DOE Renews Indiana Coal Orders Days After a Court Struck One Down

The US Department of Energy ordered Northern Indiana Public Service Company, CenterPoint Energy and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator on 19 September 2026 to keep coal units at the R.M. Schahfer and F.B. Culley generating stations in Indiana available to operate. The orders run from 20 September to 18 December 2026, the department said in its announcement. Units at both plants had been scheduled to shut at the end of 2025.

Eight days earlier, on 11 September, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated a Department of Energy order that had forced Consumers Energy to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant running at West Olive, Michigan. The Michigan Department of Attorney General, which argued the challenge, said the court ruled the order an unlawful use of section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. That is the same authority the new Indiana orders rest on.

Why the Indiana orders survived the ruling

They were never before that court. Attorney General Dana Nessel's office said on 11 September that it had filed six requests for rehearing with the department and five petitions for review with the D.C. Circuit, and that the ruling was the first decision on any of them. It reached the Campbell order only. NIPSCO said it was reviewing the decision and that its focus remains on serving customers safely and reliably while complying with applicable legal and regulatory requirements, the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported on 14 September. CenterPoint said the decision does not change the department's direction for the Culley 2 generating unit and that it will continue to comply. Neither utility said it would seek release.

What a year of orders has cost

Consumers Energy has reported $295 million in costs associated with the Campbell plant between May 2025 and 30 June 2026, and is seeking to recover them from electric customers across the north and central regions of MISO, the Michigan Attorney General's office said on 11 September. The retirement plan the order overrode had been expected to save Michigan ratepayers nearly $600 million. For Indiana, the only public estimate comes from the Sierra Club, which is opposing the orders and put the net daily cost at roughly $174,000 for Schahfer and $21,000 for Culley. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has not ruled on cost allocation, so there is no tested figure.

Availability is also not generation. Utility Dive, reading Energy Information Administration data in June 2026, found Schahfer running at a 17% capacity factor in the first quarter of 2026 against a 24% average for the same three months across the previous four years, and Culley Unit 2 at 14% against a prior average of nearly 22%. The department's announcement says the two plants have proved critical to MISO's operations during periods of high demand and low intermittent output, including Winter Storm Fern, and credits the administration with saving more than 17 gigawatts of coal generation from going offline in 2025. Both of those are the department's own claims.

The honest reading is that the department is buying an option on a cold winter and charging the premium to ratepayers, and that it has never had to price the option in the document that creates it. Its announcement points to a resource adequacy report and to the risk of outages, and publishes no reserve margin, no load forecast and no megawatt shortfall for MISO this winter. What the D.C. Circuit did not decide is whether Indiana's facts would clear the bar it set in Michigan's, because nobody has yet put them in front of it.