As judge vacates Trump’s Michigan coal plant orders, what will happen in Indiana?

The Trump administration’s bid to keep a Michigan coal plant running past its planned retirement date was illegal, a panel of federal judges ruled on Friday.

That decision could affect similar cases in Indiana.

Michigan-based Consumers Energy Co. planned to retire the coal-fired J.H Campbell Generating Plant in May 2025, but Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency order requiring that the plant stay open, citing potential power shortfalls in Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, which manages the grid across much of the Midwest.

It was the first of many similar and repeated orders that the Trump administration has issued to U.S. coal plants with planned retirements for more than a year.

Emergency orders were also issued in December 2025 for the two coal-fired units at the Merrillville-based NIPSCO’s R.M. Schahfer Generating Station in northwest Indiana and Houston-based CenterPoint Energy F.B. Culley Generating Station Unit 2. CenterPoint’s Indiana operations serve the southwest part of the state.

The Indiana orders have been reissued every 90 days since.

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the environmental groups and a collection of states — Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota — that sued over the Michigan orders.

The panel unanimously found that the Trump administration exceeded its authority in using the emergency orders to keep the J.H. Campbell plant open, which it said should only be a last resort and exceeded existing reliability safeguards exercised by states, utilities and organizations like MISO.

“The Department’s reading of ‘Emergency’ invites frequent federal interventions that are unsupported by the statute and threaten the stability of the energy market,” the order reads.

While the decision does not directly impact NIPSCO or CenterPoint’s coal units, Indiana-based Citizens Action Coalition Program Director Ben Inskeep said the ruling is a sign of what’s to come for similar litigation. The group joined others in challenging the orders at the Indiana coal plants.

“This confirms that CAC’s interpretation of federal law has been right all along and our characterization the the federal government has conducted unlawful overreach into our decision making in our state is directly on point,” Inskeep said. “This case exactly parallels what’s happened in Indiana.”

The most recent orders for Indiana expire in late September.

The Energy Department did not directly address an IBJ question on whether it intends to continue reissuing the orders at the Indiana coal plants in the coming weeks.

“The Energy Department’s emergency orders were essential for keeping the lights on during Winter Storm Fern,” the agency said in a statement. “At the peak of the storm, coal generation in impacted regions increased 25% compared to the same time last year. In Michigan, the J.H. Campbell Coal Plant in Michigan operated at over 650 [megawatts] every day between Jan. 21-Feb. 1. Rest assured, the Department of Energy will continue to protect and defend energy security for all Americans.”

Friday’s ruling could have implications for how the costs to keep the plants open are paid, too.

NIPSCO and CenterPoint both plan to seek cost recovery from continued operations of the coal units through ratepayers served by utilities across the MISO region at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC.

The utilities have also opened respective rate cases at the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, or IURC, that would allow them to collect directly from their customers for the costs of complying with the orders. The utilities have both separately indicated that they only plan to seek rate recovery at the state-level if full costs are not recovered through FERC.

Inskeep said there will likely be additional litigation involving how costs are handled in each case. Costs could be potentially be recovered from ratepayers, the federal government or shareholders he said.

“If a utility acted appropriately, I think the solution would not be to raise bills for ratepayers, but rather they need to go to the federal government and collect any costs from the federal government associated with complying,” he said, adding, “but I think there’s very strong argument to say utilities that were following these orders should not have been. They were made aware by many stakeholders that the federal government’s interpretation was completely unprecedented and off-base and unlawful and they should have done more to push back.”

Public disclosures from both utilities have indicated that the coal units subject to the Energy Department’s orders are losing money.

CenterPoint Indiana Region President Michael Roeder called F.B. Culley Unit 2 an “inefficient and increasingly unreliable asset” in a February letter to Wright. The letter was obtained by  Citizens Action Coalition in April.

He wrote that the continued operation of the six-decade-old F.B. Culley Unit 2 past March would require significant maintenance on the unit’s boilers and an overhaul of its turbine-generator that could collectively cost up to $18 million.

Meanwhile, the most recent quarterly earnings report for NiSource — NIPSCO’s parent company — indicates that the R.M. Schahfer plant operated at a $68.7 million loss in electricity market sales through June 30, incurring $102.2 million to comply with the order to keep the plants open, while only earning $33.5 million from the market. The utility made a FERC filing to recover $38 million from regional ratepayers in August.

One unit at R.M. Schahfer has been out of service since July 2025, while the other has been undergoing maintenance since February, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported.

Both NIPSCO and CenterPoint told IBJ that they were reviewing the order.