Ratepayers across the midwest may be footing the $42 million bill for keeping a Michigan coal plant open past its retirement date at the direction of the Trump administration.
Over the course of 90 days last summer, the J.H. Campbell Generating Plant brought in $77.67 million in revenue, but its expenses vastly outpaced that. The high costs are at least in part because owner Consumers Energy interpreted the administration’s order as a mandate to keep the units always on — a status known as “must-run”— which added millions in fuel and labor costs. These operational losses were compounded by the fact that the plant was barred from the region’s capacity market, where it was blocked from earning the record-high “readiness” payments that normally cover a plant’s fixed monthly costs and shareholder profits.
Because last summer’s federal mandate required the plant to operate at a loss, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved a regional cost-sharing plan to split the expenses among utilities in 11 MISO states to ensure Consumers and its co-owners were compensated for the forced service. Now, Consumers is asking FERC to reimburse it for the net losses it incurred.
The initial order from the Department of Energy ordering the plant to stay open was for 90 days, but the administration has since issued four additional 90-day orders, the most recent of which came earlier this week. The plant is now mandated to stay open until May 2026, with the total costs of keeping it online projected to balloon to roughly $135 million. (The current proceeding is specific to costs from the first executive order only.) Consumers calculated their requested reimbursement by netting all operational costs — including $55.25 million in fuel and $52.15 million in depreciation and rate-base returns — against its market earnings.
Intervenors in the proceeding largely agree the Trump administration is increasing costs for ratepayers by forcing the plant to stay online, with little benefit to the grid.
But many stakeholders, including state PUCs, are skeptical of Consumers’ accounting. J.H. Campbell’s planned May 2025 retirement date stems from a 2022 agreement between Consumers Energy and state regulators to end coal use by the end of last year. That settlement already provided Consumers a path to recover the plant’s unrecovered book value through a regulatory asset paid by Michigan customers, putting them on the hook for fixed costs. In seeking to spread the costs far beyond its own customers, those stakeholders argue, Consumers is effectively attempting to offload pre-existing local financial liabilities onto regional neighbors.
Because the DOE order didn’t designate the plant as a capacity resource, they added, and therefore the only costs eligible for recovery are energy costs associated specifically with the order. Consumers’ existing ratepayers should remain responsible for fixed costs like depreciation and property taxes and insurance.
The same group of regional stakeholders argued that other load-serving load-serving entities in the region shouldn’t be billed for the plant’s costs because they weren’t party to that settlement — and didn’t benefit from its power in the first place.
Setting a precedent
The Trump administration’s order, issued under the 1935 Federal Power Act, came just eight days before J.H. Campbell was scheduled to retire.
In a press release last May, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said parts of the Michigan region were facing an energy emergency because of the Biden administration’s “dangerous energy subtraction policies.” The order notably didn’t specify who should cover the cost of keeping the coal plant running. Critics of the move told Canary Media at the time that the administration had “manufactured” an emergency, and argued it would ultimately increase costs for consumers. The plant suffered a partial failure in June 2025 when Units 1 and 2 both went offline, just a few weeks into the first 90 day “stay-open” order.
MISO’s 2025-2026 capacity auction cleared with a summer reserve margin of just over 10%, higher than the 7.9% the region requires for grid reliability. The price to secure that capacity, however, was steep, jumping more than 20 times to a record $666.50 per megawatt-day, thanks in part to the tightening supply of available power plants in light of load growth from both new manufacturing and data centers in the state.
J.H. Campbell is far from an isolated case. The Trump administration has since issued emergency orders to keep several additional coal plants running past their planned retirement dates, including in Colorado, Indiana, and Washington. But while the order to remain open is a federal one, the cost-sharing debate is a separate legal battle, playing out plant by plant.
And Michigan’s current case has already established a precedent. After seeing the J.H. Campbell ruling, the owners of the Schahfer plant in Indiana also filed to recover their costs from the entire MISO region; they estimated that keeping that plant’s units running for just 90 days past the planned December 31 retirement date has cost an additional $21 million. The status of that request is currently pending before FERC.
Lawsuits targeting the coal retirement delay orders have been filed around the country by states and environmental advocates, arguing DOE was creating “sham” grid emergencies to prop up uneconomic plants. The J.H Campbell plant is at the center of several lawsuits being litigated in federal court, including one filed by a coalition of attorneys general currently pending before an appellate court in D.C., which argues that DOE is illegally using its “emergency” authority to seize control of the region’s generation mix and override state-approved retirement plans.
