Trump-era “emergency” extensions for coal plants like Eddystone hide a $100M price tag. Here’s why smart green technology is the better reliability strategy.
Most companies looking at their 2025 energy bills see the same thing: keeping old fossil fuel plants alive is getting brutally expensive.
Eddystone, a coal- and oil-fired power plant in Pennsylvania, is a prime example. The Trump administration’s so‑called “emergency” order to keep it running has now been extended for the third time, alongside a similar order for the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan. According to the Sierra Club’s “Ticked Off” cost ticker, that decision has already pushed costs into the tens of millions of dollars — a $100 million power plant boondoggle in slow motion.
This matters because those costs don’t vanish. They show up on bills, distort energy markets, and crowd out investment in green technology like solar, wind, storage, and modern grid software. In a year when businesses are racing to meet climate targets and cut operating expenses, propping up uneconomic coal plants is basically the worst of both worlds.
In this post, I’ll break down what’s going on with these “emergency” coal plant extensions, why they’re so expensive and risky, and how smarter, AI‑driven clean energy solutions could replace them — often at lower cost and with far less volatility.
What’s Really Going On With These Coal Plant “Emergencies”?
The key fact: Eddystone and J.H. Campbell were scheduled to retire because they’re old, inefficient, and no longer competitive. Instead of letting the market and basic engineering realities play out, the administration used a rarely invoked emergency authority to force them to stay online.
How the fake “emergency” works
In simple terms, here’s the playbook:
- The grid operator or utility raises concerns about reliability.
- The federal government issues an emergency order allowing a plant to run outside normal environmental or market rules.
- The plant gets guaranteed cost recovery, often above-market, plus extra fees.
- Customers and taxpayers quietly pick up the tab.
On paper, this is supposed to be temporary — think days or weeks during an extreme weather event. In reality, we’ve now seen multiple extensions, essentially turning a short-term tool into a long-term subsidy for coal.
The uncomfortable truth: once an emergency order is in place, it creates powerful financial incentives to keep pushing the deadline. Reliability becomes a political talking point rather than a technical question.
Why Eddystone and J.H. Campbell were set to close
Plants like Eddystone and J.H. Campbell are being retired for three main reasons:
- Economics: New wind and solar projects, backed by energy storage, routinely bid power cheaper than old coal. In many regions, clean energy now undercuts coal by 20–50% on a levelized cost basis.
- Maintenance risk: Aging turbines, boilers, and control systems mean more forced outages and higher repair bills.
- Environmental compliance: Stricter rules on mercury, sulfur, particulates, and carbon make these plants even more expensive to run.
So when an old coal plant gets a stay of execution, it isn’t because it suddenly became efficient. It’s because policy overruled both economics and engineering.
The Hidden $100 Million Price Tag of Extending Coal
Extending a coal plant’s life doesn’t just keep emissions flowing. It locks in a stack of direct and indirect costs that are easy to overlook if you only glance at a monthly bill.
Direct costs: what the “boondoggle” really buys
When the Sierra Club calls this a $100 million power plant boondoggle, they’re talking about a mix of:
- Above-market energy costs: Coal plants often need guaranteed payments that exceed wholesale power prices just to break even.
- Capacity payments and reliability premiums: Extra fees to keep the plant available “just in case,” even if it doesn’t run much.
- Fuel and logistics: Coal transport, handling, ash disposal — all of it gets more expensive for older, smaller fleets.
None of that spending builds anything new. It doesn’t modernize the grid, deploy batteries, or add a single megawatt of clean generation. It’s pure sunk cost to keep yesterday’s infrastructure alive.
Indirect costs: opportunity lost
The bigger problem isn’t just the money wasted — it’s what that money could be doing instead.
For roughly $100 million, a region could:
- Install 50–70 MW of utility-scale solar, especially with today’s lower panel prices
- Pair solar with battery storage to cover peak demand windows
- Deploy AI‑driven demand response across commercial buildings and industrial loads
- Upgrade grid monitoring and control systems to handle distributed renewables
Those investments improve reliability structurally. They also create ongoing savings instead of locking in high operating costs.
If you’re a business leader, that’s the real question: are you underwriting stranded coal assets through your bills, or are you positioning your operations to benefit from cleaner, cheaper power over the next decade?
Why Old Coal Is a Reliability Risk, Not a Safety Net
Supporters of these orders like to frame coal as a “reliability backstop.” The story goes: wind and solar are intermittent, batteries are new, so we need coal plants on stand-by for emergencies.
Here’s the thing about that argument: it ignores how modern grids actually fail.
Coal plants fail too — and often at the worst time
During extreme cold snaps and heat waves, coal plants are just as likely — sometimes more likely — to trip offline due to frozen equipment, fuel constraints, or mechanical failures. When that happens, the grid operator is stuck. You can’t spin up a broken turbine by wishful thinking.
