Energy secretary insists an emergency justified the federal order. Attorney General Phil Weiser and environmmental groups find that claim a real leg-puller. Papers filed in federal court.
by Allen Best
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser’s petition to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit insists that orders by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright to keep a coal-burning unit at Craig available beyond its scheduled retirement in December was an “illegal emergency order.”
A trio of environmental groups — Siera Club, Vote Solar and the Environmental Defense Fund — make a similar statement in their petition filed this week.
“Whatever needs our modern energy system has, Craig is not the answer,” say the environmental groups. “The plant is an old, dirty, expensive generator that is required to retire under Colorado law.”
They say no emergency exists. They say the plant was being closed because of “market forces and prudent planning.”
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the operator of the 427-megawatt coal unit at Craig and a major owner, said it “continues to evaluate our options moving forward,” according to Amy Robertson, a spokesperson.
An attorney in the case warned against expecting a quick decision from the federal court. This case will likely take months.
As he had done previously with fossil fuel plants in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Wright issued an order on Dec. 30 that the coal unit be made available to operate at the direction of the either the Western Area Power Administration or the Southwest Power Pool West.
Wright cited authority under the Federal Power Act’s 202(c) clause to address the “dire energy challenges facing the Nation due to growing resource adequacy concerns” that had been identified by President Donald Trump in executive orders on Jan. 20 and again on April 28 in 2025.
“The United States is experiencing an unprecedented surge in electricity demand driven by rapid technology advancements, including the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers and increase in domestic manufacturing.”
Weiser, Tri-State and Platte River Power Authority, also an owner of the plant, and the environmental groups all appealed Wright’s decision in late January. Xcel Energy and other owners of the Craig unit did not appeal. The Department of Energy denied the appeals and hence now this appeal to the federal courts.
The irony of the order was that that the coal unit at Craig had broken down in mid-December. It has since been repaired and is available for use, but the power production has not been needed. For that matter, those institutions responsible for ensuring sufficient resources had said in November that the unit’s power would not be needed. Its retirement had been scheduled since 2016.
On March 9, Wright was at the St. Vrain Natural Gas Plant to argue for fossil fuels and dismiss efforts by Colorado to pivot to renewables. Colorado’s energy planning, he said, was based on a “fundamental misunderstanding of how energy works and a misunderstanding of climate change.”
“California’s electricity prices are twice what they are in the state of Colorado. Yet Colorado politicians are aggressively adopting California energy policies,” he said. “We do not want to see Colorado — we do not want to see our nation — go in that direction. We want to see artificial intelligence with the United States in the lead. If we’re going to lead in artificial intelligence, we have to lead in electricity production. In the last 20 years, we’ve tripled our oil production, doubled our natural gas production, and barely grown our electricity production, because electricity is the part that’s been infected with politics, with over-regulation, with bureaucracy.”
At the press conference, Wright was asked about who should bear the cost of keeping Craig No. 1 available. He dodged the question, instead pointing to the Michigan coal plant and said that the utility made $30 million in revenue, more than the extra cost to operate.
The petitions filed by Weiser and the environmental groups this week are both lengthy, running about 90 pages each. They say, in essence, that Wright and the federal government have over-stepped authority provided by the Federal Power Act.
The Federal Power Act, said Weiser, “limits the use of Section 202(c) to addressing specific, imminent capacity shortfalls resulting from unexpected outages, natural disasters, extreme weather, and similar circumstances. Here, the Department has declared an emergency due to “a shortage of electric energy, a shortage of facilities for the generation of electric energy, and other causes” in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (“WECC”) Northwest assessment area.3 But the Order’s emergency determination cannot stand against even the mildest scrutiny.”
Weiser asks for the order to be rescinded “because it tramples on the state’s authority to design and manage power generation resources in Colorado.”
Tri-State, in its appeal, had cited cost inequities. It did not need the power from the unit, it said, so why should it have to absorb the cost of repairing the unit to make it available? As of late February, Tri-State had not identified the specific cost involved. As the unit was managed in conjunction with the other two units at Craig, cost-accounting can be complicated.
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Wright is WRONG! At least incredibly good at misdirection and misinformation.
The main reason electricity generation has not grown is that Jimmy Carter and multiple administrations afterwards followed the “soft path” of efficiency laid out by Amory Lovins. And building owners and states and homeowners and auto makers and AC manufacturers, etc.
Air conditioning electricity use was reduced from the outside in. Insulation & low solar heat gain windows and white roofs and better ductwork. High EER AC.
Lighting used something like 15% of electricity. LEDs mean that’s reduced to under 5%. DHW, way down, applying to electric and gas; efficiency standards and tech improved for everything from showerheads to dishwashers to the tanks themselves.
Gas use per home is down for similar reasons.
Maybe we blew it by offshoring aluminum smelting and wheeling that power to data centers. It’s small compared to efficiency.
Gas production, yeah up, partly to replace that inflexible baseload coal with more dispatchable gas backup to wind and solar. Partly to export LNG with surplus gas from the oil-centric wells in the Permian with their constantly increasing GORs (Gas-Oil-Ratios).
Oil, yeah, kudos to CW and the high-tech frackers who converted unrecoverable resources to very recoverable. Use has not gone up, but domestic production from tight shales certainly has.
One could go on.