A reluctant Tri-State Generation and Transmission is now burning coal and sending electricity out onto the grid from its Craig Unit 1, after the Western power grid authority said potential for outages at other plants meant the northwestern Colorado power is needed to balance regional resources.
Tri-State had long planned to shutter Craig 1 for good at the end of 2025, but federal emergency orders from the Trump administration required the co-op to instead to keep the generating unit in good repair and available to operate. Craig 1 had been available but idle in the first months of 2026, while Tri-State, the Colorado attorney general and environmental groups all fight the Department of Energy emergency orders in court.
At the end of March, the DOE extended its first 90-day emergency order for another three months.
Then on April 1, Tri-State and other utilities in the area switched their regional power coordinator to the Southwest Power Pool’s Western Interconnection, which serves to balance electricity supply and demand across multiple states and can call on individual power plants to start up when needed.
On April 7, the power pool authority issued a resource advisory for its Western region, a low-level escalation of a seven-point resource warning system.
The advisory was needed “due to load uncertainty, increased potential for low output from wind and other variable energy resources …leading into peak hours, and potential for resource outages,” the Southwest Power Pool’s update said.
The pool called on Craig 1 to start generating power April 10 to help balance the grid. Tri-State spokesperson Mark Stutz said Craig was continuing to generate coal power for grid buyers through at least Friday, absent new instructions from the pool.
Tri-State is one of five owners of three units at Craig, also known as the Yampa Project; Tri-State serves as the operating owner. All of the owners had agreed on the previously planned closure dates for Units 1 and 2. Tri-State is the sole owner of Craig Unit 3. Unit 3 is scheduled to close Jan. 1, 2028, and Unit 2 is scheduled to retire Sept. 30, 2028, Tri-State said.
Selling the electricity from Craig 1 does not solve the larger question posed by the emergency orders: Who will pay the broader fixed costs of maintaining and operating a coal unit that Tri-State preferred to shut down? The power pool only pays the market rate for the electricity it asks Tri-State to generate.
Nonprofit groups who want coal plants shut down to meet Colorado’s greenhouse gas emission targets have estimated it could cost more than $80 million to operate Craig’s coal unit through the year.
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