Court Vacates Campbell Order as the Plant Keeps Running

A D.C. Circuit panel on September 11 vacated the Energy Department’s first order keeping Michigan’s J.H. Campbell coal plant open past retirement. The plant is still running.

Judge Cornelia Pillard, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, said the Federal Power Act’s emergency tool is a last-resort backstop, not a way to reverse a shutdown the state already planned. Hours later, Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed a new 90-day order for a coal unit in Centralia, Washington.

The Plant Is Still Running Under a Later Order

Friday’s opinion did not send workers home from West Olive; it wiped out the May 23, 2025, directive, the first of six 90-day emergency orders Wright has stacked on the plant, while a later order that runs through November 14, 2026 is still on the books. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, which argued the case with Illinois, Minnesota, and a coalition of environmental groups, said the court vacated the first DOE order and called that order an unlawful use of Section 202(c). The clerk withheld issuance of the mandate, so the vacatur does not, by itself, switch the units off.

Consumers Energy, which owns and runs the three-unit station on Lake Michigan, had planned to retire the J.H. Campbell Complex on May 31, 2025. The company says the station generates up to 1,450 megawatts, enough to serve a million people, and has been running since 1962, which makes the oldest unit 64 years old. Spokesman Brian Wheeler said the utility is reviewing the ruling and will keep the plant operating under the order that extends through mid-November.

That gap between a vacated first order and a live sixth order is the whole fight now. Nessel said her office has filed six rehearing requests at the department and five petitions in the D.C. Circuit, and that Friday was the first decision on those challenges. The sixth order, issued August 14 and effective August 17, still directs the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, the Midwest grid operator, to keep Campbell available.

THE CAMPBELL ORDER CLOCK

1. January 20, 2025: President Donald Trump declares a national energy emergency, citing demand from artificial intelligence and data centers.
2. May 23, 2025: Wright issues the first Section 202(c) order, days before the approved retirement.
3. May 31, 2025: The date Consumers Energy was supposed to take the plant off the system.
4. May 15, 2026: The D.C. Circuit hears argument before Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, Judge Pillard, and Judge Robert Wilkins.
5. August 14, 2026: DOE issues the sixth 90-day order, in force August 17 through November 14, 2026.
6. September 11, 2026: The panel grants the petitions and vacates the first order; Wright announces a new Centralia directive the same day.

Congress capped each of those directives at 90 days in a 2015 amendment, and it did not cap how many times the secretary may renew them. Campbell has now been held open through a chain of those windows for more than a year past the date Michigan regulators already signed off on.

Judge Pillard Limited Emergency Power to Last-Resort Cases

The holding is broader than one Michigan generator. Pillard wrote that Section 202(c) is “essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop,” and that the department may use it only when it finds a risk of substantial harm from a short supply that “calls for immediate action by DOE in particular, as opposed to by the states.” Reversing Campbell’s “long and carefully planned retirement,” she wrote, is “disruptive.”

Our reading of the text, structure, and history leaves us unpersuaded by DOE’s sweeping conception of its ‘emergency’ authority.

Cornelia Pillard, Circuit Judge, opinion in Michigan v. Department of Energy

The panel said the facts DOE put in the challenged order did not meet that test, granted the petitions for review, and vacated the order. Earthjustice, which argued for the Sierra Club and Urban Core Collective, said the opinion also warns that the department’s reading of “emergency” would invite frequent federal interventions the statute does not support. Other petitions over similar directives, including plants in Indiana, Colorado, and Washington, are already in the same court.

The department’s defense is reliability, not a preference for coal in the abstract. Spokeswoman Emily Matthews said the emergency orders, including at Campbell, “prevented blackouts and likely saved hundreds of lives during peak capacity events this past year,” especially during severe winter storms in late January and early February. She said coal generation in the affected regions rose 25 percent from the prior year, and that Campbell provided over 650 megawatts every day from January 21 to February 1, a daily output figure, not the plant’s full 1,450-megawatt rating. DOE has also pointed to Winter Storm Fern as a period when the kept-open coal units ran hard.

Nessel called the first order a tactic “that nobody asked to keep,” and said the court “threw out DOE’s order that had zero basis in reality.” Ted Kelly, U.S. clean energy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the ruling rejected a nationwide push to force aging coal plants “that are bleeding money and polluting communities to stay online.” Sanjay Narayan, a lawyer for the Sierra Club, said families have been “paying to keep this old, expensive and dirty power plant online,” and that the groups will keep fighting the other extensions.

Midwest Ratepayers Already Face a $259 Million Net Bill

Consumers Energy’s filings put the net financial impact of complying with the emergency orders at $259 million from the first effective date through June 30, 2026, after applying $239 million in revenue from selling the plant’s power into the MISO market. That net figure is the company’s own math, not a regulator’s final bill, and FERC has not finished the recovery case.

Nessel said the approved retirement, and the cheaper resources meant to replace the plant, were expected to save Michigan customers nearly $600 million. The forced run has turned that plan inside out: the utility is now asking to spread the extra cost across MISO’s north and central regions instead of parking it only on Michigan bills.

The Bill Is Aimed at 11 States

The Environmental Defense Fund, reading those filings, said Consumers is seeking recovery from customers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. CMS Energy Chief Financial Officer Rejji Hayes has said the plant is being run “for the benefit of the region,” and that the company is trying to hold Michigan customers harmless by socializing the cost. Large users and state advocates have fought that split, arguing people who did not cause the order should not pay for it.

