DOE Keeps 951 MW of Indiana Coal Available to December 18, Eight Days After a Court Vacated the Same Power
- FERC & Federal Policy & Markets Regulatory
Marin Holt
- 0
- 9 minutes read
- Capacity held available: 951 MW
- Order period: September 20 through December 18, 2026
- Schahfer Q1 capacity factor: 17%
- Sierra Club daily cost, Schahfer: $174,000
The US Department of Energy told Northern Indiana Public Service Company, CenterPoint Energy and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator on September 19 to keep three Indiana coal units available through December 18, 2026. The orders cover Units 17 and 18 at NIPSCO’s R.M. Schahfer station and Unit 2 at CenterPoint’s F.B. Culley station. Utility Dive puts the Schahfer units at 847 MW and Culley Unit 2 at 104 MW. The orders therefore hold 951 MW past retirement dates the utilities set years ago. DOE issued them eight days after the D.C. Circuit vacated an order built on the same statute.
What the order does
The directive runs from September 20 through December 18, 2026. It requires the two utilities and MISO to take all steps needed to keep the named units ready. It also tells them to use economic dispatch to hold down consumer costs. DOE first ordered these units to run in December 2025, days before their scheduled retirement. The March renewal arrived as DOE-Order No. 202-26-19-Schahfer and DOE-Order No. 202-26-20-Culley, and expired June 21. A third period ran through September 19. This is the fourth 90-day block, and the four blocks are contiguous. That arithmetic is ours, not DOE’s, but the start and end dates are the agency’s own.
Why It Matters
On September 11 the D.C. Circuit vacated DOE’s order keeping Consumers Energy’s 1,420 MW J.H. Campbell plant online in Michigan. Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote that it is the states, informed by federal, regional and load-serving entity assessments, that bear the responsibility to plan for and avert reliability risks. The Indiana orders rest on the same section 202(c) authority and survived the ruling because they were never before that court. CenterPoint said it is reviewing the decision and evaluating its potential implications. NIPSCO said its focus remains on serving customers safely and reliably while complying with applicable legal and regulatory requirements. Neither said it would seek release.
For anyone planning a retirement in MISO, the practical lesson is that a filed retirement date is now a proposal. Four consecutive orders covering a year of operation is the pattern a developer should price, not the 90 days each order names.
Enforcement Reality
Availability is not generation, and the gap is measurable. Utility Dive, reading EIA data in June, found Schahfer at a 17% capacity factor in the first quarter of 2026. The average for the same three months over the prior four years was 24%. Culley Unit 2 ran at 14% in its first three months under order, against a prior average of nearly 22%. One of the two Schahfer units had not run since the previous summer. Neither ran in March. NIPSCO president and COO Vince Parisi told an Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission reliability forum on May 19 that the Schahfer units were offline for repairs into the third quarter. Across the five plants then under orders, first-quarter output came to 1.5 million MWh, down 65% from 4.3 million MWh a year earlier. The units are paid to stand ready and are producing less than before anyone ordered them to.
Who pays is still unsettled. Cost allocation sits at FERC. The Organization of MISO States argued in January that the commission should approve a plan only on a showing of clear need and demonstrable benefits. At least ten state regulators asked for stakeholder review. A Sierra Club analysis put the daily cost at roughly $174,000 for Schahfer and $21,000 for Culley. Utility Dive reported that returning Culley to service could run up to $20.5 million and take the plant offline for 14 weeks.
Critical Perspective
Read the order against the operating record and the word doing the work is “available.” NIPSCO’s own president told state regulators in May that the Schahfer units were out for repairs into the third quarter. One of them had not run since the previous summer. An order can compel a utility to keep a unit ready; it cannot compel the unit to be fixed, and the December 18 date says nothing about whether either unit will turn in November.
The emergency is also asserted rather than sized. DOE’s announcement points to a resource adequacy report and to outage risk, but publishes no reserve margin, no load forecast and no megawatt shortfall for MISO this winter. Four consecutive 90-day orders on the same units is a year of continuous operation justified each time by a condition the agency has never had to quantify in the document that imposes it.
Two numbers here deserve less confidence than they usually get. The $174,000 and $21,000 daily figures are a Sierra Club estimate, produced by a party opposing the orders, and FERC has not ruled on cost allocation, so no tested number exists yet. And the Indiana orders are not lawful because a court said so. They are intact because nobody has put them in front of the D.C. Circuit, which addressed only the Campbell order and reached it on the narrow ground that a mere possibility of a shortfall is not an emergency. Whether Indiana’s facts clear that bar is untested.
Sources
- US Department of Energy, September 19, 2026
- Michigan Attorney General, September 11, 2026
- Indiana Public Media, September 15, 2026
- Utility Dive, June 23, 2026
- Utility Dive, March 24, 2026
- Utility Dive, January 26, 2026
