The Energy Orders: Emergency, Dominance, Coal, Nuclear and the Grid

On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, President Trump signed two energy orders that set the frame for everything after: EO 14156, "Declaring a National Energy Emergency," and EO 14154, "Unleashing American Energy." Supporters describe them as clearing the way for the power an AI economy needs. Opponents describe them as a fossil fuel giveaway dressed as an emergency. Both descriptions are arguments. Here is what the paper says.

EO 14156: the energy emergency

The order invokes the National Emergencies Act and finds that the country's energy production, transportation, refining and generation are inadequate, that this drives high prices, and that demand from "the next generation of technology" will make it worse. It singles out the Northeast and West Coast, blaming state and local policies there.

What it directs:

• Agencies must identify and use any lawful emergency authority to speed up energy leasing, siting, production and transport, including on federal land, and send recommendations to the President if eminent domain or the Defense Production Act would help.
• Agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers must find projects that could use emergency permitting under the Clean Water Act section 404 and the Rivers and Harbors Act, and use those provisions "to the fullest extent possible."
• Agencies must identify projects that could use the emergency consultation rules under the Endangered Species Act, and the Interior Secretary must convene the Endangered Species Act Committee, the cabinet-level panel that can grant exemptions, at least quarterly.
• EPA must consider emergency waivers for year-round E15 gasoline sales.

Then comes the definitions section, the most important part. "Energy" means crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals. Wind and solar are not on the list. Neither is battery storage. So the emergency fast track, as written, covers hydro and geothermal but not solar and batteries, which EIA expected to make up 32.5 GW and 18.2 GW of the 63 GW of utility-scale capacity planned for 2025. That choice is deliberate and is the heart of the dispute.

EO 14154 and the orders that followed

EO 14154 sets policy: more production on federal lands and waters, leadership in minerals, and elimination of what it calls the "electric vehicle (EV) mandate." Section 7, titled "Terminating the Green New Deal," ordered agencies to immediately pause disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, naming EV charging programs, while they reviewed them.

Order	Date	What the text directs
EO 14213, National Energy Dominance Council	Feb 14, 2025	Creates a council in the Executive Office of the President, chaired by the Interior Secretary with the Energy Secretary as vice chair
EO 14261, coal	Apr 8, 2025	Promotes coal mining and coal power
EO 14262, grid reliability	Apr 8, 2025	Tells DOE to streamline Federal Power Act 202(c) emergency orders and publish a uniform method for judging regional reserve margins within 90 days
EO 14299 to 14302, nuclear	May 23, 2025	Reactors at military and DOE sites, NRC reform with an 18-month decision limit, DOE test reactors, fuel supply; covered in detail in Nuclear Regulation
EO 14315, subsidies	Jul 7, 2025	Tells Treasury to strictly enforce the end of wind and solar tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
EO 14386, coal for defense	Feb 11, 2026	Tells the Secretary of War, with Energy, to seek long-term power purchase agreements with coal plants to serve military installations
EO 14421, foreign grid equipment	Aug 26, 2026	Declares a second national emergency, this one about foreign-supplied grid equipment (below)

From an order to a power bill: the Campbell plant

EO 14262 led to a DOE report on July 7, 2025, which warned that outage risk could rise 100-fold by 2030 if 104 GW of firm generation retires without replacement. DOE has used that framing, along with NERC's 2025 long-term assessment (see Grid Reliability and the Future), to justify emergency orders keeping older plants running.

The best documented case is the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, owned by Consumers Energy and scheduled to close in May 2025. DOE issued a 202(c) order to keep it running on May 23, 2025. By August 2026 it had issued six back-to-back orders, the latest running to November 14, 2026, according to the Michigan Attorney General. Michigan Public's August 20, 2026 report and the Attorney General's September 11 release add these facts:

• Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has sought rehearing of each order and filed five petitions for review in the D.C. Circuit. Illinois and Minnesota joined the challenge to the first order.
• On September 11, 2026, a three-judge D.C. Circuit panel unanimously vacated the first order. Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote that section 202(c) is a narrow, last-resort backstop and that DOE had not shown an emergency that the utility, the state and the grid operator could not handle. Challenges to the five extension orders were held in abeyance.
• Nessel says Consumers Energy has reported $295 million in plant-related costs from May 2025 through June 30, 2026.
• A Grid Strategies report commissioned by environmental groups estimated $139 million a year in costs to ratepayers in the MISO region.
• FERC approved spreading the costs across customers in MISO's north and central regions, not just Consumers Energy's own customers.
• DOE says the plant reduces outage risk, and after the ruling it said its emergency orders helped prevent blackouts during winter storms in early 2026.

EO 14421: an emergency about equipment

The August 26, 2026 order uses IEEPA and the National Emergencies Act. It finds that foreign-supplied grid equipment could carry "digital backdoors" and that reliance on foreign supply creates a supply-chain risk, made worse by demand from data centers and AI.

• It prohibits acquiring, importing or installing foreign-produced bulk-power equipment, but only where the Energy Secretary determines the transaction involves a "Covered Foreign Entity" and poses an undue risk. Covered entities are countries under U.S. arms embargoes or sanctions, or ones the Secretary finds are acting against U.S. security, and people controlled by them.
• For equipment already installed, the Secretary may require it to be identified, isolated, monitored, disconnected or replaced, after weighing reliability and the availability of secure replacements.
• The equipment list is long: transformers, grid-connected inverters, battery storage, uninterruptible power supplies for critical infrastructure, backup generators, circuit breakers, protective relays and industrial control systems, among others. Lines at 69 kV and up count; local distribution does not.
• Implementing rules are due within 120 days, and recommended changes to federal purchasing rules within 180 days.

Watch this one locally. Data centers buy exactly the equipment on that list, and transformers are already scarce. A rule that bars a major supplier could slow projects of every kind, including the ones the other orders are trying to speed up.

Who supports and who challenges

The administration's case: prices and reliability are national security matters, demand is rising fast, and permitting delays block supply. NERC's assessments of tightening reserve margins and DOE's 2025 report are its main evidence.

The challengers' case: the emergency is declared for a chosen list of fuels, the cheapest new resources are left out, and emergency orders push costs onto ratepayers who were not part of the decision. In State of Washington v. Trump, filed May 9, 2025 in federal court in Seattle, 15 states challenged EO 14156 and permits issued under it; an amended complaint on January 30, 2026 added Colorado and New Mexico for 17 states. The government moved to dismiss on March 5, 2026. No ruling on the merits appears in the docket summary as of October 2026. Nessel, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund are pressing the 202(c) challenges, and won the first ruling on September 11, 2026, when the D.C. Circuit vacated the original Campbell order. DOE has issued similar orders for plants in Indiana, Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania and Washington, and those orders face their own challenges.

Where the evidence is clear: demand forecasts are rising, and some regions face tight reserve margins. Where it is contested: whether emergency powers are the right tool, whether excluding wind, solar and storage helps or hurts reliability, and who should pay.