Donald Trump’s administration loves declaring arbitrary emergencies to justify pretty much every part of its agenda, from immigration and tariffs to energy policy. On Friday, a panel of three federal judges ruled that he can’t just do that with coal.
The state of Michigan has planned to decommission the coal-fired J.H. Campbell Power Plant for years to reduce its carbon footprint. But in 2025, the Department of Energy (DOE) issued the first in what became a series of six 90-day “emergency” orders to keep the plant open. The purported emergency? Michigan could run out of electricity if the coal didn’t keep flowing! (The administration has pulled this trick to keep coal plants open in multiple states, including one in Washington that was reportedly barely even operating.)
The orders cite section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, which allows the DOE to order plants to stay open during war or when an “emergency exists by reason of a sudden increase in the demand for electric energy, or a shortage of electric energy.” As Ars Technica noted, shutting down the plant wouldn’t have resulted in any disruption at all—the state’s multi-year planning process, which involved collaboration with major energy grids, took care of that.
Environmentalists sued, and in their ruling on Friday, the D.C. Circuit’s Court of Appeals rebuffed two pieces of evidence provided by the government, a report on the Midwestern power grid’s reserves and a slide deck showing that peak electrical demand on that grid comes close to supply in the summer. The report explicitly stated the grid has “adequate anticipated resources” for “peak load conditions,” while they found the slide deck was only evidence that summer occurs.
“Those indeterminate assertions of summer electricity shortfalls are not what Congress meant by ’emergency’ in section 202(c),” the judges wrote. “… The mere possibility of an electricity supply shortfall—with no specifics about its potential severity, timing, location, or likelihood—does not warrant an emergency federal response.”
The judges also found that the DOE had failed to explain why or how keeping J.H. Campbell open would avert that emergency. The order actually made maintaining the grid more difficult, they wrote, because it “interferes with ordinary methods to assess a region’s true generation capacity and distorts price signals that otherwise prompt appropriate capacity investments.”
In fact, according to Bridge Michigan, Trump’s efforts to keep J.H. Campbell open have cost $259 million, when the original plan to close it and switch to natural gas would have saved $600 million. That’s because coal has been growing increasingly uncompetitive and expensive as an electrical fuel source for decades. The unnecessary cost is part of the point, though, because the White House wants it all flowing into the wallets of their buddies in the coal industry.
While this case only applies to the Michigan plant, Ars Technica noted the administration issued 55 such orders so far this year, and this ruling doesn’t bode particularly well for them.
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