WEST OLIVE, Michigan — President Donald Trump’s crusade to save coal is derailing long-made plans to phase out the fossil fuel in this rural community on the shores of Lake Michigan.
For years, about 9,400 residents here have girded for the closure of the J.H. Campbell coal plant, a hulking facility bordered by dense forests and sprawling beaches, its smokestacks looming over the treeline.
Long, snaking rail cars full of coal from Wyoming were poised to lurch to a halt this weekend. About 250 workers at the facility were slated to be shuffled around to Consumers Energy operations elsewhere in the state.
In a win for Republicans and local advocates that pushed the local “Save the Campbell” campaign, Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Friday ordered the aging 1,560-megawatt coal plant to remain operational, at least through this summer, to avoid any possible capacity shortfalls or what he warned was a “risk of blackouts.” Fueling that push are rolling outages in Louisiana this week, partly because the Midwest grid operator was short on generation and transmission amid a bruising spring heat wave.
“I hereby determine that an emergency exists in portions of the Midwest region of the United States due to a shortage of electric energy, a shortage of facilities for the generation of electric energy, and other causes,” Wright declared.
Michigan has emerged as a test case for Trump’s first official move to buoy a struggling coal plant based on a rationale — the declaration of a national energy emergency — that critics say is questionable. Conservatives who pushed for Trump to intervene while flagging reliability concerns are now calling on Wright to extend the emergency order and keep the Campbell plant intact beyond Aug. 21. They’re also calling on the administration to block the closure of other coal-fired power plants, including the Monroe facility that pumps power into Detroit and the surrounding area, which is slated to close in 2032.
“Monroe is twice the size of Campbell,” said Republican state Rep. Dave Prestin. “Out of every one of the massive power plants in Michigan, Monroe would probably be the biggest one that I would be very, very upset with if we tore it down because of its impact.”
But the administration’s temporary orders won’t easily reverse the factors fueling coal’s demise, from cheap gas to waning demand and national shift to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Nationally, power generators are plowing ahead with plans to shutter more than 8 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity by the end of the year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, though that figure is slightly exaggerated because it includes several plants that have delayed retirement plans. That includes Consumers Energy’s plan to close the Campbell plant 15 years ahead of schedule.
Consumers Energy, Democratic leaders like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and environmental groups have argued the closure is part of the long-planned evolution of Michigan’s power sector, one that delivers electricity without the planet warming pollution. They also say the move is poised to save Consumers’ customers more than $600 million. At the same time, Trump is taking aim at state-level climate and energy regulations. Whitmer has vowed to fight, declaring earlier this month at a conference in Detroit: “I’m not abandoning our climate goals.”
Greg Wannier, a senior attorney for the Sierra Club, said Trump’s invocation of the Federal Power Act is “an illegal abuse” of his presidential authority, one that will saddle the public with higher costs, and outdated and deadly technology. The region’s grid operator, Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) — not Trump — is responsible for safeguarding the system and concluded years ago that the plant could retire without triggering reliability problems, he said.
Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission, has said regulators will work with MISO and Consumers to assess and comply with the DOE order, but criticized the directive as costly and unnecessary, and said Michigan produces more energy than it needs.
“I think it’s a difficult case to make that there is, in fact, this local energy need that can only be met through the extension of that plant,” Scripps told POLITICO’s E&E News.
Norm Kapala, vice president of generation operations for Consumers Energy, said the decision to shutter the Campbell plant was reached through a yearslong, collaborative process overseen by the state of Michigan.
Consumers Energy has said it has enough gas capacity to ensure reliability and that closing the power plant aligns with Whitmer’s ambitious plan to phase out coal by 2025 and completely shift to renewables, gas and other energy sources by 2040.
“It really is the best decision,” Kapala said. “We know that reliability is paramount to our customers.”
