Trump’s Push to Save the Coal Industry Is Facing Opposition From the Coal Industry

The Trump administration’s efforts to prop up the quickly declining coal industry have run into a problem: Some coal industry players don’t want any part of it.

Two Colorado coal plant owners have called the Trump administration’s mandate to keep the facility running past its expiration date a violation of their constitutional rights.

Two of the electric utilities that own a unit at the Craig Station generating facility in Colorado filed a petition with the Energy Department last week asking the Trump administration to reconsider its mandate to keep the unit open until the end of March.

The unit stopped operating in mid-December because of a mechanical failure and was slated to officially close at the end of 2025 to comply with air pollution regulations. The Trump administration ordered it to stay open one day before its scheduled retirement.

“Keeping Craig Unit 1 available to operate will not best meet DOE’s goal of securing dispatchable electricity resources in the northwestern United States,” the utility companies — Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which operates the unit, and Platte River Power Authority — said in the petition.

The Colorado utility companies argued that the administration’s attempts to keep the Craig Station unit open are unlawful because the utilities will not be compensated for the costs they incur, and constitute “physical taking,” a violation of the Fifth Amendment.

The Trump administration’s December order is part of a larger effort to revitalize the nation’s coal industry, which has declined over the last two decades as global demand has plateaued. The Energy Department announced a $625 million investment last year in the industry, and more than half that money — which NOTUS reported came from unobligated Biden-era clean energy funds — was directed to recommission shuttered coal plants and extend the life of plants that were set to stop generating energy soon, such as Craig Station.

Energy experts have long been skeptical about this effort. And now, Tri-State and Platte River’s filing signals that even coal industry players themselves are joining in that skepticism, as the high costs of keeping coal plants open invite consumer backlash about energy affordability.

“Simply propping them up is just going to potentially slightly increase the time that consumers have to pay for that expensive coal power,” Michelle Solomon, a manager for the electricity program at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan clean energy research organization, told NOTUS last year of aging coal plants.

The Energy Department’s order “will likely require additional investments in operations, repairs, maintenance and, potentially, fuel supply, all factors increasing costs,” Tri-State said in a statement.

The administration cited its self-declared “energy emergency” in justifying the December order for the Craig Station unit to keep operating. In a statement to NOTUS, the Energy Department, defended its order to keep the Colorado plant open.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, the Energy Department is unleashing energy dominance to reduce energy costs for American families and strengthen the electric grid,” the statement read. “The Trump Administration is committed to preventing the premature retirement of baseload power plants and building as much reliable, dispatchable generation as possible to achieve energy dominance.”

But the utility companies said in their filing that keeping the unit open isn’t the best way to meet energy shortages. They argued that “Craig Unit 1 is an older, uneconomic unit” and that restoring the unit and maintaining electricity generation would impose “particularly high costs” for utility ratepayers, including customers who do not actually benefit from the energy generated by the plant.

The administration has forced at least five other coal plants across the country to stay open under its energy emergency declaration. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Fox News last week that keeping multiple units open past their retirement dates “likely saved hundreds of American lives” during winter storms.

The administration’s moves have sparked some criticism from industry players who were on board with phasing out coal generation — and sometimes with shifting to renewable energy production — until Trump and his team reversed course.

Michigan utility Consumers Energy said that retiring its J.H. Campbell coal plant — which Trump has extended multiple times — would “allow us to get closer to end coal use, lower our carbon footprint, and add more renewable energy for us to deliver.”

TransAlta formulated a plan to shutter its Centralia Power Plant in Washington state, but has to keep it open through March, even though state law prohibits purchasing new coal power.

“Even the coal plant industry views [reliability must-run] agreements negatively due to their market distortion effects,” Casey Baker, a senior program manager at GridLab, wrote in an analysis last year, adding that the agreements “create uncertainty in the market.”

Across the country, extending the lives of aging coal plants could cost utility ratepayers more than $3 billion per year, according to an analysis last year from Grid Strategies.

Environmental groups and Democratic state officials have also blasted the decision.

Colorado Attorney General Philip J. Weiser said in a filing with the Energy Department last week that the administration’s orders for coal plant units across the country to stay open are “to prevent coal-fired generating plants from retiring, simply because the current administration prefers coal and other fossil fuel generation.”

The administration has repeatedly attempted to block renewable energy development despite a consensus that wind and solar energy can help meet rising energy demands and bolster the grid, and recent evidence that coal is not always the most reliable way to generate electricity.