Author: Jeff St. John Published: 08/14/2025 Canary Media
The Trump admin’s scheme to keep old fossil-fuel plants running could saddle utility customers with nearly $6 billion a year in unnecessary costs, a report finds.
A new report finds the Trump administration’s push to keep dirty, aging fossil-fueled power plants from closing down could end up costing U.S. utility customers between $3 billion and nearly $6 billion per year by the end of Trump’s term — and that’s a conservative estimate.
Thursday’s report from consultancy Grid Strategies was commissioned by Earthjustice, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club, four environmental groups that have joined states in challenging the Department of Energy’s use of emergency powers to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan and the Eddystone oil- and gas-burning plant in Pennsylvania running.
Both plants were set to close earlier this year, but the DOE used its emergency authority under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to order them to stay open for 90 days, and it could issue more orders to keep them running beyond that time period.
State regulators and environmental and consumer advocates fear that the DOE is just getting going. An April executive order from President Donald Trump tasked the DOE with taking unilateral authority over power-plant closures in the name of grid reliability, which could circumvent practices long-established by utilities, state regulators, regional grid operators, and federal regulators.
In July, the DOE issued a report claiming that the country faces threats of massive blackouts if the federal government doesn’t intervene. But critics say that to arrive at this conclusion, the DOE cherrypicked data and ignored the massive amounts of new solar, wind, and battery resources set to come online in the coming years.
The new Grid Strategies report examines what would happen if the DOE forced the continued operation of nearly 35 gigawatts worth of large fossil power plants scheduled to retire between now and the end of 2028. Under that scenario, annual costs for utility customers could exceed $3 billion per year by 2028, for a cumulative total of $4.8 billion by the end of Trump’s term.
Those costs would deliver no grid-reliability benefits, Michael Goggin, Grid Strategies vice president and author of the report, stressed in an interview this week. “DOE is literally picking plants that everybody involved in the regulatory process — the market operators, the state regulators, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — said should retire,” he said. “DOE is overriding all of that extremely well-informed decision-making.”
The states that would be hit the hardest are those with a higher number of aging and costly power plants set to close and be replaced with cheaper and cleaner resources — most notably California, Texas, and Colorado.
“We have a system that keeps the lights on. It’s not perfect. But we don’t need DOE blundering in to prop up old, clunky, polluting, and expensive power plants,” said Earthjustice attorney Michael Lenoff, who is leading the nonprofit group’s litigation against the DOE on its J.H. Campbell plant stay-open order. “People are going to feel the harm from DOE abusing its authority, not just in their lungs and in their water, but in their wallets.”
Real-world costs could climb even higher, Goggin said. Grid Strategies based its estimates on comparable data from so-called “reliability must-run” (RMR) contracts — emergency actions that grid operators take in extreme circumstances when they need money-losing power plants to stay open to stabilize the grid. But that data might not account for the full costs.
Consumers Energy, the utility that owns the J.H. Campbell coal plant, reported in late July that it had cost $29 million to operate the plant in the first five weeks of the DOE’s stay-open order, due to the additional expense of extending the long-planned closure date — more than RMR contracts would have suggested.
Using that data point, “if DOE were to extend the Campbell order beyond 90 days and this cost trend were to persist, that would translate to $279 million in annual cost,” Goggin wrote — “almost exactly twice our estimate.”
Goggin also pointed out that the DOE’s indiscriminate use of Section 202(c) authority risks creating a “perverse incentive” for power plant owners to announce plant retirements in the hopes that the DOE will order the plants to stay open and give them a subsidy to keep operating. “Today there’s a process to guard against that — these plants are heavily regulated by state regulators and by wholesale markets,” he said.
To calculate the potential costs of that scenario, Grid Strategies counted up 36 power plants with a collective 31.4 gigawatts of capacity that are 60 years old or older — an age at which they are more likely to be retired. If all of those power plants announced retirement but were then forced to stay open by the DOE, the annual costs to Americans by 2028 could nearly double from the report’s base case to $5.9 billion, he said.
Grid Strategies’ report comes one week before the end of DOE’s 90-day order for the J.H. Campbell plant to stay open, Lenoff noted.
“This is a reality check,” he said. “We can’t go forward pushing an ideological agenda, or choosing preferred resources that the market has dictated can’t compete anymore.”