Trump and his team lost a key court decision involving a coal plant in Michigan. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright has issued another “emergency” order for Craig. Why?
by Allen Best
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright was in southern Colorado recently to proclaim the virtues of coal-fired power. As a key player in the Trump administration, it’s his job to milk additional life out of a technology that in many places, including Colorado, is akin to a 15-year-old cell phone or a land line.
Coal, he said following a tour of the Ray Nixon coal plant near Fountain, is dependable and affordable.
A decade ago, that sweeping claim could be made with a straight face. Even then, however, energy technology and economics were shifting dramatically. Prices of wind, then solar and now battery storage have tumbled dramatically. Today, it borders on the ludicrous.
Wright’s case for coal as a reliable resource came just days after operations of the Comanche 3 coal-burning unit at Pueblo had resumed operations after being down for repairs for approaching 13 months. That unit has been a notorious lemon, down 25% of the time since operations began in July 2010. Reliable?
A few days later, Wright’s campaign to bring back coal suffered a courtroom defeat. That defeat has implications for another Colorado coal plant, Craig No 1.
Without mentioning the court ruling two weeks before, Wright on Friday ordered the Craig unit remain available for another 90 days to “migiate blackout risks”
”For the past decade, state and federal leaders have harmed Coloradans’ wallets and energy security with efforts to force reliable generation off the grid,” said Wright in the announcement., making no mention of the recent court ruling.
“The Trump Administration will continue taking action to ensure we don’t lose critical generation sources. Americans deserve access to affordable, reliable and secure energy to power their homes all the time, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.”
Those are fighting words.
A bit of history
Retirement of Craig No. 1 on New Year’s Eve in 2025 had been planned since 2016. The day before the planned closure, Wright ordered the unit remain available. He invoked a law adopted by Congress many decades ago that gives the federal government authority to intrude into state affairs in instances of electrical grid emergencies.
Just hours after he was inaugurated as president in 2025, Donald Trump had issued an executive order that declared a national energy emergency because of a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid.” Swift action, the order said, would be necessary to meet a “high demand for energy and natural resources to power the next generation of technology.”
Trump’s order did not spell out what that next generation of technology was, although it’s impossible not to wonder: Was he referring to artificial intelligence and data centers? Electrical demand for the previous 15 to 20 years had been flat. Transportation and building electrification are playing parts, but Xcel Energy in a 2024 filing with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission identified looming demand from data centers as by far the largest cause for projected demand growth.
The law invoked by Wright, the Federal Power Act, was passed by Congress in 1935 and expanded in 1977. It has a section, 202(c), which gives the U.S. government authority to intercede in utilities in special circumstances.
That law has been used rarely and never before to address what utilities call resource adequacy. That longer-range planning is almost entirely conducted by states and their utilities. In May 2025, Wright cited the emergency of inadequate power in ordering Michigan’s J.H. Campbell coal plant to remain available for operations. Since then Wright has issued similar orders for other retiring fossil fuel plants in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Washington state as well as the coal unit at Craig.
In justifying his emergency order for Craig, Wright cited the North America Electric Reliability Corporation’s 2025-2026 Winter Reliability Assessment. Actually, pointed out the Sierra Club at the time, that report had concluded supplies were adequate in coming months
Democratic politicians in Colorado had a field day. “Ludicrous,” said Gov. Jared Polis. Will Toor, director of the Colorado Energy Office, likened it to “Soviet-style central planning, driven by ideology rather than the realities of the electric grid.”
Eleven days before Wright had issued his order, the Craig unit had broken down.
Federal court ruling
This questionable use of emergency authority was headed for the courts. The Campbell plant in Michigan was the first case. In May, the U.S. District Circuit Court for the District of Columbia heard the arguments from environmental groups and the state of Michigan. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser also filed a 92-page brief.
On Sept. 10, the court issued its decision. Essentially, the decision said the federal government had no business issuing the emergency order to keep the Michigan plant operational. The plain text of the law that allowed federal intervention restricted that power to emergency applications that required immediate action.
“That is exactly how the federal government has used its section 202(c) authority until today—to address short-term crises, such as blackouts caused by war or extreme weather events, not as a substitute for the states’ long-term reliability planning,” said the court.
The takeaway, according to Michael Lenoff, an attorney for Earthjustice, one of the environmental groups that had sued the federal government, the takaway was that the Department of Energy had “grossly overstepped” its authority when it prevented the retirement of the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan because it had noy established a genuine emergency as required for use of the 202(c).
“That is,” he explained, a need for the DOE in particular (and not states, grid operators and utilities to act.”
Lenoff also alluded to Colorado: “None of the current emergency orders for coal plants in any state demonstrate any evidence that continued operation is imminently needed, and the DOE should stop issuing orders requiring their operation. If not, we will continue to challenge those orders in court.”
