Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy ordered the owners of 10 generating units at six power plants — five of them coal-fired — to run the units past their retirement dates to address what DOE says is a reliability emergency across most of the country’s grid.

So far, the emergency orders’ impact on power production has been mixed. One power plant hasn’t operated at all under its 202(c) order, one ran for a two-week stretch, three are producing less power than they did at the same time in previous years and one is generating electricity roughly in line with its previous output, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

Combined, five of the power plants produced 1.5 million MWh in the first quarter of this year under the DOE’s orders, down 65% from the 4.3 million MWh they generated in the same period last year. One of the six plants, in Pennsylvania, hasn’t reported its output to the EIA this year. It generated just 27,000 MWh in the first quarter last year.

Never before in the Energy Department’s nearly 50-year history has it ordered generating units to continue producing power after their scheduled retirement dates. To do so, it has used a string of 90-day emergency orders issued under the Federal Power Act’s section 202(c). DOE has reissued those orders for all the units before the initial orders expired.

Industry observers expect the DOE will continue reissuing the 202(c) orders to prevent the power plants from retiring and it may add additional units to the list. Earlier this month, the department ordered the Orlando Utilities Commission, a municipal utility, to continue running its nearly 465-MW, coal-fired Stanton Unit 1 instead of placing it in “cold shutdown.” OUC initially planned to convert the plant’s two coal-fired units to burn gas, but it later bought a nearly 475-MW gas-powered plant in Osceola it could run instead of converting Unit 1, thus its plan to put that unit in cold shutdown.

The Energy Department didn’t respond to a set of questions, including what conditions would cause it to stop issuing the orders.

To understand how the power plants are operating under the 202(c) orders, Utility Dive examined the EIA’s monthly production data releases to calculate capacity factors for those units. Capacity factor is a measure of how much electricity a power plant produces over a given time compared with its potential output. We compared the capacity factors for the units since they have been under emergency orders to their capacity factors in the same time period in each of the previous four years. 

The 202(c) orders for four of the power plants effectively started on Jan. 1, when the units were set to retire. Those plants are: Unit 2 at TransAlta’s Centralia plant in Washington; CenterPoint Energy’s F.B. Culley Unit 2 in Indiana; Units 17 and 18 at Northern Indiana Public Service Co.’s R.M. Schahfer plant in Indiana; and Craig Unit 1 in Colorado, run by Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association.

The DOE’s emergency orders for Consumers Energy’s majority-owned J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan and Units 3 and 4 at Constellation Energy’s Eddystone plant in Pennsylvania effectively started on June 1, 2025, when those plants were scheduled to be shuttered.

The most recent EIA data for Eddystone runs through December 2025. The information for all the other units runs through March, the most recent available data.

Since the orders were issued, Consumers Energy’s 1,420-MW Campbell power in Michigan has run at a 46% capacity factor since June 1, down from a nearly 66% average in the same periods in the previous four years, EIA data shows.

The 730-MW Centralia plant in Washington hasn’t produced electricity since the DOE ordered it to be available starting Jan. 1, a spokesperson for TransAlta, the plant’s owner, said in an April 29 email.

Since the start of the year, when its DOE emergency order, took effect, the 446-MW Craig Unit 1 produced electricity only for a two-week period, from April 10 through April 25, in response to Level 1 Resource Advisories the Southwest Power Pool issued due to resource outages and load and intermittent resource uncertainty, according to Amy Robertson, Tri-State’s vice president of communications.

CenterPoint’s 104-MW F.B. Culley Unit 2 operated at a 14% capacity factor in its first three months under its DOE order, down from an average of nearly 22% in the same months in the previous four years, according to EIA data.

The 380-MW Eddystone units in Pennsylvania have operated at a 0.5% capacity factor, roughly in line with past operations, according to the EIA data. The units run on oil and gas, unlike the other coal-fired power plants that DOE ordered to delay their planned retirements.

NIPSCO’s 847-MW Schahfer units in Indiana ran at a 17% capacity factor in the first quarter this year, down from an average of 24% in the first three months in the previous four years. However, one of the plant’s two units hasn’t run since last summer, and neither unit ran in March.

Power plants’ age takes a toll

In part, the power plants are producing less than they did in the past because of their age and the fact that they were about to be shuttered.

“If you are planning on retiring [your power plant] ... you're not spending your top dollar in the last few years to make sure it's running, that it’s efficient,” said Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab, a nonprofit technical consulting organization.

The power plants’ owners likely deferred investing in the facilities toward the end of their expected operations, thus keeping them running under the DOE orders may require additional spending, according to Greg Wannier, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club, a group that is challenging the orders in court.

“There's a risk that if the plants are kept online for too long, those deferred maintenance projects will start increasing the price tag of these orders significantly,” Wannier said.

The issue is already affecting the two Indiana power plants under 202(c) orders.

NIPSCO’s Schahfer units are offline for repairs, which the company expects to finish in the third quarter this year, Vince Parisi, NIPSCO president and COO, said during a May 19 summer reliability forum hosted by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.

NISPSCO declined to provide details on repair scope, timing or cost estimates. “Total costs to comply with the federal order are still being evaluated as reliability work continues, and we do not speculate on potential future federal action beyond the current [202(c)] order,” Jessica Cantarelli, communications manager for the utility, said in a June 3 email.

CenterPoint pushed back against the orders, in part because of the repairs needed to comply. Complying with the DOE’s orders will require “substantial investment to support an inefficient and increasingly unreliable asset,” Michael Roeder, CenterPoint Energy’s Indiana region president, said in a Feb. 17 letter asking DOE Secretary Chris Wright to let the utility retire its Culley unit.

CenterPoint estimates it will have to spend up to $20.5 million and take the plant offline for 14 weeks to make the repairs to keep the plant operating, according to the letter.

“Our team continues evaluating additional operational factors as there may be additional investments needed, driving estimated costs higher,” Roeder said in the letter. “These factors make clear that extending the life of Unit 2 is neither practical nor financially responsible, underscoring the need for a more prudent and economically sound path forward.”

In Colorado, the owners of Craig Unit 1 have been planning to shut it down for a decade and since 2019 have maintained it at a level that was “appropriate” for its expected retirement, two of the owners — Tri-State and Platte River Power Authority — said in an April 29 filing asking the DOE to reconsider a 202(c) order for the unit.

Complying with DOE’s order required the unit’s owners to repair out-of-service equipment like feedwater heater tubes, ash blowers and side stream filter pumps, Tri-State and Platte River said.

Tri-State and Platte River on April 29 asked the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit to overturn the DOE’s first 202(c) order for Craig Unit 1.