CenterPoint Energy, the company that owns Culley Unit 2, has described it as its “smallest and most inefficient coal unit.” But that didn’t stop the Trump administration from ordering it to stay open in December 2025. In February, the company specifically asked the Trump administration not to renew its stay-open order for the plant, describing it as unreliable and unnecessary for grid reliability. The DOE reupped the order anyway.
Centralia in Washington state
The more than 50-year-old plant owned by TransAlta was slated for a retrofit that would turn it into a gas-burning facility before Trump’s stay-open order in December 2025. Although TransAlta says it’s still committed to that plan, it’s also seeking tens of millions of dollars in reimbursement for costs incurred to keep the coal plant online — a move that’s frustrating utilities in the region since the plant has sat idle in the months since the DOE’s order. Electric customers might be on the hook regardless.
Utilities in Colorado had been planning for about a decade to retire Craig Unit 1 at the end of 2025, but the Trump administration forced it to remain online. In February 2026, two cooperative utilities that co-own the plant filed a petition asking the DOE to reconsider its stay-open order, arguing that it will force their members to bear unnecessary costs. The agency has not relented.
Already, the plant’s owners have had to take on the costs of repairing a faulty valve that sent the plant offline in December 2025, and some estimates project that running the plant for a year beyond its retirement date could cost up to $150 million.
Environmental groups and Colorado’s Democratic attorney general have filed legal challenges to the DOE order.
Unit 1 at the Stanton coal plant got its stay-open order in June 2026. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that propping up the nearly 40-year-old facility could add an average of $21 to monthly electric bills if the costs are solely assigned to customers of the Orlando Utilities Commission, the municipal utility that owns the plant.
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