Early last year, a top coal lobbyist sent a letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright with a dire warning.
Roughly one-third of the nation’s coal-burning power plants were scheduled to close within five years, according to the letter, dated Mar. 11, 2025, from a coal trade group. Many of the closures would occur during President Trump’s second term.
But what if the plants didn’t have to shut down? The trade group, America’s Power, proposed an unusual remedy: The Energy Department could deploy rarely used emergency powers to force them to stay open longer.
Two months later, the Trump administration began doing exactly that.
The letter, which has not been previously reported, reveals some of the earliest known discussions about a move that experts have called an extraordinary intervention into the nation’s energy markets.
Since May 2025, the Energy Department has repeatedly issued emergency orders to keep nine coal-burning units at six plants operating long past their scheduled retirement dates, saying the facilities are needed to prevent looming blackouts. The orders have sometimes come over the protests of the plant’s owners and are expected to cost ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars. A federal appeals court has already struck down one order, ruling that it overstepped the law.
The letter from America’s Power was made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Environmental Defense Fund, an environmental group.
Mr. Trump has long expressed his affection for the coal industry, often calling it “clean, beautiful coal” to needle environmentalists, who point out that the highly polluting fuel is a major driver of global warming.
Coal power has been declining for two decades, as utilities have retired hundreds of older plants in favor of cheaper and cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power. Even Mr. Trump couldn’t stop the slide in his first term. More than 150 coal-burning units shut down between 2017 and 2020.
In the letter last year, Michelle Bloodworth, the chief executive of America’s Power, laid out several ideas to reverse the trend. The Environmental Protection Agency could repeal costly pollution rules, she wrote. The federal government could purchase power directly from coal plants. The administration could invoke a Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act to inject fresh funding into coal supply chains.
Most immediately, the Energy Department could keep coal plants open under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, a provision that historically has been used only sparingly during temporary emergencies such as hurricanes. The emergency in this case, the letter said, was an expected shortage of reliable power over the next decade, citing forecasts from a leading grid monitor.
The Trump administration has since taken each of those steps. In July, Lee Zeldin, administrator of the E.P.A., told coal executives at a public meeting, “Many of the items that were on your wish list are now done.”
“The letter shows the really broad extent to which the coal industry is not only influencing but even directing the Trump administration’s actions,” said Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The industry swung for the fences and got everything they asked for.”
In a statement, Ms. Bloodworth said keeping older coal plants online was necessary to prevent electricity shortages as demand surges.
“We appreciate Secretary Wright and the Trump administration for using the emergency authority Congress provided under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act,” she said. “It is one of the few tools available to protect grid reliability at a moment when electricity demand is climbing faster than new generation can be built.”
“Federal and state officials must work together to prevent the premature retirement of dependable coal generation,” she said. “Waiting for a blackout before taking action is an unacceptable gamble.”
America’s Power does not publish a list of members but says it represents coal producers and electricity generators.
While an Ohio-based utility briefly proposed using emergency powers to stop coal plants from retiring in 2018, the idea never gained traction and was rarely discussed later. It wasn’t mentioned in Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint for a second Trump term.
Asked whether the coal industry letter had inspired the Energy Department’s actions, Ben Dietderich, an agency spokesman, said, “No. On day one, President Trump declared a national energy emergency due partly to past leaders’ energy subtraction policies that encouraged the premature shutdown of reliable coal and natural gas plants.”
It is not unusual for industry groups to send wish lists to incoming presidents. In 2020, shortly before President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., took office, the solar and wind industries published numerous recommendations, such as having the federal government buy renewable energy, that the Biden administration later adopted.
But the Trump administration’s use of emergency powers to keep coal plants open has created significant friction.
In some cases, the orders have surprised utilities, arriving at the last minute and upending months of preparation for closure. Some companies have scrambled to replenish their coal piles, bring back workers and quickly make repairs, spending tens of millions of dollars in the process. Each order lasts only for 90 days, but the Energy Department has repeatedly renewed them.
One operator, CenterPoint Energy, asked the Energy Department in February to let an emergency order lapse for the Culley coal plant in Warrick County, Ind., saying that running the unit would require up to $18 million in repairs. The department has since renewed its order three times.
The operators of the Craig Generating Station in Colorado went a step further, challenging their emergency order and explicitly saying that the coal unit was not needed.
Another utility, the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, has asked regulators to let it collect at least $38 million from customers to cover the costs of keeping open two aging coal units at its Schahfer plant. One unit has been out of commission since July 2025 because of a turbine failure and will require extensive repairs, the company said in public filings. The other ran during the winter before going offline in March for maintenance.
“The orders are forcing the utility owner to throw money at uneconomic plants that were rightly taken out of service,” said Ari Peskoe, director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative.
Mr. Wright, the energy secretary, has called the orders a necessary corrective after Democratic administrations and states hurt the coal industry by imposing strict environmental rules on power plants, often in the name of tackling climate change.
“Coal is massively more important for the U.S. electricity grid than wind and solar combined today,” Mr. Wright said last week at The New York Times’s Climate Forward event. “And coal has had a war on it. The government has imposed heaps of costs on it, regulatory burdens, everything to strangle it.”
Wind and solar power combined generated more electricity in the United States than coal last year, but coal can run on demand at all hours while wind turbines and solar panels cannot.
Without orders to stop coal plants from retiring, Mr. Wright added, “we would have had hundreds of Americans freeze to death in the last week of January last year.” He also said that some utilities have requested federal help to keep plants open.
Environmental groups have disputed those claims, arguing that the Midwestern regional grid — where several coal plants have been required to stay open — had sufficient capacity available during peak demand periods last winter and this summer.
The coal industry continues to struggle even as electricity demand grows, particularly from A.I. data centers. During the 2000s, coal provided nearly half of the nation’s electricity. But that share was just 17 percent last year and is expected to decline sharply again this year, according to federal data.
The Energy Department’s orders have also faced legal pushback. This month, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the first such order, to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant in West Olive, Mich., operating.
The court ruled that the agency had overstepped its authority. It said states have responsibility to manage power generation and that the federal government should intervene only when states and grid operators can’t or won’t respond.
Since that ruling, however, the Energy Department has renewed orders to keep coal units running in Indiana, Colorado and Washington.
“The Energy Department disagrees with the decision and is working with the Department of Justice to assess potential rehearing and appeal options,” said Mr. Dietderich, the agency spokesman.
In Michigan, the owner of the J.H. Campbell plant has said it would keep the facility running since the court struck down only the first three-month emergency order. The agency has since issued five more. But environmentalists and other legal experts said the decision undercut the rationale for all such orders.
“In our view, the next move should be for D.O.E. to stand down, but as we see with this administration, it is often reluctant to stand down,” said Sanjay Narayan, managing attorney at the Sierra Club.
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