‘Come and say their goodbyes’
The J.H. Campbell plant has been churning out power for more than six decades on a rural stretch of land near Lake Michigan marked by dense forests, hiking trails, boat launches, blueberry farms, and a smattering of houses and antique shops.
The boxy, beige building and its towering smoke stacks — named after James H. Campbell, a former president of the utility who built the state’s first nuclear reactor — has been a staple of the community for generations, and a source of jobs and revenue.
The plant also has a national reach. Down the road, rail cars filled to the brim with piles of coal from the Powder River Basin in the West are parked on tracks, waiting to be unloaded.
The plant’s closure represents a blow to the Black Thunder mine, the country’s second-largest coal mine. Campbell is the Black Thunder’s fifth-largest consumer of coal over the last decade, having received more than 23 million tons of coal from the mine on Wyoming’s high plains between 2015 and 2024, according to a review by POLITICO’s E&E News of U.S. Energy Information Administration data. Black Thunder is operated by Core Natural Resources.
Consumers Energy has been preparing for the plant’s closure, offering hourlong bus tours for locals to say goodbye. Visitors donning hard hats have funneled into buses to get a peek at the 2,000-acre site, complete with a tour of the plant and an elevator ride up to the fourth-floor turbine deck, where the steam created by coal-heated water turns weighty turbines, generating electricity.
“Our community does want to come and say their goodbyes,” Kapala told a local Fox News affiliate during a tour late last year.
Consumers opted to close the Campbell plant years ahead of schedule as part of a state-level legal process filed in 2021 — and approved a year later — that requires companies to create a path for meeting demand while complying with state environmental goals.
Scripps with the MPSC explained utilities in the state are required to file such plans every five years, including demand projections. The commission also has the ability to call on utilities to come in earlier if demand changes significantly and they feel the plan is inadequate. What’s more, Scripps said utilities have to project demand out four years and show they’ve got sufficient resources in place.
As part of the settlement, Consumers was also required to buy a gas plant in Covert County, extend the life of gas- and oil-burning units, add 75 MW of storage by 2027, 550 MW of storage by 2040, 8,000 MW of solar by 2040 and a one-time solicitation for an additional 700 MW of generation by 2025.
Scripps said the state has yet to see a spike in demand from data centers that’s often cited in calls for coal-fired generation to remain intact. If that does happen, he said the state and utilities have the ability to act early.
“Unlike a lot of other instances where plants have retired and there essentially was no plan, this one went through a fairly sophisticated, integrated resource planning process,” said Scripps. “Ultimately, the commission felt that the concerns around reliability had been sufficiently addressed with the new resources that were brought online as part of that plan.”
Plotting a comeback
Trump’s decision to intervene in Michigan arrived shortly after the president inked executive orders to revive the fossil fuel — and amid Republican outcry in the state.
In late April, Michigan Republicans including Prestin, state Rep. Luke Meerman and state Sen. Roger Victory warned top Trump officials in a letter that the grid would be increasingly vulnerable with the Campbell plant’s closure. They called on Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to keep the Campbell and Monroe plants open.
“A state prone to adverse weather conditions and prolonged winters, energy failings in Michigan have dire consequences and we write to highlight the critical concerns we have for our energy security,” they wrote. “Michigan is regulated by a radical renewable energy plan that mandates untenable energy standards by year, and the state has already begun to phase out traditional fuel sources like coal.”
Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga, who represents Michigan’s 4th District, which includes the Campbell plant, said in an email that any time a plant like Campbell heads towards closure, “let alone during a National Energy Emergency, people rightfully become concerned and wonder what it means for their home, family, or farm in terms of cost.” Huizenga also said the plant’s closure is “a costly example of Jennifer Granholm, Joe Biden, and Governor Whitmer’s failed energy strategy.”
Victory also reached out directly to the Trump administration, he said, and argued that the plant was needed to fuel growth in the region, including energy-hungry data centers and manufacturing. “I just don’t understand the aggressive nature of how, why it’s so critical to get that plant decommissioned,” Victory said.
