DOE Emergency Orders Keep Coal Plants Open as a Court Rules Against the Campbell Order and FERC Delays Data Center Rules

J.H. Campbell is a 1,560-megawatt coal plant on Lake Michigan. Its owner, Consumers Energy, planned to close it in May 2025. On 23 May 2025, days before the date, the Department of Energy ordered it to keep running. It has been running on rolling 90-day orders ever since.

On 11 September 2026 the D.C. Circuit ruled 3 to 0 that DOE exceeded its authority in issuing that order. It’s the first appeals court ruling on DOE’s new use of emergency power over the grid, and it lands while DOE has a stack of similar orders in force.

The 202(c) orders

Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act lets the Energy Secretary order plants to run during an emergency. It was traditionally used for short events: a heat wave, a storm, a cold snap. Since May 2025 DOE has used it to stop planned retirements.

After Campbell came Eddystone units 3 and 4 in Pennsylvania at the end of May 2025. In December 2025 DOE added Centralia 2 in Washington State, Schahfer 17 and 18 and F.B. Culley 2 in Indiana, and Craig 1 in Colorado. In 2026 it added Wagner 4 in Maryland’s PJM territory and Stanton 1 in Florida. By April 2026 the count of orders and extensions had reached 43. DOE’s own 2026 list runs to order 202-26-49, the latest renewal of Craig 1 on 25 September, valid to Christmas.

Not all of those are retirement orders. Many are short emergency orders during the January cold snap and summer heat. But about seven plants are now held open past their planned closing dates.

Someone pays for that. Running an old plant that its owner wanted to close costs money, and the costs land on consumers through their utilities. Environmental groups estimate the total so far at more than $540 million, about half of it for Campbell. There’s no official figure.

DOE’s reasoning

The case for the orders rests on DOE’s resource adequacy report of July 2025. It warned that outage risk could rise about a hundredfold by 2030 if 104 gigawatts of firm capacity retired as scheduled, while only about 22 gigawatts of the 209 gigawatts of planned new generation was firm. It assumed 50 gigawatts of new data-centre load by 2030.

Critics disputed the inputs. GridLab argued federal data show about 52 gigawatts of planned retirements, half DOE’s number.

The demand side isn’t in dispute, only its size. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s June 2026 update projects data centres reaching about 11.8% of US electricity use by 2030, within a range of 9.5% to 15.3%. Two years ago it projected 6.7% to 12% by 2028.

FERC and the large-load rule

The other half of DOE’s grid strategy runs through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. On 23 October 2025 Secretary Chris Wright used a rarely invoked power under section 403 of the Federal Power Act to direct FERC to write rules for connecting large loads like data centres to the grid, with final action requested by 30 April 2026.

FERC didn’t issue a final rule. On 18 June 2026 it issued show-cause orders to six grid operators, PJM, MISO, SPP, NYISO, CAISO and ISO New England, defining a large load as 50 megawatts or more connected above 69 kilovolts. In August it put all six proceedings on hold, with responses now due in mid-November.

The comparison

Other countries facing the same squeeze have used markets more than mandates. Britain pays plants through capacity auctions to stay available. Germany keeps a formal reserve of plants paid to stand by outside the market. In both, the decision to keep a plant open is priced in advance and paid for openly.

The US approach has been an emergency order, renewed every 90 days, with the cost settled later. The Campbell ruling questions whether that’s legal for a plant whose closing was planned years ahead. Washington State is already challenging the Centralia order in the Ninth Circuit, and the Eddystone case is pending in the D.C. Circuit.

If the courts close the 202(c) route, the reliability question doesn’t go away. It goes back to FERC and the grid operators, slower and more formal, which is where it was before May 2025. DOE’s AI data-centre plans on federal land depend on how that question gets answered.