The Trump administration asserted “unprecedented” authority when it ordered a Michigan coal plant to stay open because of an alleged electricity shortage, a lawyer for the state argued before a federal court on Friday.
Michigan and other states, joined by environmental groups, are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which hears cases involving federal agencies, to declare the Energy Department’s emergency order to be unlawful.
The case revolves around the J.H. Campbell coal-burning power plant in West Olive, Mich., which opened in 1962 and had been scheduled to shut down permanently on May 31, 2025, as part of a broader nationwide shift away from coal to cheaper and cleaner natural gas and renewable energy.
But just a week before the shutdown, Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered the plant to remain open, asserting that there was an electricity shortage in the Midwest and action was needed to avert summertime outages. The order has been renewed several times since then, and similar orders have been issued to four other coal plants around the country.
Lucas Wollenzien, assistant attorney general for Michigan, appeared on behalf of his state, Illinois and Minnesota. He said the department had failed to present evidence of an actual emergency and that allowing the order to stand would leave “all resource-planning decisions subject to unilateral override by the secretary.”
The case was heard by a three-judge panel, and much of their questioning turned on the matter of what constituted an emergency. Among other things, the judges asked: If actions are needed to avert future risk, is that automatically an emergency? They mentioned climate change as a possible analogy.
The Justice Department said the government was well within its rights under federal law and was acting in response to a surge in demand from data centers and the specter of power cuts.
“The secretary of energy is not required to wait for a blackout to happen” before invoking a law that lets it intervene in the operation of the nation’s electric system during an emergency, said Robert N. Stander, deputy assistant attorney general.
Once the shutdown was complete, the plant could not be brought back online in times of peak demand, he added.
The cost of keeping coal plants open around the country on the government’s orders has reached hundreds of millions of dollars. Michigan’s petition said households and businesses would face higher electricity bills because of the order there, as well as increased air pollution.
The Campbell plant order could be understood only “as part of a long-term and multipart strategy to preserve coal and other fossil fuel generation under the guise of grid-reliability concerns,” the attorney general’s petition said.
Burning coal creates hazardous emissions, including fine particles that when inhaled raise the risk of heart attacks, asthma, cancer and other conditions. Coal also emits about twice as much planet-warming carbon dioxide as natural gas when burned for energy, and coal plants are the single largest source nationwide of emissions of mercury, a particularly potent neurotoxin.
From June to December 2025, the J.H. Campbell plant emitted 36 pounds of mercury, which can impair brain development, according to a recent New York Times analysis of federal data. Last year, mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants across the country rose by 9 percent, ending years of declines.
The plant’s retirement had been planned as part of a 2022 settlement with the state attorney general’s office and other parties before the Michigan Public Service Commission.
Benjamin Chagnon of Earthjustice argued on behalf of environmental groups at Friday’s hearing. The groups said the case was the first of many legal challenges to the Energy Department’s emergency orders to be considered by a federal court of appeals.
Mr. Chagnon noted that Consumers Energy, the plant’s majority owner, had recently invested in a natural gas plant, as he argued that utilities, rather than the federal government, were best placed to figure out how to meet the country’s energy needs in the long term.
Responding to a hypothetical posed by Judge Robert L. Wilkins about climate change, Mr. Chagnon said that the “normal processes” set up to address long-term challenges should be employed before emergency measures, using a metaphor to make his point. “If we’re driving along in a car and we decide we need to stop at this red light up ahead, I think we would look first to the regular brake, not the emergency brake, because we tend to use normal mechanisms to solve problems before we go to extreme ones,” Mr. Chagnon said.
The panel, which also included Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Cornelia T.L. Pillard, did not immediately rule on the petition. All three judges were nominated by former President Barack Obama.
A lawyer for Consumers Energy, Zachary C. Schauf, spoke only briefly during the hearing. The company has not taken a position on the petition. Mr. Schauf said he was appearing “really just to ensure that nothing in this case undermines our ability to recover the roughly $43 million in net costs we incurred under this order.”
Karen Zraick covers legal affairs for the Climate desk and the courtroom clashes playing out over climate and environmental policy.
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