On the local level, members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners have for months debated the fate of the plant. The 11-member legislative body sets policies in the rural swath of land that includes the Campbell facility.
Sitting in a conference room in West Olive earlier this month, Republican Ottawa County Commissioner Joe Moss said he and his colleagues were hopeful Trump would intervene to keep the plant open and said they were planning to explore legal actions to prevent the plant from being demolished.
“I do think the Trump administration will try something,” said Moss. “I just don’t know if it would be enough to stop what’s going on.”
But Doug Zylstra, the board’s lone Democrat, said his colleagues’ arguments gloss over the fact that Consumers Energy is saving $600 million by closing the plant, and that the utility has invested in gas over a period of years to ensure grid reliability. Zylstra added that no city or other entity has stepped up to throw out a multimillion-dollar financial lifeline to keep the plant open.
“It’s an obvious point to say it has baseload generation, but if it costs $600 million to stay open, is that a cost-efficient source of base load power? I don’t think so,” he said. “People aren’t lining up to give Consumers $600 million to keep the plant open — they tend to be lining up to tell Consumers what to do with their own money.”
‘Hard test case’?
Proponents of Trump’s push to revive coal hope that the Campbell plant is just the beginning.
They cite a 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment by the grid’s monitor, the North American Electric Reliability Corp., or NERC, which found MISO is facing a “high” risk because the addition of new resources isn’t keeping up with retirements and growing demand.
Michelle Bloodworth, head of the coal power generation group America’s Power, said that report and NERC’s call for utilities to better manage plant retirements should prompt the Trump administration to step in and study regions like Ottawa County before any facilities are torn down.
Demand is increasing, EPA is reconsidering onerous regulations, and the economics of coal-fired power plants could change, she said, noting that 19 utilities since 2022 have delayed the retirement of about 28,000 MW of generation.
“I think from a resource adequacy, fuel security, and national security standpoint, we need to keep every coal plant that we have until analysis tells us differently,” said Bloodworth.
A spokesperson for MISO said the grid operator doesn’t comment on individual generating facilities, but instead shares regional and zonal summaries. The most recent survey, released in the summer of 2024, cited uncertainties around grid reliability, with results indicating the region could see as much as a 1.1 GW surplus to a possible deficit of 2.7 GW this summer. The actual outcome, according to the survey, will hinge on the pace and quantity of new resource additions and projected resource retirements.
“Resource Adequacy risks could grow over time across all seasons, absent increased new capacity additions and actions to delay capacity retirements,” MISO wrote.
MISO notably has not requested an emergency measure to keep Campbell open, a measure taken by other grid operators when faced with major power plant retirements in recent years.
Federal regulators approved a plan in January to keep open a Maryland coal plant, saying its continued operation was needed for the reliability of the Mid-Atlantic power grid. In New England, they approved a similar plan in 2022, which kept a large gas plant open for two additional years.
Trump’s declaration of an energy emergency and subsequent executive orders inked in April appear to override the regional process, at least temporarily.
Trump signed an order calling on DOE to craft a new “methodology” to assess grid reliability by early May and to implement a process to determine which coal-fired power plants should be kept online in the following months — even through use of DOE’s authority under 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. The department since 2000 has issued or extended such orders 21 times.
Wright stated that the order for the Campbell plant is “limited in duration to align with the emergency circumstances,” but it’s not clear if the administration plans to extend the order.
Scripps said the directive took him by surprise because the state and Consumers Energy used a “holistic approach” to analyze the closure of the facility, and because MISO found in its last auction that there was sufficient capacity in all zones and all seasons for the upcoming year, a conclusion that accounted for Campbell going away.
“You’ve got the secretary saying there’s an emergency here, and the market saying ‘it’s tightening, but we still have a sufficient reserve and we have it across the footprint,” said Scripps.
As for DOE’s move to keep the plant online, Scripps said: “I think this is a hard test case for that particular power.”
