A Retreat to the 19th Century, One 90-Day Coal Plant Extension at a Time

By Dave Levitan | August 21, 2025 | 9:12am

Photo by Joseph Prakash/Unsplash

Climate Fossil Fuels

A Retreat to the 19th Century, One 90-Day Coal Plant Extension at a Time

It was already farcical back in May, when Energy Secretary Chris Wright touted a fake emergency in order to force an aging coal-fired behemoth of a power plant to stay open for 90 days beyond its scheduled retirement. It is now descending further into tragedy, without much comedy on the horizon — at 8:50 PM on Wednesday, just hours before the 90-day window would close, Wright issued another edict forcing the JH Campbell plant in Michigan to keep belching out deadly pollution for yet another three-month period.

The first time, the DOE issued a press release so Wright could pretend that the move was so that Michigan and the greater Midwest “do not lose critical power generation capability” over the summer months. The grid operators in the region, of course, have not said any such crisis exists, even without the Campbell plant’s power — in fact, weeks before that original order, MISO specifically announced that “adequate resources are available to serve summer demand amid rising risks.” This time, a few hours after issuing the order on Wednesday night, the DOE isn’t bothering with “summer” or some such excuse, with Wright only lying that the US in general “continues to face an energy emergency.”

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It is worth repeating that outside of the Trump administration, essentially no one wants this. The company that owns the plant was well prepared for life after its closure; the grid operators are doing just fine and the lights would stay on without it; and as we recounted back in May, each 90-day extension of this single plant will mean something like 112 extra asthma attacks, four heart attacks, a few extra ER visits and hospital admissions, and 10 or 11 dead people that don’t need to be. The fake energy emergency will spawn very real personal health emergencies.

Residents who live in the shadow of the plant and will face those health impacts personally have protested its zombie march through the summer. The cost of running the plant — about $1 million per day — will spread out across rate-payers in the whole midwestern region, raising electricity prices for everyone. If this effort expands to other coal plants with planned retirements in the next few years, the cost could eclipse $3 billion, paid for by us.

According to reporting from The Guardian and elsewhere, the company that runs the plant is in fact concerned that those worst-case scenarios will come to pass — it has told outside groups that there is a decent chance Wright will just keep doing this, popping his head out of Trump’s Caves of Delusion to announce the “emergency” still persists every 90 days, adding a new 11 dead people to the tally every three months through the end of his term.

As always, the Trump administration offers up plenty of horrors. But there is something so profoundly dark about this move, cynically put forth as a necessity to keep the lights on but in reality merely a brute-force troll to own the libs, and maybe funnel a bit more cash to some grubby coal executives. Again, not even the company that owns the plant is excited about this; before Trump took office the coal sector could be largely understood as an industry that, while perhaps clawing at the walls now and again, was in the process of accepting its new home at the bottom of a capped-off mine. Trump is letting it crawl around on the surface, grotesque and deadly, for 90 more days, and 90 more after that.