What they're not telling you: # FOLLOW THE COAL: How Emergency Powers Keep Aging Plants Profitable While States Foot the Grid Bill Energy Secretary Chris Wright has issued five emergency orders in 2025 that override state utility commissions and prevent the retirement of more than 17 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity—a legal maneuver that raises a fundamental question: who profits from keeping decrepit power plants online, and who bears the cost of their continued operation? The centerpiece of this intervention is Wright's May 2025 emergency order targeting Northern Indiana Public Service Company's R.M. Schahfer Generating Station in Wheatfield, Indiana.
What the Documents Show
Two coal-fired generators at this facility—built in 1983 and 1986—were scheduled for retirement on December 31, 2025, after the utility determined they were economically obsolete. Instead, they remain operational under federal-agencies-is-on-the-rise.html" title="State AG Collaboration With Federal Agencies Is on the Rise" style="color:#1a1a1a;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-style:dotted;font-weight:500;">federal mandate. The same pattern repeats across four states: Michigan, Washington, Indiana, and Colorado. All told, Wright has frozen the retirement of capacity that utilities themselves determined was no longer cost-competitive to run. President Trump's January 2025 National Energy Emergency declaration provided the legal architecture for this intervention.
Follow the Money
Wright justified his authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, which permits emergency orders to maintain adequate electrical capacity during grid stress. But here's what the mainstream accounts miss: utilities don't voluntarily retire profitable plants. When NIPSCO and others scheduled these retirements, they had already calculated that coal's operating costs—fuel, labor, environmental compliance, maintenance—exceeded revenues even in tight grid conditions. Keeping them open means either subsidizing their losses through ratepayers or accepting lower wholesale margins. In his April 2025 executive orders and subsequent budget hearings for Fiscal Year 2027, Wright argued these orders prevent grid instability during extreme weather. The framing is compelling: winter and summer peaks require baseload capacity.
What Else We Know
But this elides a crucial structural question. The regional transmission operators (RTOs) that manage grid reliability—PJM Interconnection covers the Indiana territory, MISO serves Michigan—already incorporate reserve margins into their planning. If Wright's orders were truly about grid adequacy, they would have been targeted to specific peak hours, not blanket 90-day extensions repeatedly reissued for the same plants. Instead, these are indefinite subsidies wrapped in emergency language. Sixteen Democratic state attorneys general filed suit on May 9 in Seattle's U.S. District Court, contesting whether Trump's declared energy emergency even exists.
What I find striking about this story is how nakedly it reveals the machinery of regulatory capture: when markets move against you, simply declare an emergency and rewrite the rules through executive order. The pattern here is coal industry protection masquerading as grid reliability.
Coal plants retire because they're economically obsolete—generators themselves made that calculation. Wright and Trump have inverted the regulatory hierarchy: rather than let utilities and state commissions manage capacity decisions, they've centralized power in the Energy Department and justified it with emergency language that's difficult to challenge in real time.
Who benefits? Coal operators who would have idled capacity. Who pays? Ratepayers in Indiana and Michigan, whose bills rise to cover the operating losses on these mandatory plants. The RTOs and grid operators who now operate with artificial constraints that prevent more efficient dispatch.
Watch the D.C. Circuit's decision. If those judges allow this emergency framework to stand, expect it to spread. Every regulated industry will have learned that sufficiently framed emergencies can override state regulators and market signals. That's not grid reliability. That's regulatory state capture in real time.
Primary Sources
- Source: ZeroHedge
- Category: Money & Markets
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