Catch the latest energy news from around the region. Check back for these monthly Energy News Roundups.
Coal plants in Indiana and Wisconsin hit the jackpot last week: They’re getting close to $50 million of the $425 million the Trump administration announced for modernization projects at a dozen coal plants across the country. Hallador Power Company’s Merom Generating Station south of Terre Haute is expected to get $27.2 million to improve water treatment measures. Alliant Energy’s Columbia Energy Center north of Madison is in line to receive $19 million for reliability and efficiency upgrades. Both plants have already been kept in operation well past their original closure dates.
The Trump administration staved off the closure of another Indiana coal plant last year by ordering it to stay open. There’s just one problem: NIPSCO’s R.M. Schahfer plant has been offline for repairs since the end of February. It’s expected to stay offline until at least October, NIPSCO told grid operators last month. One of the plant’s two coal units had been out of service for months before the emergency order due to mechanical failures, while the other went offline Feb. 28 for planned maintenance.
And state and federal lawyers clashed in a Washington courtroom over whether the Trump administration’s order to keep Michigan utility Consumers Energy’s J.H. Campbell coal plant operating past its retirement date was needed to avert a power shortage. The plant on Lake Michigan was scheduled to close last May until Energy Secretary Chris Wright intervened. The U.S. Department of Energy has said the order is in accordance with a national energy emergency that President Donald Trump declared on his first day back in office. Attorneys for Michigan and other states say there is no emergency.
Two former Ohio utility executives have been indicted — again — on bribery, fraud and corruption charges after their last trial ended with a hung jury. In a statement announcing the reindictment, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said FirstEnergy was “hijacked by two scheming executives who sought to control the regulator that influenced the company’s stock prices.” Jurors in the last trial couldn’t decide whether former FirstEnergy CEO Chuck Jones and senior vice president Mike Dowling paid a $4.3 million bribe to the state’s top utility regulator -– partly to bail out a pair of unprofitable coal plants.
Meanwhile, Ohio’s tax break for data centers cost the state 11 times more than expected last year. Data centers in Ohio are exempted from sales taxes, and the exemption was originally estimated to cost $136 million. In 2024, it cost about $555 million; in 2025, it cost nearly $1.6 billion. Companies benefitting from the exemption include Meta, Alphabet and Amazon. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced a pause on new exemptions days after Signal Ohio reported on the cost to the state.
More energy news, in case you missed it:
- Energy company Enbridge can continue building a new stretch of its Line 5 pipeline in northern Wisconsin but must halt work in waterways where it needs additional permits, a Wisconsin judge ruled.
- Lawmakers in Minnesota — where a moratorium on new nuclear generation remains in place — approved $500,000 in funding to study the possibility of building new nuclear plants in the state.
- A Michigan campaign to ban utility companies and large government contractors from donating to political causes said it turned in over 562,000 signatures to get on the November ballot.
- “This could very well turn into the site where cancer gets cured,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the groundbreaking of a $16 billion data center campus outside Ann Arbor.
- Frito-Lay is not refusing to buy potatoes grown on farmland that’s hosted solar installations, the snack food manufacturer said after Michigan and Pennsylvania lawmakers spread the false claim on social media.
