A fourth emergency order keeps a Colorado coal plant open past its 2025 retirement

The Energy Department has ordered Unit 1 at Craig Station, a coal-fired unit in Craig, Colorado, to stay available to run from Sept. 27 through Dec. 25, 2026, even though the unit was originally scheduled to shut down at the end of 2025. Order No. 202-26-49, issued under the name of Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Sept. 25, is the latest in a string of emergency directives for the plant.

The order does not rest on one owner alone. It names six parties that must act: Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, the grid operator Southwest Power Pool, Platte River Power Authority, Salt River Project, PacifiCorp and Public Service Company of Colorado. Each is told to help keep the unit ready for service through the end of the year.

What Order 202-26-49 requires of the Craig Station owners

According to the department’s announcement of the Craig decision, the order directs those parties to take all measures necessary to keep Unit 1 available to operate. The department says the unit remains an asset for reliability in the Rocky Mountain region of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, and that it is needed to address elevated reliability risks during atypical weather. The stated aim is to reduce the risk of power outages that could threaten public health and safety.

The order’s own page adds a narrower instruction for Southwest Power Pool, which must “employ economic dispatch of Craig Unit 1 only during hours necessary to meet the emergency.” Economic dispatch means the unit is called on when its output is needed rather than run around the clock. The department presents that limit as a way to mitigate blackout risk while minimizing costs to ratepayers, and the press release describes the same goal as protecting taxpayers.

The order is in effect “beginning on September 27, 2026, through December 25, 2026,” a window of roughly three months. The page that hosts the order does not set out the emergency findings behind it, and it does not describe reporting duties or cost recovery, so those details sit in the full order document the page links to.

Four emergency orders for one coal unit

The first order in the sequence came on Dec. 30, 2025, just as the unit was due to retire. Order No. 202-25-14 ran until March 30, 2026 and told Tri-State, Platte River Power Authority, Salt River Project, PacifiCorp and Xcel Energy to keep Unit 1 available to operate, coordinating with the Western Area Power Administration and Southwest Power Pool West. Several parties asked for rehearing in January 2026. The department issued a notice on March 2 saying rehearing was denied by operation of law, and on June 24 it issued Order 202-25-14B addressing the arguments raised.

The department lists the Craig orders as a sequence: the December 2025 order, two more in 2026, and now 202-26-49, which makes the fourth. Its index of 2026 emergency orders is where the two intervening orders are filed. Their dates and terms were not reviewed for this article, so the only firm timeline is the one bookended by the December 2025 order and the September 2026 order described here.

The Federal Power Act authority behind the orders

Each of these directives is issued under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, codified at 16 U.S.C. 824a. The statute lets the government act during a war or when it finds an emergency, such as a sudden increase in demand or a shortage of energy, facilities or fuel, and to order “such temporary connections of facilities and such generation, delivery, interchange, or transmission of electric energy” as will best meet the emergency and serve the public interest. Where affected parties cannot agree on terms, it allows terms to be set, including compensation or reimbursement.

A separate provision applies when an order may conflict with an environmental law or regulation: such an order must expire within 90 days, though it can be renewed or reissued for further periods of up to 90 days each, after consultation with the federal agency responsible for the environmental interest involved. Whether the Craig orders fall under that provision is not stated on the pages reviewed, even though both the December 2025 order and the current one run for about three months.

Wright framed the decision in political terms. In the department’s release he said that “For over the past decade, state and federal leaders have harmed Coloradans’ wallets and energy security,” and that the Trump Administration will keep acting to avoid losing “critical generation sources.” He added that “Americans deserve access to affordable, reliable, and secure energy to power their homes all the time.”

The release also places Craig inside a national count, saying that more than 17 gigawatts of coal power has been kept online since 2025. That figure covers all such orders across the country, not this unit alone, and the release credits the president’s leadership for preventing premature retirements. What the pages reviewed do not provide is a dollar figure for keeping Craig Unit 1 ready, or any statement on how those costs will be divided among the six named parties and their customers, which leaves the question of who pays for the plant to the full order text.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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