The Department of Energy overstepped when it ordered an aging coal-fired power plant in Michigan to stay open past its planned retirement date last year, a federal court ruled on Friday.
The J.H Campbell plant is one of seven fossil-fueled plants around the country that the Trump administration has forced to stay in operation, despite the pollution they cause and the enormous costs of keeping them online. Just before it was about to close last May, Trump’s Energy Department invoked short-term emergency powers under the Federal Power Act to keep the 64-year-old plant running, arguing that the threat of outages, along with the need for more energy to power data centers, constituted an “emergency.” But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected that argument, with Appeals Court Judge Cornelia Pillard writing that the emergency statute “is essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop.”
When he declared a “national energy emergency” on his first day in office in 2025, President Donald Trump instructed federal agencies to use whatever emergency powers they had to increase energy production — specifically for fossil fuels. The ruling represents one of the first successful legal challenges to how the administration has used its “energy emergency” powers.
