Citing the energy emergency declared by President Donald Trump upon taking office, Energy Secretary Chris Wright extended his order Thursday that a large Michigan coal plant keep running past its planned closure.
“The United States continues to face an energy emergency, with some regions experiencing more capacity constraints than others,” Wright said in extending the order. “With electricity demand increasing, we must put an end to the dangerous energy subtraction policies embraced by politicians for too long.”
The power system is under unprecedented stress from the digital economy, as it tries to keep up with demand for cloud computing and artificial intelligence data centers — and prepare for voracious demand growth through 2030.
In a second order directing Consumers Energy and the Midwest grid operator to keep the J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in West Olive, Michigan, running through November, Wright deployed a nearly century-old law written for wartime use. Wright extended his original order in May that kept the plant open.
“The emergency conditions that led to the issuance of the original order persist,” Wright said.
But in hewing to Trump’s personalized understanding of the grid’s challenges, Wright risks ignoring the full range of stresses ahead, say electricity experts, issues that can’t be solved just by keeping old power plants running.
Wright again Thursday pointed an accusing finger at wind and solar power.
“This order will help ensure millions of Americans can continue to access affordable, reliable, and secure baseload power regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining,” Wright said.
Grids serving Texas and huge swaths of the middle of the country use significant amounts of renewable energy to keep the lights on, with utilities and big technology companies building or purchasing more. California has installed large amounts of energy storage to enable its supply of renewable power.
The decisive action to keep the J.H. Campbell plant running contrasts dramatically with the snail-paced regulatory changes that have guided an industry that abhors surprises.
“Everything we do in the energy space takes too long — 10 years or more,” said Jeff Weiss, executive director of Distributed Sun, a solar energy developer, speaking at a U.S. Energy Association event this week. “We need to figure out how to do everything in two years,” he added, “and it’s critical to our economy.”
Yet whether an imminent emergency exists that would justify federal intervention into electricity markets is widely disputed — and pinned mostly on the Trump administration’s political calculations.
There is no imminent shortage of electricity, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) declared in a lawsuit challenging the original DOE order keeping the J.H. Campbell plant running.
The attorney general’s challenge to the DOE order cited the authority of states to oversee power generation and utility rates. The Michigan Public Service Commission and the region’s grid operator, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, both agreed to the closure.
The Trump energy policy
The executive order and lawsuit thrust the Midwest grid’s reliability challenges into a politically charged confrontation.
The foundation of Trump’s energy policy seems to boil down to four assertions: Power grids can only meet Big Tech’s artificial intelligence ambitions if they rely heavily on fossil fuels. Electrifying a limitless number of data centers is a matter of national security. Wind and solar power aren’t reliable sources of electricity. And lastly, U.S. policy should reflect the president’s hostility toward non-nuclear clean energy sources that benefited from former President Joe Biden’s climate policy.
“Energy dominance,” in Trump’s first year, translates to more natural gas, new nuclear reactors built sometime in the 2030s — and whatever existing coal plants the administration can keep from closing today.
Wright cited his department’s grid reliability study in July warning that power outages across the U.S. could increase by 100 times in 2030 “if the U.S. continues to take reliable power offline” — and just as the tech industry’s need for electricity spirals upward. DOE’s worst-case scenario holds that 104,000 megawatts of older coal and gas plants nationwide could retire by 2030, creating a supply crisis.
But that threat analysis assumes that data centers will require more than 50,000 megawatts of new generating capacity, most of it running around the clock for months at a time as it processes enormous AI workloads.
That figures are guesswork, at best, grid experts say. And companies operating in the power markets won’t build if they can’t count on a guaranteed, long-term electricity supply.
“No credible data center developer is going to break ground on a large data center without confidence in 24/7 electricity,” says John Moura, director of reliability assessment and performance analysis for the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC).
How much to build?
The demands for more power keep coming.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Tom Falcone, president of the Large Public Power Council. “We know that there’s a lot to build. How much exactly?”
Developers’ requests to hook new power plants into grid systems have choked interconnection queues. “Is it all needed?” Falcone asked.
States and utilities are pressing for longer-term financial commitments from data centers and others requesting a lot of electricity. “That is the balancing act when you’re in a large build-out,” Falcone said.
Further, clean energy advocates say that the administration’s eagerness to single out the risks of wind and solar generation during severe weather misses another critical point. The DOE grid emergency analysis uses historical weather patterns to estimate power needs during periods of stress. But in line with Trump’s views, DOE chose not to examine the severity and frequency of extreme weather as climate change worsens over time — threatening natural gas infrastructure and other conventional sources of power.
NERC’s most recent grid reliability assessment does consider the future, examining which hours of the year extreme cold or heat would put the grid at greatest stress. Those risk factors also apply to natural gas, the largest source of electricity generation.
NERC Chief Executive Jim Robb told a FERC conference in June that grid operators need “much deeper insight” into the probabilities of extreme storms and heat waves that could push power demand to new peaks. Current industry risk analysis is not adequate, Robb said.
“This will require stronger modeling of fuel and capacity performance to assess reliability risk,” Robb said.
