Trump Administration Illegally Extends Michigan Coal Plant a Third Time, Despite Staggering Financial Losses and Breakdowns

(WASHINGTON – Nov 19, 2025) The Trump administration issued another illegal emergency order forcing the J.H. Campbell power plant in Michigan to operate for an additional 90 days past its original planned retirement date, until February 17, 2026, bringing the total extension to 270 days from when the plant was supposed to shut down. This is the third order issued for the Campbell plant – the Department of Energy first ordered it to remain online past its planned retirement in May and extended it again on August 20.

Consumers Energy committed to retire the plant in 2022 under a settlement approved by Michigan state regulators, finding that replacing the plant with a variety of cleaner resources – including wind, solar, and storage – would reduce costs for Michigan customers. DOE’s series of emergency orders ignore those decisions and are now putting consumers across the Midwest on the hook to keep this aging, expensive, and highly-polluting plant online. According to financial filings from Consumers Energy, the emergency orders have caused the coal plant to rack up over $80 million in losses as of September 30 – over $600,000 a day – which are continuing to accumulate. Those costs will be recovered from millions of families and businesses in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

“Mandating aging, unreliable and costly coal plants to stay open past their retirement is a guaranteed way to needlessly hike up Americans’ electricity bills and make air pollution worse,” said Ted Kelly, Director and Lead Counsel for U.S. Clean Energy at Environmental Defense Fund. “The barely working Campbell plant, which has burned through over $600,000 in losses every day under DOE’s unlawful orders, proves that this is a failed strategy for our country’s growing electricity needs.

“These half-a-century old plants are simply too expensive to operate, too dangerous for our health and break down too often to be counted on. To keep costs down, we should be unleashing – not blocking – the cheapest, fastest and cleanest sources of electricity onto our grid, including solar, wind and battery projects. 

“EDF and allies will continue to fight these illegal and completely unnecessary emergency orders in court.”

Despite claims from the Trump administration that coal is “reliable,” data from North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) shows that coal experiences the most outages from equipment failures of any power source in the U.S. 

Case in point: In June, the Campbell plant partially broke down when DOE claimed it was important for maintaining reliability. Only one unit was even producing power because another unit had been broken for weeks and the third abruptly shut off.

The regional grid operator (MISO) had a surplus of resources greater than ten times the power provided by Campbell because the grid operator and utility were prepared for its retirement. Moreover, NERC’s latest annual winter reliability assessment, also released yesterday, concluded that MISO has sufficient resources to meet electricity needs even in situations with extreme levels of demand and generator outages. 

Attorneys General from Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois have challenged the previous orders. A coalition of public interest groups, including Environmental Defense Fund, is also challenging the previous DOE mandates in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.