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January 5, 2026 - President Donald Trump closed out 2025 by flexing emergency powers to alter the country’s electricity markets. Coal plants slated for closure were ordered to continue running in the name of grid reliability, while the construction of wind projects was halted because of national security.
The moves infuriated the president’s critics, who claimed Trump is using his emergency authority to aid his favored fuel (coal) and hurt technologies he dislikes (wind). But Trump and administration officials defiantly argued the measures were needed to correct policy interventions by the Biden administration that helped renewables, jeopardized reliability and sent power prices climbing.
The debate underscores how much has changed during Trump’s first year in office. While presidents of both parties have expanded executive power in recent decades, Trump has taken the exercise to new limits. The result is a fundamentally changed energy landscape. Plodding rules and regulations that governed the country’s collection of electricity markets have taken a backseat to Trump’s sweeping executive orders that determine which power plants get built and which ones will shut down. The implications for grid reliability, electricity prices and the planet remain uncertain.
“The way decisions are getting made are very fast paced and not sort of done in a more methodical, comprehensive, strategic approach,” said Devin Hartman, who directs energy policy at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank that has been critical of Trump’s use of emergency powers. “It’s a lot more just one off, what can we quickly do on this as soon as possible to have the most effect and less concerned with procedural considerations, or in some cases, legal questions.”
He added, “It’s just a very different way to approach policy.”
That was on display in the closing weeks of 2025, as the Department of Energy issued orders to keep four retiring coal facilities open, and the Interior Department halted construction of five offshore wind projects. In both cases, the administration cited the emergency powers of the presidency.
DOE invoked a provision of the Federal Power Act known as 202(c) that allows it to direct power plant operators to run a facility for 90-days in the event of an emergency, arguing the coal facilities are needed to ensure grid reliability at a time of mounting electricity demand.
The department ordered a Washington state coal plant to stay open on Dec. 16. It followed up with a similar order for two Indiana coal plants on Dec. 23. On Christmas Day, DOE tweeted a picture of Santa Claus holding a satchel of coal with the caption “coal isn’t just for the naughty this year.” Then, on Dec. 30, it ordered a turbine at a Colorado coal plant to stay open.
Coal supporters cheered the orders.
“Maintaining a diverse set of fuel resources, including coal, is critical to ensuring electric reliability, especially during winter storms and other extreme weather events,” said Michelle Bloodworth, who leads the coal trade group America’s Power. “The Department of Energy’s actions to keep these coal units online will help assure that the lights stay on for millions of people this winter.”
DOE did not respond to a request for comment. But Energy Secretary Chris Wright said when announcing the move to keep the turbine open at Craig Generating Station in Colorado that the decision was necessary to ensure “an affordable, reliable, and secure supply of electricity.”
The order came just days after Craig’s 446-megawatt turbine suffered a mechanical breakdown. State leaders said Colorado was being targeted by Trump, who had recently attacked Gov. Jared Polis (D) as a “bad governor.”
The flurry of actions to aid coal came as Interior officials announced they had received a classified Department of Defense report showing that radar interference by wind turbines is a threat to national security. The order that followed halted work on five projects under construction along the East Coast for 90 days.
The move marked a sharp escalation for a president who has made opposition to wind a hallmark of his second term. On Friday, Trump posted three times on his social media site about the dangers that wind turbines pose to eagles. He made no mention of Interior’s order.
Interior previously proposed revoking permits for projects that had yet to start construction. It also ordered two projects to temporarily stop construction earlier in 2025. The department stepped back both times, once because Trump claimed to strike a deal with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and another time because the order was reversed by a federal judge.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said Trump’s actions were necessary to correct Biden-era policies aimed at shutting down coal facilities. “That is why he declared a national energy emergency on day one and unleashed reliable, affordable energy sources that will ultimately safeguard our economic and national security,” she wrote in an email.
Trump’s aggressive approach represents a departure from his first term, when administration officials considered the use of emergency statutes but followed traditional policy-making channels.
In one high profile instance, the Energy Department proposed subsidizing coal and nuclear plants in 2018, citing national security as the rationale. The plan was unanimously rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. DOE and the White House later debated invoking national security statutes to implement the plan but ultimately decided against it due to internal worries about its costs.
Trump showed no such hesitancy in 2025. DOE invoked its 202(c) emergency authority more times during the last year than any previous administration over a four-year term, according to a tally by ClearView Energy Partners, a consulting firm.
‘Bad Sources’
Trump isn’t the first president to push the bounds of executive power to achieve his political goals, said David Spence, who specializes in natural resource law at the University of Texas, Austin, School of Law. But Trump has been “unusually willing to test the law or to sort of violate the law and then hope that the courts validate it or ratify it after the fact,” Spence said.
Critics argue that it’s hypocritical to block some power plants from being built at a time when the Trump administration is asserting national security reasons to keep others open. The five offshore wind projects under construction would generate enough electricity to supply 2.7 million homes.
One of those projects, Vineyard Wind, is already sending electricity to New England’s power grid. Another, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, is the country’s largest marine wind project at 2.6 gigawatts. It would contribute energy to Virginia, which is seeing electricity demand rise quickly due to mounting power consumption from data centers.
“If we have a reliability crisis, we need everything to get on the system immediately. And if we don’t have a reliability crisis, we don’t need to take a bunch of coal-fired power plants out of the market and prohibit them from retiring,” said Joshua Macey, a professor at Yale Law School who has been critical of the administration’s use of emergency authority.Trump has expanded the definition of what constitutes an emergency, he said. DOE traditionally used its emergency authority to respond to natural disasters or blackouts observed during California’s energy crisis in 2000 — not for potential risks about grid reliability.
“The kind of crisis the administration is pointing to looks categorically different from every single use of the 202(c) in the past,” Macey said.
Ordering coal plants to stay open while halting wind projects might appear contradictory, but it fits with the Trump administration’s wider view that renewables negatively impact grid reliability and electricity prices, said Timothy Fox, an analyst who tracks electricity policy at ClearView Energy.
“The Trump Administration takes the position that incremental renewables do not equate to incremental generation capacity, because more solar and wind can push out conventional generation, notwithstanding rising power demand,” he wrote in an email.
That type of thinking points to a flaw in the Trump administration’s approach, said Hartman, the R Street analyst. He said administration officials were getting “information from bad sources” about the impact of renewables on the grid. While wind and solar projects do not contribute to reliability to the same degree as natural gas or nuclear plants, the electricity they do generate is a positive for the electric system, he said.
Hartman said he was sympathetic to the administration’s concerns about maintaining grid reliability, but not its use of emergency authority to achieve its goals. It’s a response to the Biden administration’s effort to favor renewables while curtailing fossil fuel production, he said.
“That put the political right in the position to counteract those things, unfortunately, more by picking their own winners and losers to contradict the left,” Hartman said. “We kind of need this adult conversation, actually, about the fuel wars and saying: ‘This is not benefiting anybody, you guys. This is not going to help affordability, reliability or the environment to just constantly have the seesaw of picking winners and losers.’” |
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