Appeals Court Rejects DOE Emergency Orders Keeping Michigan's J.H. Campbell Coal Plant Running

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Department of Energy overstepped its authority when it used emergency orders to keep the J.H. Campbell coal-fired plant in Michigan operating past its planned retirement. The court's own language was narrower than the coverage suggests: it held that "those indeterminate assertions of summer electricity shortfalls are not what Congress meant by 'emergency' in section 202(c)" and that the situation "does not warrant an emergency federal response". Characterizations of the administration having "manufactured" an emergency are the press framing the ruling, not the panel's words.

The mechanism at issue is Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, a narrow provision letting the Energy Secretary order generation to keep running during a genuine grid emergency. DOE had issued a string of 90-day orders under it since 2025, renewing them as each expired. The plant itself is a 1,420 MW, three-unit station that entered service in 1962 and is owned by Consumers Energy, the utility subsidiary of CMS. The sources do not state a specific retirement date, only that decommissioning was planned.

The practical stakes go well beyond one plant. Repeated 202(c) orders have become the administration's instrument for deferring coal retirements, and the cost of keeping an uneconomic unit online is ultimately recovered from ratepayers across the regional market. A ruling that the statutory emergency bar is higher than DOE has been treating it removes that instrument, or at least raises its evidentiary price, for every other unit currently held open the same way. Watch for whether DOE seeks rehearing or Supreme Court review, and whether utilities with deferred coal retirements restart their decommissioning timetables.