extending operations at the Schahfer plant, and a NIPSCO spokesperson declined to provide an estimate to Canary Media.
In Colorado, Craig Unit 1 has been offline since Dec. 19 because of mechanical failure, according to Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, the electric cooperative that operates and holds a partial ownership stake in the plant. “As a not-for-profit cooperative, our membership will bear the costs of compliance with this order unless we can identify a method to share costs with those in the region,” Tri-State CEO Duane Highley said in a December press release. “There is not a clear path for doing so, but we will continue to evaluate our options.”
Tri-State spokesperson Mark Stutz said the co-op and its partners don’t have firm cost estimates for repairs or for compliance with the order, “which will likely require additional investments in operations, maintenance, and potentially fuel supply.”
Consultancy Grid Strategies has estimated that keeping Craig 1 running for 90 days would cost at least $20 million, and that running it for a year could add up to $85 million to $150 million. Those costs do not include repairs of the equipment that failed and caused it to go offline.
Fixing up coal plants to comply with the DOE mandates could also put utilities in a legal bind. State attorneys general and environmental groups are already challenging many of the agency’s Section 202(c) orders, saying those orders are based on false premises and violate the law’s strictures for the agency to use its authority only to prevent immediate grid emergencies.
These arguments may soon see their day in federal court. In December, a coalition of environmental groups, including Earthjustice, filed a legal brief with the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the DOE’s use of Section 202(c) authority to force the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan to keep running. The brief asks the court to “put an end to the Department’s continued abuse of its authority, which has imposed millions of dollars in unnecessary costs and pollution on residents of Michigan and the Midwest.”
Nor does the DOE have authority to order utilities to undertake repairs or alterations to power plants under Section 202(c), Earthjustice, Sierra Club, and Indiana-based environmental and consumer advocates argued in a December letter to NIPSCO. The groups warned the utility that they plan to legally challenge any repair costs it tries to pass on to customers.
“The authority does not exist within Section 202(c) for DOE to force upgrades or major investments in energy-generating facilities. The authority only extends to operational choices,” said Greg Wannier, senior attorney for the Sierra Club. “I do think that at some point, regulated utilities do bear some responsibility for not taking illegal actions to comply with illegal orders.”
NIPSCO spokesperson Joshauna Nash told Canary Media that compliance with the DOE’s order is “mandatory.” The utility is “carefully reviewing the details of this order to assess its impact on our employees, customers, and company to ensure compliance,” Nash said. “While this development alters the timeline for decommissioning this station, our long-term plan to transition to a more sustainable energy future remains unchanged.”
The Trump administration seems set to continue using Section 202(c) authority. The DOE has issued three consecutive 90-day must-run orders for both the J.H. Campbell plant and the Eddystone plant in Pennsylvania. It has also issued a report that appears to lay the groundwork for justifying federal action to prevent any fossil-fueled plant from closing, citing data that critics say has been cherry-picked and misrepresented to paint a false picture of a power grid on the verge of collapse.
If the DOE continues to prevent fossil-fuel plants from closing, the costs could reach into the billions of dollars. Grid Strategies has estimated that forcing the continued operations of the nearly 35 gigawatts’ worth of large fossil-fueled power plants scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028 could add up to $4.8 billion over that period.
Financial concerns aside, forcing utilities to react to successive 90-day emergency orders amounts to “sticking a wrench in the spokes of how utilities and their state regulators have planned their systems,” said Brendan Pierpont, director of electricity at think tank Energy Innovation.
The utilities under DOE must-run orders have developed plans to retire workers at those plants or move them to other jobs, he said. They’ve ended long-term coal-delivery contracts and procured alternative resources to make up for the lost power from the shuttering units. Some plan to convert the facilities to run on fossil gas, as is the case with the Schahfer plant and the coal plant in Washington state. Those projects will likely be delayed if the coal units must keep running, he said.
Earthjustice’s Lenoff agreed that the DOE’s intrusion into those plans is “creating uncertainty that harms investment, raises costs, and disrupts orderly planning by experts and authorities who know what they’re doing. The Department of Energy has shown that it is just blundering into markets and processes that it doesn’t understand with flimsy arguments that don’t withstand scrutiny. And other people are bearing the costs.”
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