Between January 2025 and October 2026, the Department of Energy invoked Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act on 61 separate occasions — a volume that outpaces the 21 total invocations recorded across the full span from 1977 through 2024. Under that provision, the Department of Energy holds the authority to direct how electric energy is produced, moved, exchanged, or distributed whenever wartime conditions or a declared emergency call for action in the public interest.
Lawsuits followed as those directives were issued at an accelerating pace, and a federal appeals court ultimately stepped in to define the limits of the statute's reach.
On 20 January 2025, a national energy emergency took effect after Trump signed Executive Order 14156. Signed on April 8, 2025, Executive Order 14262 — carrying the title "Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid" — laid out a government position that the nation's power network draw on every available generation resource, with particular attention to those backed by fuel supplies designed for redundancy and extended continuity, as a way to respond to a declared energy emergency, sustain adequate output, and keep pace with rising consumption.
A directive issued under the April 2025 Executive Order set an accelerated timeline for the Department of Energy's Section 202(c) review process, activating whenever grid operators flagged an anticipated near-term supply shortfall, with preventing a full breakdown of electricity distribution named as the underlying objective. The order also directed the Secretary of Energy to put in place procedures for keeping any generation resource judged essential within a vulnerable region connected to the grid, while barring any facility with a nameplate capacity exceeding 50 megawatts from withdrawing from the bulk-power system or switching its fuel type where such a switch would diminish net generation capacity.
Under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, the Department of Energy holds authority to declare an emergency whenever conditions such as an unexpected spike in power demand, insufficient electricity supply, strained generation or transmission infrastructure, inadequate fuel or water reserves at generating facilities, or comparable disruptions warrant such a finding. The agency retains authority to initiate proceedings on its own initiative or in response to a complaint, and may do so without advance notice, a formal hearing, or a written report.
Under that law, any emergency directive issued by DOE is required to align with applicable environmental rules and standards to the degree that doing so is practicable. Under a Section 202(c) order, any entity whose compliance would put it in breach of environmental law is shielded by the statute from both civil and criminal liability arising from that breach. Under the law, any emergency directive that runs counter to environmental statutes carries a 90-day cap, though the Department of Energy retains the authority to extend that directive across as many additional 90-day intervals as it judges appropriate.
Seven days ahead of the J.H. Campbell Power Plant's planned decommissioning date, on 23 May 2025, a Section 202(c) order from the Department of Energy directed both the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and Consumers Energy to keep the 1,560 MW coal-fired Campbell Power Plant in West Olive, Michigan, available for a 90-day operating window. Rehearing petitions against the order were filed by environmental organizations, the Michigan Attorney General, the states of Minnesota and Illinois, and the Organization of MISO States.
Faced with the agency's failure to act on the rehearing requests before the statutory deadline expired, those requests were treated as having been turned down by operation of law, prompting Michigan to file a petition with the D.C. Circuit. The matter was referred back for further appellate consideration. The case is docketed as Michigan v. U.S. Department of Energy, Case No. 25-1159, in the District of Columbia Circuit.
On 11 September 2026, the D.C. Circuit issued its ruling. To interpret what qualifies as an emergency under Section 202(c), the court drew on both the FPA's written language and how that language is arranged within the statute. In laying out how the Federal Power Act divides regulatory responsibility, the ruling drew a boundary around federal reach — confining it to matters that fall outside state jurisdiction — while pointing to the statute's own language as the basis for keeping generation facilities beyond Washington's direct regulatory grasp.
Under Section 202 of the FPA, the court identified three tiers of federal authority, placing Section 202(c) at the outermost tier — a provision the court described as a narrow backstop available only when other avenues have been exhausted. The court ruled that a qualifying emergency under that provision requires a grid-reliability threat demanding an immediate response from DOE, with the additional condition that DOE first determine the state responsible for resource adequacy has not taken, and will not take, timely steps to head off an unacceptable threat to grid reliability before federal intervention becomes available. On that basis, the D.C. Circuit then turned to applying the standard.
On both grounds DOE put forward to justify the Campbell order, the Circuit found that neither rose to the level of an emergency. Where the rationale put forward by DOE drew on selected passages from a NERC reliability assessment and a MISO auction presentation, that very NERC document elsewhere determined that MISO held adequate anticipated resources to cover peak load demand — a finding DOE's own position did not contest, given its recognition that summer capacity procurement by MISO had met the threshold required.
The department's backup argument — that grid reliability across most regions would deteriorate to unacceptable levels within a five-year window — did not satisfy the statutory definition of an emergency, given that resource adequacy concerns of that timeframe are conventionally handled through established state and regional planning mechanisms. The ruling further observed that treating Section 202(c) as broadly as DOE proposed risks warping the price signals that markets rely on, potentially deterring investment in new energy resources by pushing capacity prices lower than underlying conditions warrant.
Pointing to the order's lapsed status as evidence that vacatur would cause little disruption, the court set aside the Campbell order on the basis that a remand could not address the underlying defect.
Section 202(c) directives from DOE — a mix of newly issued orders and renewals — continued to arrive in the aftermath of the D.C. Circuit's ruling. The administration contended that urgent conditions remain in place over both the immediate and extended periods ahead, pushing back against the appellate court's ruling.
At present, seven power-generating facilities operate under unilateral Section 202(c) directives, with the Department of Energy rolling over each directive on a rolling 90-day basis. Among the generating stations listed are the coal-fired Campbell Power Plant in West Olive, Michigan, rated at 1,560 MW; the dual-fuel Eddystone Generation Station Units 3 and 4, situated in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, with a combined capacity of 760 MW; Centralia Generating Station Unit 2, a 729.9 MW coal-burning facility located in Centralia, Washington; and the Schahfer Generating Station Units 17 and 18, a coal-powered facility in Wheatfield, Indiana, contributing 847 MW of capacity. Three additional coal-powered generating units are part of the inventory: a 103.7 MW installation at Warrick County in Indiana operating under the Culley Generating Station Unit 2 designation, a 446.4 MW facility in Craig, Colorado, known as Craig Station Unit 1, and a 464.5 MW plant in Orlando, Florida, identified as Stanton Energy Center Unit 1.
A tariff-revision filing submitted by TransAlta Centralia Generation LLC — seeking reimbursement for expenditures tied to its adherence to a pair of DOE Section 202(c) orders — drew a without-prejudice denial from FERC on October 1, 2026. Expense allocation under that ruling fell to load-serving entities spread throughout the Northwest portion of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, rather than landing exclusively on the balancing authorities and reliability coordinators that the DOE orders had identified by name.
On the question of advance filing, the commission determined that rate recovery under FPA Section 202(c) carries no such requirement, and further found that TransAlta retained a pathway to recoup standby costs even in the absence of any actual unit operation throughout the DOE-mandated emergency window.
Legal disputes over the DOE's Campbell order extensions remain on hold, expense-recovery proceedings sit unresolved at FERC, and the door stays open for additional states or utilities to mount their own challenges to the department's invocation of Section 202(c) as questions surrounding prolonged renewals and cost allocation continue to take shape.