Modern reliability planning looks at probabilistic resource adequacy — not nostalgia. It models how different resource mixes behave during stress events. The results from multiple regions are consistent:
- A diverse mix of wind, solar, storage, flexible gas, and demand response performs better than a fleet heavy on aging coal.
- Digital control and forecasting — especially AI‑enhanced — often add more reliability per dollar than keeping a single coal plant alive.
In other words, the coal “safety net” is fraying, and the tools that actually improve reliability look very different.
How green technology strengthens the grid
If you work in energy, facilities, or manufacturing, there are three green technology trends that matter more for reliability than any one coal plant:
-
Grid-aware demand response
Buildings, EV chargers, and industrial loads can automatically reduce or shift usage when the grid is stressed. AI forecasts make these responses precise instead of blunt. -
Distributed energy resources (DERs)
Rooftop solar, community solar, behind-the-meter batteries, and microgrids spread risk. If one asset fails, others keep running. -
AI‑powered forecasting and optimization
Machine learning models predict demand, renewable output, and equipment failures with far more accuracy than legacy planning tools.
Put together, you get a grid that fails less often, recovers faster, and costs less to operate — without keeping risky coal plants on life support.
Where AI Fits: Replacing “Emergency” Coal With Smart Clean Energy
The Trump administration’s repeated extension of coal plant emergency orders is basically a sign of a planning problem. If you need to keep invoking 11th‑hour authority, it’s because you didn’t build a robust, flexible system ahead of time.
That’s exactly where AI and advanced analytics change the game for clean energy.
Smart planning beats last-minute bailouts
AI-powered tools help utilities, grid operators, and large energy users answer questions like:
- How much solar, wind, and storage do we need in each zone to cover peak hours reliably?
- Which feeders or substations are likely to become congestion hotspots in the next 3–5 years?
- Where should we place batteries or flexible loads to avoid costly transmission upgrades?
By simulating thousands of scenarios, these tools identify portfolios that meet reliability standards without propping up legacy fossil assets.
Real-time operations: replacing coal’s “dispatchability”
One reason coal hung around so long is that operators could ramp it (somewhat) predictably. Today, that role is shifting to:
- Battery storage, which responds in milliseconds
- Flexible gas plants used sparingly as a bridge
- Controllable loads, like data centers and EV fleets
AI systems orchestrate these assets in real time, taking in:
- Weather and solar/wind forecasts
- Price signals
- Grid constraints
- Equipment status
The result is dispatchability without the emissions, water use, and fuel risk of coal.
If your business is planning long-term energy strategy, this is where you want to be investing — not in regions that keep writing blank checks to 50‑year‑old boilers.
What Businesses Should Do Instead of Funding Coal Boondoggles
You can’t directly stop a federal emergency order. But you can decide whether your organization is passively exposed to these decisions or actively building a cleaner, cheaper, more resilient energy position.
Here’s what I recommend to companies that want to align with green technology instead of getting dragged along by fossil politics.
1. Audit your exposure to legacy fossil costs
- Review your tariffs and riders for reliability, capacity, or “system benefits” charges that might be tied to old plants.
- Ask your utility or energy supplier how much of your bill supports legacy coal assets.
- If you’re in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or similar markets, push for transparent reporting on emergency order costs.
2. Shift procurement toward clean and predictable
- Prioritize renewable energy contracts (PPAs or green tariffs) with fixed or indexed pricing.
- Look at on-site solar plus storage for facilities with large rooftops, parking lots, or land.
- Use AI‑driven energy management systems to flatten peaks, which directly reduces your exposure to capacity and reliability charges.
3. Treat flexibility as an asset
Demand flexibility is often cheaper than new generation. You can:
- Enroll in demand response or flexible load programs.
- Use building automation and AI to dynamically adjust HVAC, process loads, and EV charging.
- Explore microgrids for critical facilities, combining solar, storage, and intelligent control.
4. Align sustainability and finance
Your sustainability targets and your CFO’s cost objectives are finally pointed in the same direction. Use that.
- Build a business case that compares “status quo with coal exposure” vs. “clean and flexible mix” over 10–15 years.
- Include carbon pricing risk, ESG requirements, and stakeholder expectations in the model.
- Treat every dollar locked into propping up coal as a missed opportunity to modernize.
Most companies get this wrong by focusing only on today’s kilowatt-hour price. The real risk is being stuck in a region or contract structure that keeps bleeding money into aging fossil infrastructure while your competitors enjoy cleaner, more stable, and more predictable power.
The reality? It’s simpler than you think. Retiring plants like Eddystone and J.H. Campbell on schedule and replacing them with a portfolio of renewables, storage, and AI‑guided demand flexibility is not some distant vision. It’s already happening in multiple markets, and it’s usually cheaper than stretching out a coal plant’s last years under perpetual “emergency.”
For organizations serious about climate commitments and cost control, the path is clear: step away from the coal boondoggles and lean into green technology that actually earns its keep.
If your team is planning energy strategy for 2026 and beyond, the real question is this: are you budgeting for the past — or designing for the grid you actually want to operate in?