WASHINGTON — A unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Sept. 11, 2026, vacated a Department of Energy emergency order that had forced Consumers Energy’s aging J.H. Campbell coal plant in West Olive, Michigan, to keep running past its planned May 31, 2025, retirement.

Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Circuit Judges Cornelia T.L. Pillard and Robert L. Wilkins heard the case. Pillard wrote the opinion. The court held that Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s department had no lawful “emergency” under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to override years of state and regional resource planning.

“We hold that section 202(c) is best read to apply where the Department identifies a risk of substantial harm from inadequate electricity supply that calls for immediate action by DOE in particular, as opposed to by the states,” Pillard wrote. “Because the circumstances DOE identified in the challenged order do not warrant resort to section 202(c) as correctly interpreted, we grant the petitions for review and vacate the Order.”

Michigan led the challenge, joined by Illinois and Minnesota and by environmental and public-interest groups including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Michigan Environmental Council, Environmental Law and Policy Center, Vote Solar, the Ecology Center, Urban Core Collective, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Consumers Energy intervened to protect its right to recover compliance costs from ratepayers in separate FERC proceedings.

What DOE ordered — and what the court rejected

Campbell is a roughly 1,420-megawatt, three-unit coal plant owned and operated by Consumers Energy. The utility’s integrated resource plan — approved by the Michigan Public Service Commission after a contested settlement, affirmed on state appeal, and cleared by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) — called for retiring Campbell and replacing it with a mix of gas, solar, and storage that regulators said would meet reliability criteria at lower cost with less pollution.

Days before the May 2025 retirement date, DOE issued Order No. 202-25-3 under section 202(c), declaring an emergency in parts of the Midwest and commanding Campbell to stay online for at least 90 days. DOE later extended the compulsion repeatedly — the opinion recounts four extensions totaling 450 days of forced operation under the challenged regime — citing “potential tight reserve margins” and longer-term resource-adequacy worries rather than a discrete wartime shock, weather disaster, or sudden outage.

The panel was unpersuaded. It read section 202(c) as a narrow, last-resort backstop — not a license to second-guess state generation planning. “The Department’s position would empower it to pick its preferred power sources in Michigan — or, presumably, any other state — and order them to operate without regard to the multiple procedural and substantive constraints built into state reliability planning processes,” Pillard wrote.

On the ordinary meaning of “emergency,” the court leaned on contemporaneous dictionaries and the Federal Power Act’s structure: states keep primary authority over generation; sections 202(a) and (b) put voluntary regional coordination and state-requested FERC orders ahead of unilateral DOE compulsion. “The mere possibility of an electricity supply shortfall — with no specifics about its potential severity, timing, location, or likelihood — does not warrant an emergency federal response,” the opinion said.

Pillard also warned that an expansive emergency reading “invites frequent federal interventions that are unsupported by the statute and threaten the stability of the energy market,” including by distorting capacity-market price signals that tell generators when to build, keep, or retire plants.

Costs, extensions, and what happens next

Forced operation has not been cheap. Consumers Energy told the SEC that through June 30, net compliance costs for Campbell were about $259 million after applying MISO market revenues, according to reporting by Utility Dive and Bridge Michigan. The Washington Post reported that emergency orders keeping plants open have cost ratepayers nearly $1 billion across similar mandates, citing utility filings.

DOE defended the program after the ruling. A department spokesperson told Utility Dive the orders “prevented blackouts and likely saved hundreds of lives during peak capacity events this past year,” pointed to Campbell’s output during Winter Storm Fern, and said DOE “will continue to protect and defend energy security for all Americans.” The opinion itself treats DOE’s statutory theory — not a factual scoreboard of megawatt-hours — as dispositive.

Practical follow-through is still messy. Bridge Michigan reported that Consumers spokesperson Katie Carey said the utility is “reviewing today’s court ruling” and, while it does, “continuing to comply with the current 90-day Department of Energy order.” The vacated decision targeted the initial May 2025 order; later extension petitions had been held in abeyance. Environmental counsel framed Friday’s holding as a rebuke of using emergency labels to prop up uneconomic coal against market-and-state retirement plans. DOE can still seek Supreme Court review.

The deeper fight is institutional, not just one plant on Lake Michigan. Section 202(c) was written for war and sudden crises. Stretching it into a standing federal veto over state-approved retirements collapses the line between emergency and policy preference — and sticks ratepayers with the bill when markets and state planners already priced the exit. Friday’s panel drew that line back where the statute put it.

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