The federal emergency order that has kept Consumers Energy's J.H. Campbell coal plant running for nearly a year and a half past its planned retirement expires on Saturday, November 14 — and as of Monday afternoon, November 9, the U.S. Department of Energy had not posted a new one, Michigan Public reported. It is the sixth straight emergency order for the plant, and the first deadline to arrive since a federal appeals court ruled that the government broke the law with the very first one.
The Campbell plant stands on the Lake Michigan shore in West Olive, in Port Sheldon Township, Ottawa County, between Holland and Grand Haven in western Michigan. The Energy Department's current order, No. 202-26-39, describes a 1,420-megawatt plant. Consumers Energy, Michigan's largest utility, had planned to retire all three of its coal units on May 31, 2025, under a plan state regulators approved — a retirement the Michigan Attorney General's office says was expected to save ratepayers nearly $600 million.
How a plant set to close kept running
Eight days before the shutdown, on May 23, 2025, the Energy Department ordered the plant to stay available, using Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act — a rarely used emergency power that lets the Energy Secretary order a plant to run during an electricity emergency. The department has renewed the order roughly every 90 days since, the statutory pattern for such orders. The sixth order was issued on August 14, 2026, signed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, directed to MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator that runs the grid across Michigan and much of the Midwest, and took effect August 17 through November 14.
The department's case is that the grid cannot spare the plant. Its August order cites 1,431,336 megawatt-hours of net generation from Campbell between January and May 2026, an 8.8-gigawatt reduction in MISO's accredited thermal capacity, and tens of gigawatts of signed new generation still not online. The Energy Department has argued the country faces an energy emergency and cannot afford to lose the plant's power, and it has used the same power to keep other coal plants running.
A court has already called the first order unlawful
On September 11, 2026, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled unanimously that the Energy Department's first Campbell order was an unlawful use of Section 202(c), and vacated it. The ruling addressed only that first, May 2025 order — it did not automatically erase the five later renewals, which is why the plant is still running under the sixth. Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois, along with environmental organizations, have filed rehearing requests against the sixth order that are listed on the department's own order page, and Attorney General Dana Nessel has challenged every order in the series.
Nessel put her objection plainly: “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.” Her office noted that the plant was originally built in the 1960s, and that the September ruling was the first time a federal court had vacated an emergency order of this kind.
The $295 million question: who pays
Keeping Campbell open has not been free. Consumers Energy has reported $295 million in costs tied to running the plant from May 2025 through June 30, 2026, according to the Attorney General's office, and the utility is seeking to recover that money from electric customers across MISO's north and central regions — not just in Michigan. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has granted Consumers' request to charge the plant's operating costs across that region. A separate study by the consulting firm Grid Strategies, commissioned by environmental advocacy groups, estimated the federal mandates could cost MISO-region ratepayers about $139 million a year. Those figures are contested in the continuing legal and regulatory fight, and the final bill has not been settled.
The need for the plant is also disputed. MISO's own 2026 capacity auction found the region had enough power to meet demand through spring 2027, according to regional reporting on the case. Consumers' approved replacement plan is already built around other resources: the 1,200-megawatt Covert natural gas plant in Van Buren County, which the utility bought in 2023, plus new solar and battery storage. Consumers executive Shaun Johnson told the Ottawa News Network the company will close Campbell once the federal orders end.
By Saturday, November 14, the Energy Department must either issue a seventh emergency order or let the sixth expire — it has renewed every earlier order before expiry. Rehearing requests and court challenges to the renewals continue either way, and the fight over who pays the $295 million already spent will be decided in regulatory proceedings, not by the expiry itself.
For households and businesses across Ottawa County and the wider MISO region — including Michigan's Punjabi families and the truck stops and warehouses along the Lake Michigan corridor that run on the same grid — the Campbell fight is not abstract. It is a live argument, now in its eighteenth month, over who decides when an old coal plant closes: the state that approved its retirement, or a federal emergency power that a court has already said was used unlawfully once.