Salt River Project (SRP) customers may pay up to $704 per megawatt-hour for a Colorado coal plant to operate under emergency orders from the Trump administration in the first half of 2026. This is almost eight times the cost of solar plus storage resources, according to the utility’s estimates.

Craig Generating Station in Moffat County, Colorado, is a coal fired power plant with three units totalling 1,285 megawatts (MW) of generation. SRP owns 29% each of Units 1 and 2 of the facility. Other owners of Units 1 and 2 include PacifiCorp, Platte River Power Authority, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, and Xcel Energy Colorado. Unit 3 is owned wholly by Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association. All three units are operated by Tri-State. Unit 1 was scheduled by the owners to cease operations on December 31, 2025, because of the high costs of operating the coal powered facility.

Trump administration keeping Craig open while customers pay the costs

The Trump administration’s Department of Energy (DOE) issued a 90-day order to Tri-State on December 30, 2025 to keep Unit 1 of the coal plant open under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. The order was issued one day before Unit 1 was scheduled to close. DOE’s initial and subsequent orders state that “emergency conditions” exist because of increasing demand from data centers and domestic manufacturing. The orders direct SRP, Tri-State and the other owners of Craig Unit 1 to follow direction from the Southwest Power Pool, the balancing authority and reliability coordinator, to ensure that the plant is available to operate.

Similar orders to keep coal plant units in operation were issued by DOE for the J.H. Campbell Power Plant in Michigan, Centralia Generating Station in Washington State, Schahfer Generating Station and F.B. Culley Generating Station in Indiana, and Eddystone Generating Station in Pennsylvania. 

On September 11, 2026, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trump’s DOE illegally ordered the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan to stay open. The court found that DOE’s “reading of ‘emergency’ invites frequent federal interventions that are unsupported by the statute and threaten the stability of the energy market.”

Two of Craig’s owners, Tri-State and Platte River, objected to DOE’s order in January 2026, ultimately filing suit in April. The case was later joined with suits filed by the Colorado attorney general’s office and environmental groups against the DOE’s order on Craig. The federal court’s ruling in the Michigan case could impact the Colorado case because the facts in both cases are similar. In the meantime, utilities including SRP and their customers are incurring costs to keep Craig Unit 1 in operation.

In a filing made in the lawsuit against DOE regarding Craig Unit 1, Xcel estimated their share of costs to comply with DOE’s order as “more than $4 million to date during 2026.” The company noted that the final costs are still being calculated. Xcel owns approximately 10% of Craig Unit 1. Provided that costs are shared proportionately among the owners, the total cost to keep Craig 1 in operation could total $40 million. SRP’s share for that unit alone could be as much as $11.6 million.

Costs to run Craig Unit 1 are uneconomic for SRP customers

Though DOE required Craig Unit 1 to be ready to operate because of emergency conditions, the plant sat mostly unused during the first six months of the year. Reporting from Colorado Public Radio highlights that from January to June in 2026, Craig Unit 1 did not operate, except in April. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s data shows that in April, Craig Unit 1 produced 56,782 MWh. Craig’s other units ran significantly more during the first six months of 2026: Unit 2 produced 644,969 MWh and Unit 3 produced 615,284 MWh. Notably, Craig Unit 1 was not called into service during the month of June, even though the balancing authority issued numerous resource advisories, alerting generating operators that there may be increased demands on the system. 

Based on the cost estimate of SRP’s share in the first half of the year, SRP customers may have to pay $704 per MWh for the operation of the Colorado coal plant that they and the other owners sought to close at the end of last year. This figure is in contrast to the renewable resource costs that SRP identified in its most recent integrated system plan, which estimated solar plus storage costs as being under $90 per MWh. Other owners of Craig identified the cost of solar plus storage at as low as $48 per MWh.

SRP has not intervened in the lawsuit against DOE.