The Trump administration has followed through on a threat to use emergency wartime powers to force expensive and polluting coal-fired power plants to stay open — even if the utilities that own them, the states in which they operate, and the grid operators responsible for maintaining reliability all agree it’s safe to shut them down.
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy issued an order demanding that the J.H. Campbell plant, a 1,560-megawatt coal-burning power plant owned by Michigan utility Consumers Energy, must abandon its plans to shut down on May 31 and instead continue operating through at least late August.
The order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive and a vocal denier of the climate change crisis, states that “an emergency exists in portions of the Midwest region of the United States due to a shortage of electric energy.” It cites this rationale to invoke the DOE’s emergency authority under the 1935 Federal Power Act to unilaterally order any power plant in the country to keep running.
“This administration will not sit back and allow dangerous energy subtraction policies threaten the resiliency of our grid and raise electricity prices on American families,” Wright said in a Friday press release. President Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders in April aimed at “bringing back” the U.S.coal industry, including an order authorizing the DOE to cite grid reliability as justification for keeping coal plants open.
“A manufactured emergency”
Environmental and consumer watchdogs decried Friday’s announcement as an unlawful abuse of power that serves the administration’s pro-coal agenda. They warned that keeping this coal plant open will worsen pollution, harm nearby communities, and increase costs for utility customers.
“Donald Trump invoking the Federal Power Act is an illegal abuse of his presidential authority. Coal is expensive, outdated, and deadly,” Greg Wannier, senior attorney with the Sierra Club Environmental Law Program, said in a Friday statement. “[A]ll of the relevant parties, including MISO, the grid operator ultimately responsible for keeping the lights on in Michigan, concluded years ago that J.H. Campbell could retire without causing any grid reliability problems.”
All regions of the North American electric grid are expected to have sufficient resources under normal operating and weather conditions this summer, but some may face supply shortfall risks during periods of extreme heat, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said Wednesday in its annual 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment.
Peak demand across NERC’s 23 assessment areas is forecast to increase by 10 GW since summer 2024, “more than double the increase from 2023 to 2024,” NERC said in a news release.
The addition of solar, wind and battery resources, frequently referred to as inverter-based resources, or IBRs, is also creating risks, the assessment states, as they have been known to trip offline during grid disturbances. NERC plans to issue an alert in the next month regarding modeling deficiencies and technical requirements to integrate more IBRs into bulk power system, officials said.
Across its footprint, NERC has seen more than 7 GW of generator retirements since last year, said Mark Olson, manager of reliability assessments.
“These generator retirements are reducing the reserve capacity in some areas, they reduce some of the flexible generation that’s available for managing solar and wind variability. So that’s increasing the risk profile somewhat,” Olson said in the discussion.
New resource additions, particularly solar, are “generally effective in summer,” Olson said, but “we’re going to see differences when we get to the winter assessment.”
Those variable resources are also making the summer grid more complicated to manage, however, and they introduce risk through the use of more IBRs that can be unstable during grid disturbances. Olson called IBRs a “key risk that is escalating.”
NERC and the electric power industry “are engaged in a comprehensive and long-term strategy to address IBR issues with new standards, requirements and guidelines for modeling and planning,” Olson said. “With more and more inverters on the system … we’re advising operators to be prepared for the potential for disconnects during grid disturbances, and to operate conservatively.”
Germany, France, Japan all found out that knee jerk shutting down important sources of energy create deleterious ‘emerging problems’.
And ‘bad actor frenemies’ are quick to take advantage.
“Fear of Nuclear” has HARMED those countries in the long term.
Sometimes true LEADERSHIP means doing things that are unpopular.
Career politicians (the L&Ss) usually don’t exhibit such fortitude.
NOW, the EU (and UK) and Japan are all struggling to access sufficient energy to meet their needs, in the face of Russia-Ukraine and China-US geopolitics.
The Scandinavians are also wishing their neighbors had been more astute in planning for future energy needs.
Will the US ‘learn from the EU, UK, Japan mistakes’?
Stay tuned. We’re gonna find out.
You are misinformed about nuclear power in those 3 countries.
Germany shutdown their nuclear power because of Chernobyl and Fukushima disaster that all most destroyed the economies of Russia and Japan. The German people demanded the shutdown.
France did not abandon nuclear power. France improved the safety of their nuclear plants by upgrading them due to Fukushima lessons learned. France shutdown about 25% of their reactors to repair faults found in the reactors after the Fukushima inspections and repairs.
Japan was sloppy in the regulation and operation of their nuclear power plants. They built reactor in tsunami zones improperly and on seismic faults improperly. Japan shutdown all their nuclear plants after Fukushima to reevaluate their safety. Japan permanently shutdown all reactors built on seismic faults. Japan made major changes to all the other nuclear plants to better handle long term station blackout conditions. Japan has restarted some of these reactors.
They are not struggling. EU and UK are working together to manage the problems. Japan is building lots of renewable resources while restarting some nuclear plants.
