Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel plans to file a sixth request for rehearing with the United States Department of Energy over a coal-fired power plant near Lake Michigan operated by Consumers Energy.
“After six so-called emergency orders, it is clear that DOE intends to stretch Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to force an aging, obsolete plant to operate indefinitely,” Nessel said.
The J.H. Campbell power plant was scheduled to close in May 2025 but has been forced to remain open after the federal department issued six consecutive orders lasting over a year after President Donald Trump stated there was an energy emergency.
The request for rehearing is a necessary administrative step before the order can be challenged in court.
Gavin McCabe, senior litigating counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright upheld the emergency orders after the first five rehearings.
The first federal emergency order from May 2025 is now being challenged in an active lawsuit that already had some oral arguments, McCabe said.
“We are anticipating a decision anytime,” he said. “The court doesn’t have a deadline to decide, but roughly it takes three to six months.”
He said if the plant is allowed to close after the court’s decision, the other challenges will potentially become moot so those cases have been put on hold.
“In some way they are all connected even though they are issued separately and have different numbers on them, but we are challenging each of them,” he said.
Ted Kelly, the director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the plant is unnecessary and there is no energy emergency.
“They never had proof there’s an energy emergency,” Kelly said. “The retirement of the Campbell plant was part of a careful plan by the utility Consumers Energy, the state of Michigan, and the grid operator where they brought other generation online to replace this coal plant. They replaced it with cleaner, cheaper resources.”
He said a provision of the Federal Power Act is supposed to be used for taking immediate action in situations like war or weather events, and that’s how it’s been used in the past until now.
“There was no need for this,” Kelly said. “That’s been reflected in a number of reviews by the grid operator and by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which reviews reliability nationwide. They found the system was reliable and did not have a need for any emergency action.”
The U.S. Department of Energy said in a statement that the Energy Reliability Corporation’s 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment supports keeping the plant open. The department quoted the long-term assessment in one of its justifications for the emergency order: “Projected resource additions do not keep pace with escalating demand forecasts and announced generator retirements.”
The Electric Reliability Corporation also released a statement in April which said if additional power plants are built without delay, the region’s risk of power outages would be “elevated” until 2027 but then fall to “normal” risk in later years.
McCabe said he believes the court will find the statute is being used illegally, but there is always a chance it rules the other way.
Running the plant is costly.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission granted Consumers Energy's request to charge operating costs of the plant to residents within the north and central regions of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator — the organization that operates the power grid in Michigan and several other states and a Canadian province.
“Causing it to run unnecessarily just imposes those costs on people who shouldn’t be having to pay for it,” said McCabe, with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That is in addition to the fact that the Campbell plant is a large source of air pollution and water pollution.”
He said the statute the federal government is using to compel Consumers to keep the plant operational means ratepayers, not the government, pay the cost of running the power plant.
The energy sources that were supposed to replace the plant included natural gas, battery storage, and solar energy, all of which would cost less for residents and be better for the environment overall, Kelly said. He argued that operating the plant has the potential for especially devastating environmental consequences because it sits less than a mile from Lake Michigan.
One report from the consulting firm Grid Strategies, commissioned by several environmental advocacy groups, found the J.H. Campbell plant could cost ratepayers in the MISO region $139 million dollars per year due to the federal mandates, and Nessel said Consumers Energy has reported $295 million dollars in costs associated with the plant since May 2025.
This comes after unrelated price hikes earlier this summer from Consumers Energy.
Nessel said the cost of operating the plant beyond its planned retirement should not be falling on Michiganders.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary costs are stacking up and Michigan families will be forced to foot the bill to keep online a plant that should have been retired more than a year ago," she said.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright previously stated the Energy Department was keeping the plant open to mitigate the risk of power outages for American families.
“Americans deserve access to affordable, reliable, and secure electricity regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining,” he said.
The Department of Energy did not respond to our request for comment.
Editor's note: Consumers Energy is among Michigan Public's corporate sponsors.
