Craig coal plant: 3 Colorado cases freeze while DOE seeks a rehearing

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Craig Station Unit 1 was supposed to shut down on Dec. 31, 2025. Nearly 10 months later, it is still under federal order to stay available to operate.

On Monday, Oct. 26, the Department of Energy (DOE) asked the full D.C. Circuit to throw out a September ruling that narrowed its power to issue those orders.

The ruling was about a coal plant in Michigan. Three Colorado cases have been frozen behind it since June.

What the court said in September

On Sept. 11, a three-judge panel vacated the emergency order DOE used to stop the retirement of the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan. Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote the opinion. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Robert Wilkins joined it.

The panel gave Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act a narrow reading. Federal intervention under that section is “rare and authorized only when states, their utilities, and [regional transmission organizations] are unable or unwilling to respond,” the court held.

Then it turned to DOE’s evidence.

DOE had quoted a North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) report saying the Midwest grid operator was “at elevated risk of operational reserve shortfalls during periods of high demand or low resource output.”

The panel pointed to what the order left out. “DOE characterized that statement as describing an emergency even though the very same report concluded that MISO had ‘adequate anticipated resources’ for ‘peak load conditions,'” the opinion says.

Colorado has made a version of that argument against the Craig orders since January.

The ruling did not touch those orders. It read the same federal emergency power DOE used to issue them.

What DOE filed Monday

The DOE petition asks for rehearing by the full court or, in the alternative, by the same panel. 

DOE argues the panel invented two requirements that are not in the statute. One is that the department defer to states before acting. The other is that a 202(c) emergency be a last resort.

Retirements in one state can strain the grid in others, DOE argues, and it says it should not have to wait for state regulators to act. It tells the court it is “uniquely positioned” to weigh what a plant closure does to reliability across state lines.

“The panel admitted this is not the ordinary meaning of ’emergency,'” the petition says. It calls the panel’s reading of the statute one “derived from a seeming 1930s understanding of how the Nation’s electricity grid operates and is regulated.”

The petition does not take up the panel’s criticism of how DOE used the NERC report. It repeats the elevated-risk finding in its account of the case and never answers that criticism. Elsewhere it quotes the department’s own appellate brief for NERC’s description of the grid as facing a “five-alarm fire.”

DOE also tells the court the case is bigger than Campbell. “This is a question of exceptional importance,” the department writes.

Why Colorado is waiting

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser asked DOE to rescind the first Craig order in a January filing. The department did not rule within the 30 days the statute gives it. On March 2, it issued a notice saying the requests for rehearing were “deemed denied by operation of law.”

That cleared the way to court. Weiser petitioned for review on March 18.

Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and Vote Solar filed a second case. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority, two of the plant’s own owners, filed a third.

All three were consolidated. Then, on June 8, the court put them on ice at DOE’s own unopposed request.

The abeyance order directs the parties to file motions to govern “within 60 days of this court’s disposition of No. 25-1159.” Disposition, not decision. 

The court separately ordered the clerk to withhold the mandate in the Michigan case until seven days after any timely rehearing petition is resolved.

Monday’s filing is that petition. As of Tuesday, no motion to govern had appeared on the consolidated docket.

Two of the five owners oppose keeping it open

What makes the Craig fight unusual is who is on which side.

Tri-State and Platte River asked DOE in January to reconsider. Their filing argues that the order is an uncompensated taking of their property under the Fifth Amendment, both a physical taking and a regulatory one, and that recovering their costs through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does not fix it.

“FERC cost recovery shifts costs onto ratepayers; it does not assure compensation from the government,” the request says.

Two cost figures in the filing measure different things.

Running and maintaining the whole unit has averaged $12.99 million a year over the past decade, leaving out coal and depreciation. Tri-State puts the cost of its own 24 percent share at $23.9 million a year with coal and depreciation counted in.

The unit was also broken when DOE ordered it to stay available. A valve failure took it offline on Dec. 19, 2025, 11 days before the order. Bringing it back meant repairing two main steam stop valves and doing baghouse maintenance the owners had put off because the unit was closing.

Tri-State said the unit was available again on Jan. 20, roughly a quarter of the way through a 90-day order.

Platte River general manager and CEO Jason Frisbie signed on to the request alongside Tri-State. “While Platte River will continue to comply with federal law, we disagree with the need to keep the plant open,” he said.

Tri-State CEO Duane Highley said the cooperative supports DOE’s reliability goals, but added that “as not-for-profit entities, we face issues that other utilities do not.”

Colorado’s regulators had reached the same conclusion about need months before any federal order existed. 

Approving Tri-State’s electric resource plan in August 2025, the Public Utilities Commission found that Craig Unit 1 “is not required for reliability or resource adequacy purposes based on the record in this ERP,” language Weiser quotes back to DOE in his rehearing filing.

Where the plant stands now

Craig Unit 1 is a coal unit in Moffat County that started running in 1980. Federal generator data rates it at 446.4 megawatts nameplate and 427 megawatts net. Colorado’s filings use the net figure.

Salt River Project holds the largest ownership share at 29 percent, followed by Tri-State at 24 percent, PacifiCorp at 19 percent, Platte River at 18 percent and Xcel subsidiary Public Service Company of Colorado at 9 percent. Those figures come from Colorado’s rehearing filing and are rounded.

DOE has issued a series of orders on the unit since Dec. 30, 2025. The current one, Order 202-26-49, took effect Sept. 27 and runs through Dec. 25. It covers Unit 1 alone and directs Southwest Power Pool to dispatch it only during hours needed to meet the emergency.

There is a reason the orders run 90 days at a time.

Under the Federal Power Act, a 202(c) order that may conflict with an environmental law expires within 90 days, and the department may renew it for further 90-day periods. In Monday’s petition DOE told the court the statute “imposes no limit for how long an ’emergency’ might persist.”

Rehearing has been sought on each of the first three Craig orders. DOE did not act on any of those requests within 30 days. Notices of denial by operation of law followed on March 2, June 1 and Aug. 24.

The department did answer the arguments once, in a June 24 order taking up what Colorado, the plant’s owners and environmental groups had raised. It found “no basis to grant rehearing” on the remedy and said the owners’ takings arguments did not “warrant rehearing.” It rewrote parts of its reasoning and left the order itself alone.

“DOE is not changing the outcome of the Emergency Order,” it wrote.