Emergency DOE Order To Keep Michigan Coal Plant Open Has Cost $80 Million Since May - Customers Across MISO Will Pay

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The Trump administration’s emergency order to keep the huge J.H. Campbell coal plant on Lake Michigan operating past its planned retirement date has cost at least $80 million since May, its operator, Consumers Energy, told regulators and investors this week.

The company said in its third-quarter earnings report Thursday that it would pursue the process laid out in the U.S. Department of Energy’s order for collecting those costs: It will seek payment from ratepayers across the Midwest. Even though the peak summer electricity demand season has passed, executives at Consumers, Michigan’s largest energy provider, said that they see no sign of let-up in the emergency orders. “We expect those to continue for the long-term,” said CEO Garrick Rochow in a conference call for investors. “And we’re prepared to continue to operate the plant and comply with those orders.”

He said the costs—$615,385 per day—should be shared beyond the 1.9 million electricity customers of Consumers Energy. The company plans to propose the tab be split among ratepayers (an estimated 42 million to 45 million electricity customers) in the nine states served by the regional electric grid operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). “The benefits go to MISO,” Rochow said. “Not just to our customers, they go to MISO.”

Rochow said the Trump administration envisioned this approach. “That order from the Department of Energy has laid out a clear path to cost recovery,” he said. Consumers Energy will have to apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in order to pass the costs to the ratepayers, and states that oppose such a cost allocation could move to intervene in those proceedings. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued two consecutive 90-day orders—on May 23 and on Aug. 20—to keep the Campbell plant open under the emergency provisions of the Federal Power Act. In the past, such orders have been used to ensure energy delivery at times of natural disasters. But Wright used the act to execute Trump’s agenda to ramp up energy production, saying Campbell needed to stay open to minimize the risk of power outages and address critical grid security issues in the Midwest.

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But critics say the operation of the 63-year-old plant is generating unnecessary costs as well as pollution. In a September regulatory filing challenging the DOE’s order, a coalition of environmental groups pointed out that even on the day of highest peak demand this summer, MISO had an unused surplus of resources greater than 10 times the power provided by the Campbell plant. And indeed, according to recent Environmental Protection Agency data, two of the three units at the Campbell plant were not operating at all for about 30 days of the 131 days from the start of the DOE order through Sept. 30. The third unit at the plant only ran for 18 days. Such stoppages could occur for maintenance or simply because the grid operator did not call on the plant to deliver energy to the grid.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102025/michigan-campbell-coal-plant-operation-has-cost-80-million/

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