Barb Deardorff lives near the coal plant in Wheatfield. “I think this is all just a political football,” she said of the federal government’s order to keep the coal-fired plant running.
Alex Garcia | Earthjustice
WHEATFIELD — Barb Deardorff was looking forward to the day when she wouldn’t see the giant smokestacks — or the pollution pouring out of them — looming in the distance near her rural Jasper County home.
The 49-year-old organizer for the Indiana teachers’ union has lived 2 miles away from NIPSCO’s coal-fired Schahfer Generating Station her entire life.
Some days, the smoke from the towers turned the sky into a yellowish-brown mirror, Deardorff described. Water from the well on her property has tested high for arsenic and lead.
When the utility in 2018 announced it would shutter the coal units, Deardorff was elated. The last two were set to close at the end of 2025, bringing an end to the Schahfer facility that was named one of the nation’s worst super polluters in 2016.
“I couldn’t believe it was finally happening and we don’t have to worry about their pollution anymore,” she said.
That excitement disappeared Dec. 26 when the U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order requiring NIPSCO to take all the necessary steps to keep the coal units operating for 90 days.
The same mandate was sent to CenterPoint Energy’s F.B. Culley Generating Station in Warrick County, where one of the coal units was to be retired at the end of 2025.
Deardorff was stunned. “I was really disappointed when I heard about the Trump administration’s order,” she said. “I think this is all just a political football.”
MOUNTING LEGAL CHALLENGES
Indiana wasn’t the first state to receive an order to keep a coal plant open. The Trump administration this year has demanded facilities in Washington, Michigan and Colorado remain operating despite years of planning to close them.
The administration argues it has the authority to require plants to remain open under the Federal Power Act, which allows the Department of Energy to issue electricitygeneration orders during wartime or an energy emergency.
The agency claims the soaring demand for more electricity coupled with the closure of coal plants will create an energy deficit that equates to a national emergency. The coal plants must stay open to maintain the reliability of the electric grid, according to the orders.
But consumer advocates say that argument has a major f law: There is no energy emergency.
In November, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. reported the grid operator for Indiana and surrounding states had “normal risk” for the winter season.
The move to keep the coalburning plants running represents an “unprecedented power grab” by the federal government to commandeer the state’s right to make energy decisions, according to Ben Inskeep, program director for Citizens Action Coalition, an Indiana c o n sume r advocacy group.
“These illegal orders are pushing the really dirty, really expensive forms of energy that are raising our bills and directly harming people living with the massive pollution from these facilities,” he said.
Environmental groups are asking a federal judge to reverse similar emergency orders issued in Michigan by the Trump administration. The Michigan attorney general is also suing the Department of Energy.
The decisions in those cases could directly impact the mandates keeping Indiana’s two coal plants open.
At the same time, Indiana advocacy groups have jointly threatened to sue NIPSCO if the utility tries to pass on to ratepayers the cost of keeping the coal units operating.
“We will not let NIPSCO simply add unneeded, unlawful and very high costs to peoples’ electricity bills without a fight,” said Sameer Doshi, an attorney with Earthjustice, which is representing the Indiana groups.
‘A HEAD SCRATCHER’
Trump isn’t the first president to use the Federal Power Act to issue orders allowing for more energy production, but he’s the first to use it so often and so forcefully.
From 1977 to 2024, the act was used 19 times by the energy department, according to the lawsuit filed by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. Last year, under the Biden administration, it was used once to help alleviate potential energy shortages following Hurricane Milton in Florida.
Just last year, the Trump administration used the act 16 times.
Historically, orders have been directed exclusively to address short-term emergencies like natural disasters and extreme weather, according to the lawsuit. They are almost always requested by power grid operators or utility companies to mitigate short-term energy disruptions, notes the suit.
But Trump’s order to keep coal plants open past their scheduled retirement date marks a sharp — and illegal — departure from how the act was intended to be used, Nessel argues in the lawsuit.
Rather than address emergencies, the orders attempt to dictate energy policy to favor coal over renewable energy “under the guise of grid reliability concerns,” she argued.
The fact the orders keep Indiana’s coal plants open for only an addit ional 90 days also under cut s the Trump a dmi n i s t r a t i o n ’ s claims that the facilities are needed as a longterm energy solution, explained Janet McCabe, the former deputy administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under President Joe Biden.
Even more telling are the administration’s orders to stop clean-energy projects that are nearly operational and cutting nearly $8 billion in funding for wind and solar projects, all of which could quickly add significant amounts of power to the grid, argued McCabe, now a visiting professor at Indiana University.
“It’s kind of a headscratcher about these orders for coal plants while renewable projects, especially wind, are not being supported by the current administration,” she said. “To the extent that the country needs more power on the grid, we should be supporting all kinds of energy projects.”
A COSTLY PROPOSITION
The illegal orders will force utility companies to spend millions of dollars to keep them running, according to Inskeep with the Citizens Action Coalition.
At NIPSCO’s Schahfer Generating Station, one of the coal units that must continue to operate has a broken turbine blade and had been under a “forced outage” since the summer.
NIPSCO President Vincent Parisi told the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission this year the unit would need to be rebuilt and could take as much as six months to fix.
Inskeep said the cost of the rebuild and repairs would be “substantial.” At the Michigan coal plant, the utility reported it cost $80 million to operate the facility past its planned retirement date of Sept. 30, averaging more than $615,000 per day.
That’s why the Citizen Action Coalition joined three other Indiana environmental groups to send a letter reminding NIPSCO it wasn’t required to follow an illegal order from the Trump administration, Inskeep explained.
The groups also told NIPSCO they would sue for the “recovery of any imprudently incurred expenditures” made to keep the coal unit operating.
NIPSCO acknowledged in an email to the EPA that it would require “significant capital investment” to keep the coal units running past the end of last year. That cost could only be justified if the units were allowed to remain open for at least three years, wrote Fred Gomos, senior director of environmental policy with NiSource, the utility’s parent company.
NIPSCO administrators wrote in an emailed statement that it would comply with Trump’s order and any subsequent orders, but its “long-term plan to transition to a more sustainable energy future remains unchanged.”
That’s little comfort for Deardorff, who lives near the power plant. While the Trump administration issues orders to win political points with the coal industry, residents like her, she said, will continue to suffer from air and water pollution created by the facility.
“I haven’t seen the Trump administration show any concern about our health,” Deardorff said. “This is really just trying to take the United States back to the 1950s when Trump thinks we were at our apex.”
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