DOE declares 'emergency' to keep 64-year-old coal plant open; appeals court finds no emergency existed

…(cont) That is the whole plot. A plant was closing on schedule. A cabinet secretary declared an emergency to stop it from closing. A federal court read the emergency and found no emergency in it.

Michigan, Minnesota, and Illinois had challenged the order together, joined by the Environmental Defense Fund, whose lead counsel, Ted Kelly, said the point plainly: families and businesses in the Midwest were being asked to cover hundreds of millions of dollars to keep an old, expensive plant burning. That is not a rounding error. That is a line item, and it was headed for a utility bill before Friday's ruling.

Grist called this one of the first successful legal challenges to the administration's broader energy-emergency agenda — the label the Department of Energy has been reaching for when a coal plant's retirement date arrives on schedule. The court did not rule on the agenda. It ruled on this filing, this plant, this word. But a word that fails once, in writing, in front of judges, is a word that has to be defended the next time someone reaches for it.

Nobody in this filing disputes that Campbell is old. Nobody disputes it was scheduled to close. The only dispute was whether "emergency" meant what the statute says it means, and the court's answer was no — not close, not arguable, not this time. The plant stays retired. The order does not.

Here is the last line of the ruling, in plain English: there was no emergency here. Sixty-four years old, one scheduled retirement, one invented emergency, one federal court that read the document and said so.