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The Trump administration is facing lawsuits from states and environmental groups opposing its use of emergency power to force aging coal plants to stay online. Now, add utilities to its list of challengers.
Last week, the cooperative utilities Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority filed a petition asking the Department of Energy to reconsider its December order demanding that they keep running Craig Generating Station’s Unit 1, a jointly owned coal plant in Colorado, for the next 90 days.
Tri-State and Platte River — along with co-owners Salt River Project, PacifiCorp, and Xcel Energy — have been preparing to close the plant since 2016, both to comply with Colorado’s plan to shutter all coal generation by 2030 and to replace an aging and increasingly expensive source of power. Forcing them to operate it past December will require their members to bear unnecessary costs, which constitutes an “uncompensated taking” of their property in violation of the Constitution, the petition argues.
Tri-State and Platte River operate as nonprofit co-ops, which are owned by the customers they serve, meaning that they cannot pass the cost of keeping a plant open along to a multistate regional transmission network, as for-profit utilities can. Instead, their member-customers need to absorb the entire blow.
The consultancy Grid Strategies has estimated that keeping Craig Unit 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. The utilities operating Craig Unit 1 have already had to take on the costs of repairing a valve failure that forced the plant offline in December.
It will also disrupt the use of long-planned replacement resources that can provide power more cheaply and reliably than Craig Unit 1 — including the 145-megawatt Axial Basin solar farm, which may be forced to curtail its electricity generation because of grid congestion due to keeping the coal plant online.
“We do not take this request for a rehearing lightly,” Tri-State CEO Duane Highley said in a Thursday press release. “But as not-for-profit entities, we face issues that other utilities do not, because it is our members that ultimately are going to pay for the cost of this order.”
The petition from Tri-State and Platte River marks the first time a utility has publicly contested a Trump administration must-run order, said Michael Lenoff, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit law firm that’s filed challenges and lawsuits against similar orders across the country.
“DOE should listen to utilities on the ground making sure the lights stay on, and not advance its policy to rescue the dying coal industry and force other people — in other words, ratepayers — to pay for it,” he said.
Since last year, the DOE has used its authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to require a Michigan coal plant and an oil- and gas-fired plant in Pennsylvania to stay open for three consecutive 90-day periods. In December, in addition to Craig Unit 1, it issued similar orders for two coal plants in Indiana and one in Washington state.
The DOE has justified the orders by claiming that the power grid faces an imminent, increasing threat of major blackouts. But energy experts refute the idea that such a grid crisis is around the corner, arguing that the Trump administration is relying on a false premise. The true goal, they say, is to misuse emergency authority to benefit the coal industry by forcing customers to continue to pay for power plants that can’t compete economically against much cheaper power from renewables, batteries, and fossil gas.
State attorneys general and environmental groups have filed rehearing requests with the DOE on all of these must-run orders. To date, the DOE has declined to take up those administrative challenges, opening the pathway for challengers to file lawsuits.
In December, a coalition of environmental groups filed a legal brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit challenging DOE’s first Section 202(c) order, for the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan. It asked 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.”
Indeed, the moves are pushing substantial costs on to utility customers at a time when electricity bills are already rising far faster than inflation. The Sierra Club, which is tracking the costs of keeping coal plants running under DOE emergency orders, estimates the price at just over $202 million as of Monday, up from more than $158 million as of the second week in January.
If the DOE forces the continued operations of every fossil-fueled power plant scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028, the costs could add up to $4.8 billion, according to a 2025 study by Grid Strategies. Extending the analysis to also include every power plant that is 60 years old or more could increase the cost to nearly $6 billion, the study found.
These costs come in the form of retaining workers, securing new coal supplies, and undertaking maintenance and repairs that were once deferred. And they’re not the only expenses associated with the orders: Utility customers must also pay for the resources that utilities have already secured to replace the closing coal plants.
All these costs will add up if Craig Unit 1 is forced to stay online. “We have planned for the retirement of this resource for over a decade and have proactively replaced the capacity and energy from new sources,” Jason Frisbie, general manager and CEO of Platte River, said in the press release.
In other words, as Matthew Gerhart, senior attorney at the Sierra Club, previously put it to Canary Media, the Trump administration’s actions mean that customers will “end up paying twice.”
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