Washington's largest climate polluter shuts down despite federal order

The Pacific Northwest’s largest pollution source has shut down, and Washington state officials want to keep it that way.

Canadian company TransAlta’s coal-burning power plant in Centralia, Washington, shut down Dec. 19, according to grid data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The plant has not re-started since then, despite a Dec. 16 emergency order from U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright to keep operating.

Washington state officials are challenging the Trump administration’s emergency order.

A state law enacted in 2011 required the Centralia plant to shut down by Dec. 31, while a 2019 law prohibits utilities from selling coal-based power in the state after 2025.

“There's no emergency,” said attorney Kelly Wood with the Washington Attorney General’s Office. “The authority that they're drawing upon here is reserved for times of war and times of actual, imminent emergency situations. So think of things like hurricanes, earthquakes.”

The Washington AG’s Office has requested the U.S. Department of Energy revoke the emergency order.

“The notion that there's some imminent threat of power loss in the Northwest is just false,” Wood said. “It's been a very wet season so far, and our reservoirs are all above capacity, and so hydropower is very abundant currently.”

The energy department has 30 days to reply before the state can sue to overturn the order.

Six environmental groups have filed a separate request with the Department of Energy seeking to revoke the emergency order.

RELATED: Washington’s biggest polluter ordered to keep burning coal by Trump administration

Trump administration officials claim the coal power is needed because much of the country is at elevated risk of blackouts if extreme weather simultaneously hits broad stretches of the nation.

The energy department’s press office declined an interview request.

“The Trump Administration is committed to preventing the premature retirement of baseload power plants and building as much reliable, dispatchable generation as possible to achieve energy dominance,” Energy Department spokesperson Caroline Murzin said by email.

Officials with TransAlta, headquartered in Alberta, did not respond to interview requests.

Under the Federal Power Act, the secretary of energy can issue emergency orders effective for up to 90 days to stabilize the power grid.

The Trump administration has forced a coal-burning plant in Michigan to keep running since May by issuing three consecutive 90-day orders.

The TransAlta emergency order expires March 16.

Lauren McCloy with the Northwest Energy Coalition, one of the nonprofit groups challenging the emergency order, said the Centralia plant is typically idled each spring, when high flows on the Columbia River produce an abundance of cheap hydropower.

McCloy said the plant appears to be in “cold standby” mode—shut down but able to be switched back on again.

“They have been planning for the shutdown of this plant for a long time, and so they've deferred maintenance at the plant,” she said. “They have not been out shopping for a new coal contract. We don't really know what the status is of the ability for them to get more coal or to keep the plant operating.”

On Dec. 9, TransAlta announced it had reached a deal with Puget Sound Energy, Washington’s largest utility, to convert the Centralia plant and run it on natural gas for another 16 years. If that conversion takes place, the plant would become Washington’s largest gas-burning power plant.

The company’s website says the coal-to-gas conversion project “remains a priority for TransAlta.”

Natural gas produces less carbon dioxide and other pollutants when burned than coal does, but upstream leaks of methane, a climate super-pollutant, can make gas as harmful to the climate as coal.

RELATED: Washington's last coal power plant will transition to natural gas

Though the Centralia plant was considered a “baseload” source of electricity — more reliable than intermittent sources like wind or solar power — grid data shows it had shut down entirely for the first week of December before shutting down again on Dec. 19.

“The plant is affected by market conditions,” McCloy said. “Presumably, the reason the plant wasn't running during that time was because Puget Sound Energy didn't need the power, and the plant was not competitive with the other power that was available on the market.”

Puget Sound Energy and TransAlta had a long-term purchase agreement that expired Dec. 31.

Competition has pushed many coal plants out of business nationwide and replaced them with cheaper, gas-fired plants and wind turbines.

Blocking the nation’s aging coal plants from retiring would cost electricity consumers between $3 billion and $6 billion annually over the next three years, according to a report commissioned by environmental groups.

A Department of Energy fact sheet on Thursday said the Trump administration was “ending the war on beautiful, clean coal”— President Trump’s preferred term for the dirtiest of fossil fuels — by preventing the closure of five coal power plants.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but it is patently false to call coal “clean.”

In 2023, despite having only one of its two boilers running, the Centralia plant was Washington’s largest source of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and of health-threatening pollutants including particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and mercury, according to the Washington Department of Ecology.

On Dec. 29, TransAlta Centralia Vice President Mickey Dreher signed an agreement with the Washington Department of Ecology to clean up hazardous waste from 55 years of burning coal at the site.

Combustion of fossil fuels is the primary cause of the earth’s warming climate.

According to the Washington State Climate Office, 2025 was the state’s second-warmest year on record, with December 2025 its warmest December on record.

International scientific organizations reported in January that the last 11 years have been the hottest 11 years on record, with the pollution-induced warming accelerating in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

RELATED: Scientists call another near-record hot year a 'warning shot' from a shifting climate