A court has blocked the Department of Energy’s attempts to force a broken coal plant open in Michigan, stating that there is no “emergency” that should force the plant to stay open and wasting millions of ratepayer dollars for 468 days after its planned retirement.
One of the Department of Energy’s recent tactics has been to issue “emergency orders” forcing coal plants to stay open, even when nobody wants them open.
The DoE has used this on six coal plants (and one oil-and-gas plant) in six states, claiming that the plants need to be kept open for “reliability.”
The problem, of course, is that coal is the least reliable form of energy we have available to us. It’s also expensive and polluting, which is why coal use has been plummeting in recent years, dropping from a high of around half of US electricity generation in the early 2000s, down to 17% now.
So everyone is trying to get off coal, for good reason. And when I say “everyone,” I mean everyone – even the owners of the plants subject to these orders have made filings opposing the orders.
The only person trying to keep these coal plants open is fossil shill Chris Wright, posing as head of the Department of Energy, whose main goal is to make American energy supply more expensive and less secure, and ensure that Americans suffer as much harm as possible from it, both to their lungs and pocketbooks.
Each of these orders was obviously illegal from the start – there is no emergency that should force broken coal plants to be reopened, at great cost, in order to sit there idle, providing nothing for ratepayers in the region who are on the hook for the hundreds of millions of dollars that these orders will cost.
Lawsuit against illegal coal order prevails, there is no “emergency”
So each has been subject to a lawsuit, wasting time and clogging up the courts with lawsuits that everyone knows the answer to in the first place. And the first of those lawsuits got decided today.
A DC appeals court issued a full rebuke to Wright’s energy inferiority agenda, recognizing that there is no “emergency” justifying keeping the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan open. The Campbell plant has cost ratepayers over $259 million and has been forced open for 468 days since its planned May 17, 2025 retirement.
The order is a full victory for the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois and nine public interest groups (the usual suspects: Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Earth Justice and so on) who sued over the order. The court vacated DoE’s order, essentially saying that the entire thing is null and void, since the DoE exceeded its authority in making the order in the first place.
Other “emergency” orders will probably end the same way
The decision has implications for other similar orders covering six other plants. Since each of those are subject to similar lawsuits, and had similar legal reasoning from the DoE, plaintiffs hope that the DoE will recognize that all of its other orders will fall to the same fate when they reach their day in court.
EDF Lead Counsel Ted Kelly said: “We hope that the Department of Energy will recognize that this decision eliminates its basis for arguing that any of the renewals are lawful, as they are based on the same set of factual and legal arguments, and will follow the law by allowing Campbell, as well as the six other plants being kept open, to retire.”
We’ve covered some of these other plants, like the one in Washington that’s not even running and the one in Colorado that’s broken and the owners don’t even want open. The total money wasted by the seven plants, so far, has been $547 million and counting – and that’s not counting the $625 million and $700 million grants to this welfare queen of an industry that’s going nowhere but to the grave.
And just about everyone recognizes that’s where it’s going – except the impotent ignoramuses squatting in the executive branch.
This is not the first court case lost by Trump. NRDC has succeeded in over 90% of its lawsuits against his anti-environment actions, and recent years have seen a string of losses for the republicans, from coal plants, to wind power, to unnecessary permitting red tape, to California’s clean air laws. Given the incompetence of everyone involved in this group, we’re sure this won’t be the last court loss for them either.
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