What may also be notable is the discomfort expressed by some on the right side of the bench at the intrusion of the federal government in affairs normally left — as Lenoff said — to the states. Among the dissidents to the federal use of 202(c) authority was the R Street, a think tank “focused on solving complex public policy challenges through free markets and limited, effective government.”
In a November 2025 post, R Street’s Michael Giberson said the DOE’s emergency orders threaten to “undermine competition in regional energy markets.”
The practical effect
Wright’s orders have result in the Craig unit being used for about three weeks since January when called upon by Southwest Power Pool, a new operator in Colorado and adjoining states of the Western grid. It provides resource-sharing, better matching supplies and demands.
Why did SPP need the power? Steve Johnson, senior director of markets administration for SPP, said at a forum organized by the Colorado Renewable Energy Society on Tuesday that the balancing authority “currently doesn’t have enough capacity, firm capacity, to meet its obligations during those peak hours.“
Johnson said that one of the interties between the Eastern and Western grids reduced the potential to import power into Colorado from the Eastern grid. Importing power from elsewhere was an option, he conceded, and one that SPP will be taking another look at.
A lingering question is why generation from the other two units was not used? Eric Frankowski, executive director of the Western Clean Energy Campaign, points to Energy Information Adminstration reports for production during July when SPP called on Tri-State for 20,478 megawatts of generation from Craig No. 1. That same month, Craig No. 1 delivered 132,268 megawatts and Craig No. 3 delivered 119,327 megawatts, both of them far below capacity.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the operator and part-owner of the Craig unit, said it did not need the power going forward. Nor did Fort Collins-based Platte River Power Authority. Xcel Energy, another part owner, in a lawsuit, said the order has cost it $4 million.
On the other side of Colorado, in Kit Carson County, the Trump administration has been stalling review of the 500-megawatt Towner Wind Energy II Project. Federal law requires review of wind projects higher than 200 feet, to avoid danger to aircraft, and these wind towers qualify.
Butting up against the Kansas border, Kit Carson has a limited tax base. The county has virtually no irrigated agriculture. It does have great expanses of land, plus oodles of wind and solar potential. It is also bisected by Xcel Energy’s 345-kV transmission line, the Colorado Power Pathway, a highway created to deliver electrons to metro Denver, Xcel’s primary service territory. Kit Carson gave nearly all its votes to Trump in the last three elections. The county is a victim of the warm of Trump and his henchmen on renewable energy in Colorado and beyond.
After the event at the Ray Nixon plant a couple weeks ago, U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans sent out a press release blaming Democrats in Denver for ordering expensive renewables without having replacement generation. He should check out the investments made by his own utility Brighton-based United Power, an electrical cooperative. It has been investing heavily in solar and in batteries. Why? To save money for its members who are the same as its customers.
Evans might also want to study the numbers from Holy Cross Energy, the Glenwood Springs-based electrical cooperative. Through August, 90% of its electricity had come from renewables. And the last time I checked, Holy Cross had some of the lowest electric rates in Colorado.
Concluding thoughts
To be clear, coal has most certainly elevated the lives of most of us. So has natural gas. And, for a time in my life, an electric typewriter was a distinct improvement over the old manual Royal. Technology advances.
Also, to be clear, we do not necessarily have all the answers about how to totally end emissions.
In a general way, the old way of electrical generation comes from mining resources from underground. The new way looks to what is available above ground.
Enhanced geothermal — using heat deep underground to produce electricity — is intriguing in that it draws support from both Republicans and Democrats. In Colorado, it’s nowhere ready for prime time. But some utility CEOs who have no use for coal think geothermal might not be that many years aways from being part of our electrical mix.
It’s also worth noting that Wright’s agency decided to locate its new Center for Geothermal Excellence in Golden at the National Research Laboratory of the Rockies, i.e. the former National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
What is causing higher electricity bills? It’s easy to blame renewables, as the Trump team wants to do. The story is far more complex.
Keep in mind, one of the ongoing discussions before the Colorado Public Utilities Commission is whether Xcel ratepayers should be paying for that coal plant in Pueblo during the nearly 13 months it was down for repairs. Colorado’s Office of Utility Consumer Advocate has pointed out that Xcel’s customers will be paying $79 million for Comanche 3 during a year-plus when it did not produce power. It cost more than $21 million to continue operating Comanche 2, a unit scheduled to retire last December but kept in operations because of the absence of Comanche 3.
As for Wright’s emergency order at Craig, it is best understood as a hiccup on the farewell tour for coal in Colorado, just a little political theater manufactured by Trump and his team.
Also related:
“A hiccup for coal on its farewell tour of Colorado” Big Pivots, Jan. 8, 2025
“Is Chris Wright right or wrong?” Big Pivots, March 20, 2026
“Is Craig coal plant part of a five-alarm fire?” Big Pivots, May 15, 2026
- Implications of Michigan case for Craig coal plant - September 26, 2026
- A big widening of this narrow electronic highway - September 25, 2026
- Two Denver-based firms get geothermal grants - September 21, 2026
