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The U.S. Department of Energy overstepped when it ordered an aging coal-fired power plant in Michigan to stay open past its planned retirement date last year, a federal court ruled in mid-September.
The 1,420-megawatt J.H Campbell plant is one of seven fossil fuel plants around the country that the Trump administration has forced to stay in operation, despite the pollution they cause and the enormous costs of keeping them online. Just before it was about to close last May, Trump’s Energy Department invoked short-term emergency powers under the Federal Power Act to keep the 64-year-old plant running, arguing that the threat of outages, along with the need for more energy to power data centres, constituted an emergency.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected that argument, with Appeals Court Judge Cornelia Pillard writing that the emergency statute “is essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop.”
When he declared a “national energy emergency” on his first day in office in 2025, Donald Trump instructed federal agencies to use whatever emergency powers they had to increase energy production—specifically for fossil fuels. This ruling represents one of the first successful legal challenges to how the administration has used its “energy emergency” powers.
It doesn’t overturn the idea that there is an energy emergency, said Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the groups involved in the lawsuit. But it does limit its practical implications.
“You can say there’s an ‘energy emergency’ as much as you want—even if you’re the president,” Kelly said. “But what you can actually do depends on what the real facts on the ground are and what the law actually lets you do in different situations.”
Of all the coal plants the Trump administration has forced to stay open, the Michigan plant has emitted the most pollution, according to Kelly. Over that time, it had emitted 1,000 tons of nitrogen oxides, 2,000 tons of sulphur dioxide, and 140 tons of particulate matter as of the end of June. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that mix of pollutants could contribute to about 100 new cases of asthma for the 3,000 people that live near the plant in West Olive, Michigan. Its continued operation since May last year has cost $259 million, which the utility, Consumers Energy Company, is seeking to recover from its customers in Michigan and 10 other states.
The court order doesn’t mean the plant has to shut down immediately. Kelly hopes the Trump administration voluntarily backs down, or if that doesn’t happen, that the court could force a shutdown. But the administration could challenge the ruling, delaying action by asking for a re-hearing or for a review by the Supreme Court, said Gavin McCabe, senior litigating counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council, another environmental group involved in the lawsuit.
Either way, the D.C. Circuit Court’s ruling sets a precedent that there has to be a true emergency to keep these plants open. Several lawsuits against the other fossil fuel plants have been on hold as courts waited to see how the federal court ruled on the case, and the legal arguments there are pretty similar, Kelly said.
It’s hard to square the idea of an “energy emergency” with the Trump administration’s actions against renewable energy: By mid-August, the administration had committed about $4 billion in payouts to companies to stop offshore wind projects that could have, together, powered more than 15 million homes.
“Why would the administration be blocking sources of energy that are ready to come online in favour of keeping online something that has been set to be retired?” McCabe said. “I mean, there appears to be a pretext that the president wants to help coal industry supporters. And this is one of the ways to attempt to do that.”