CAMPBELL COST THROUGH JUNE 30

• Net impact: $259 million after $239 million in MISO market revenue, per Consumers Energy filings.
• Planned savings lost: nearly $600 million that the approved retirement was expected to save Michigan customers.
• Who is asked to pay: electric customers across 11 states in MISO’s north and central regions.
• Fleet-wide tally: IEEFA found at least $300 million extra through mid-May 2026 across the keep-open plants, a broader and earlier total than Campbell’s later net figure.

Those two dollar figures are not the same pile of money. The $259 million is Campbell’s net through June 30. The $300 million is IEEFA’s count for the whole forced-open fleet through mid-May, and the group said the tab was still rising by more than $30 million a month.

FERC Has Not Signed Off on Recovery

Section 202(c) says owners are entitled to just and reasonable compensation for carrying out an emergency order. Consumers filed a complaint at FERC in June 2025 because the MISO tariff had no clean way to collect. FERC granted that complaint in August 2025 and told MISO to revise the tariff; a later compliance filing was rejected in March 2026, and a revised filing was still pending in the company’s midyear report. Until that docket closes, the $259 million is a cost on Consumers’ books, not a line already printed on every Midwest bill.

Nessel has argued that if the underlying DOE orders are unlawful, recovery from MISO customers is unlawful too. That second fight will outlast Friday’s opinion, because the sixth Campbell order is still in force and the company has said it will seek recovery for the later windows on the same theory as the first.

Which Other Plants the Emergency Orders Still Cover

Campbell was the first keep-open case to get an appellate ruling, not the only plant Wright has pinned to a 90-day cycle. DOE’s public 2026 section 202(c) orders still list coal units that had been headed for retirement in Michigan, Washington, Indiana, Colorado, and Florida, plus oil-and-gas turbines at Eddystone in Pennsylvania. The department says more than 17 gigawatts of coal generation were saved from going offline in 2025, a policy total that includes plants beyond this docket.

COAL PLANTS STILL UNDER 202(C) ORDERS

Constellation’s Eddystone Units 3 and 4 in Pennsylvania, which burn natural gas or oil, are also under a 202(c) availability order. Florida’s Stanton order cited grid strain and expected demand from data centers. The Indiana windows run through September 19, 2026. Each of those directives uses the same statute Pillard just read as a last-resort tool, which is why Friday’s reasoning travels even though the judgment names Campbell.

By Spring, Several Forced-Open Units Had Barely Run

Keeping a plant “available” is not the same as burning coal. IEEFA energy data analyst Seth Feaster found that by June, the orders had done little for miners and a lot for maintenance budgets, because several units sat idle while still booking staff, taxes, fuel storage, and legal costs. J.H. Campbell accounted for 93 percent of the 3.03 million tons of coal used under the orders from June 2025 through March 2026, and that pile was 0.86 percent of the 350 million tons U.S. plants burned in the same stretch. U.S. coal use in January 2026 fell by more than 6 million tons from a year earlier, twice the tonnage burned under all of the emergency orders combined.

WHAT THE FORCED-OPEN UNITS DID LAST WINTER

• Centralia: TransAlta booked $19.9 million in fixed costs for the first 90-day order, about $6.2 million a month, and the plant appeared not to have run since December; the owner put running cost at $83.44 a megawatt-hour, later $113.49, against a $27.60 Northwest wholesale average in the first quarter.
• Culley Unit 2: CenterPoint told DOE the 1966 unit was fully available only 5 of the first 48 days and was not asked to run on those days, and that repairs to avoid “catastrophic mechanical failure” would cost $16.5 million to $20.5 million.
• Schahfer Unit 18: The unit had not run since early July 2025, months before the December 23, 2025, order, and still had not run through March 31, 2026.
• Craig Unit 1: The last full run was December 16, the stay-open order came December 30, and the unit had not run again through March 31; co-owners said members would pay more than $1 million a month for a resource they did not need.

Those operating snapshots stop in the spring, before later renewals. They still show the bind Friday’s test creates. If the statute requires an immediate, last-resort shortage that only DOE can fix, a fleet that is expensive to hold and often not dispatched is a hard fact pattern to bring back to the same court.

Wright Signed Another 90-Day Order Hours Later

The department did not pause the program. On September 11, Wright issued an emergency order to keep Centralia Unit 2 available from September 13 through December 11, 2026, after the unit had been scheduled to shut at the end of 2025. “America needs more reliable power, not less, and today’s order will help ensure reliable electricity generation remains available to help address periods of peak demand,” Wright said. He said similar actions “have prevented blackouts and likely saved lives,” and pointed to DOE’s Resource Adequacy Report as the basis for treating retirements as a reliability risk in the Northwest.

That is the same statutory hook the D.C. Circuit just narrowed. The Centralia paper, like Campbell’s sixth order, still has to live inside a 90-day box and inside Pillard’s last-resort reading if it is challenged in the same court. Nessel said the administration “does not get to invent fake emergencies to bypass the rule of law,” and that her office will keep fighting the extensions to protect ratepayers. Matthews said the department “will continue to protect and defend energy security for all Americans.”

Consumers Energy is still running Campbell under the order that lasts through November 14, 2026. The first directive is vacated. The plant, and the rest of the 90-day fleet, have not gone dark.