Cost of Trump Administration’s Mandates to Keep Michigan Coal Plant Open Balloons to $80 Million

(WASHINGTON – Oct. 31, 2025) In new financial filings, Consumers Energy reported a net loss of $80 million through Sept. 30 by keeping the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan running past its planned retirement in May after the Trump administration ordered it to stay open. Consumers Energy will seek to recover the cost – which is continuing to accumulate – from families and businesses in Michigan and 10 neighboring states.

The Department of Energy (DOE) first issued an emergency order in May to keep the plant running for 90 days past its retirement, then re-issued another 90-day emergency order at the end of August. A coalition of public interest groups, including Environmental Defense Fund, has challenged both mandates.

“The Trump administration is running up people’s electricity bills for an old, polluting coal plant that barely works,” said Ted Kelly, Director and Lead Counsel for U.S. Clean Energy at EDF.  “What’s outrageous is that after the Department of Energy called the coal plant essential for reliable power this summer, it ended up breaking down. The grid had more than enough electricity needed to deliver reliable power to homes without this unnecessary, costly mandate. So why continue to keep it open?”

In June, when the DOE claimed that electricity from J.H. Campbell was needed, there was a surplus of available resources more than ten times the amount of power being provided by Campbell, according to data from the regional transmission organization that controls the Midwest grid, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO. When demand peaked on June 23, only one Campbell unit was even producing power, as another unit had been broken for weeks and the third abruptly shut off when it was supposedly “critical” to maintaining reliability.

The financial losses will be passed onto families and businesses in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

“These old fossil plants are scheduled to retire for a reason – they’re expensive, dangerous to our health and prone to equipment failures,” Kelly said.“Families and businesses shouldn’t have to pay out of their pockets to keep them on life support when more reliable, cheaper and cleaner energy options exist.”

An independent report from Grid Strategies found that if the Trump administration continues these mandates to keep aging coal power plants online, it could cost U.S. electricity consumers as much as $6 billion per year.