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Across Illinois, dozens of communities are locked into contracts to buy power from the state’s biggest coal plant for decades to come. But two cities in search of cheaper, cleaner energy want out.
The Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a nonprofit that procures power for 32 municipal electric utilities, has been asking its members to extend their commitments to buy energy through the group until 2055, even though existing contracts don’t lapse for another decade. Most communities signed on, but two that account for almost half of IMEA’s power demand — the Chicago suburbs of Naperville and St. Charles — have rebelled, declining to renew their contracts past 2035.
A major reason: residents’ desire to get cleaner energy and break ties with the Prairie State Energy Campus, a 1.6-gigawatt facility in rural southern Illinois that is the state’s largest coal plant. IMEA owns 15% of Prairie State, which makes up over a third of the agency’s power portfolio. IMEA also has an ownership stake in the Trimble coal plant in Kentucky, meaning coal represents almost half of its generation assets.
Since the two cities aren’t planning to re-up with IMEA, they are free to negotiate power supply deals with other companies that they hope can provide renewable energy and cheaper rates.
“We don’t want to have financial responsibility for burning coal. That’s what this is all about,” said Ted Bourland, a Naperville resident who belongs to the volunteer community group Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force. He said that task force members and city leaders have already talked with power suppliers, like Constellation and NextEra, that indicated interest in providing Naperville with energy, including renewables.
The cities’ refusals to renew commitments involving the coal plant may seem procedural or mundane at first glance. But the saga shows that residents can successfully demand a say in where their energy comes from. The effort is also an example of how communities are moving to ditch coal power even as the Trump administration works to prop up the declining industry.
Challenges still lie ahead for Naperville and St. Charles. It may prove complicated for them to find new deals that prioritize clean sources, as proliferating data centers in the region race to secure energy, especially renewables, to help tech giants meet their climate goals.
“You’re a municipal utility in northern Illinois, you have a decent load,” said Mark Pruitt, an energy consultant and Northwestern University adjunct professor who formerly ran the state agency that procures energy for Illinois’ two biggest utilities. “But you’re not as large as the data centers that are all competing for capacity in northern Illinois. What makes you think you’re going to compete favorably with the data centers?”
Bourland said Naperville could consider continuing with IMEA down the road, especially if the agency can offer a deal with more renewables.
But IMEA says that it needs promises of future investment from its members to construct or acquire new generation — including renewables.
“Without extensions beyond 2035 with our member cities, IMEA cannot procure new, favorable 20-year renewable energy agreements,” said Staci Wilson, IMEA vice president of government affairs and member services. She added that other municipalities extending their commitments allowed IMEA to contract for 150 megawatts of solar in 2024.
Wilson said that IMEA would be “open to discussions” with Naperville in the future, though it would consider market conditions and other factors in deciding whether to renew with Naperville at a later date.
Prairie State was developed starting in 2007 by the utility American Municipal Power and the coal company Peabody Energy, owner of a nearby mine that serves the plant. The plant cost $5 billion to build and began operating in 2012. Under a complicated structure, the complex is owned by nine electric utility agencies, including IMEA, that procure electricity for more than 200 municipalities across eight states.
The communities were promised that Prairie State would provide stable and affordable energy rates. However, the deals became problematic for some towns, which struggled to cover the plant’s construction costs and even faced bankruptcy, since they had taken on debt to finance the investment and didn’t receive as much revenue or power from the plant as expected in its early years. Peabody sold its ownership stake in Prairie State in 2016, leaving municipalities to bear a larger share of the debt.
Under IMEA contracts, residents pay rates that may be higher or lower than what other Illinois residents pay, depending on fluctuations in the power markets. Over the coal plant’s life, their bills have been slightly higher than they would have been with ComEd, the utility serving most of the Chicago area, according to an analysis by Pruitt that was commissioned by Naperville. In addition to their power bills, the municipalities will be paying through 2035 for the cost of building the coal plant. Since IMEA is a part owner of the coal plant, its members can benefit from the sale of the facility’s energy when power prices and power demand are high, making the plant’s energy competitive on the market. Conversely, when market prices are low, coal plant ownership is not as good a deal.
In recent years, scores of coal plants have closed because they can’t compete with cheaper energy sources. In 2021, clean energy think tank RMI published a report finding that customers would likely save money if Prairie State were replaced by clean energy sources
In 2024, IMEA began asking municipalities to renew their contracts through 2055. So far, 29 have done so. The village council in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Winnetka voted for renewal in June 2025, despite opposition from residents who wanted cleaner energy.
But pushback in St. Charles yielded a very different result.
“Over the course of more than a year and a half, we consistently showed up at city council meetings, we consistently met one-on-one with the city councilmen and the mayor,” said resident Debi Mader, retired from a long career in marketing for Sears Holdings. “We got enough people interested in the topic — it’s not a very sexy topic.”
Finally, in August, St. Charles officially declined to renew its IMEA contract.
Residents in Naperville — IMEA’s largest energy user — similarly rallied opposition to renewing the contract. Bourland said that St. Charles’ decision gave Naperville advocates hope that they too could resist the agency’s proposal.
In September, Naperville sent IMEA a proposed contract calling for mandatory net-zero emissions by 2050. The agency countered that it would “endeavor to achieve” carbon neutrality by 2050, but declined to set binding targets.
On Feb. 3, the city council voted 6–3 to cease contract negotiations with IMEA.
“I am over the moon,” Bourland said. “This is a reward for over two years of focus. It was an uphill climb.”
As St. Charles and Naperville seek to distance themselves from Prairie State, Illinois as a whole still faces tough questions around the plant’s future while the state works to decarbonize. The facility has long enjoyed support from labor unions and some Illinois politicians, and spiking demand from data centers as well as federal politics could make it tough to close.
Prairie State is billed as utilizing “clean coal” technology, and Illinois leaders have long hoped that carbon capture and sequestration will be successfully implemented at the plant. But there’s been little progress toward that goal, and the concept of carbon sequestration is highly controversial in southern Illinois.
A 2024 study by the Frontier Group ranked Prairie State as the 12th worst climate polluter of any industrial facility nationwide. The plant also spews significant amounts of health-harming pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.
At Naperville’s Feb. 3 city council meeting, 15-year-old high school student Adi Julka lamented, “We are, in effect, the dirtiest city in all of Illinois,” since the community is the largest IMEA member. “We are complicit in both the damage to our environment and everyday Illinoisans’ financial and physical well-being.”
Illinois’ landmark 2021 Climate & Equitable Jobs Act nearly failed because of pushback to its requirement that Prairie State reduce its emissions. The law not only requires all fossil-fuel generation to cease by 2045, but also mandates Prairie State specifically to reduce carbon emissions by 45% by 2038, which would likely mean closing one of its two units.
But IMEA noted in an October memo to Naperville that the federal government could order Prairie State to keep operating regardless of emissions mandates. In the past year, the Trump administration has ordered several coal plants to keep running beyond scheduled closure dates. IMEA also noted that Illinois’ 2021 climate law contains exceptions from fossil-fuel emissions limits if needed to maintain grid reliability.
Indeed, reliability concerns loomed at the two-and-a-half-hour Naperville city council hearing this month. Residents with a group called Affordable Naperville, for example, argued that extending the IMEA contract is crucial to ensuring predictable energy supplies in an uncertain future.
“Current headlines warn of increasing stress on the grid, price spikes as demand surges from things like data centers, electric vehicles, and economic growth,” said longtime resident Patrick Hughes.
Other residents argued that the quickly changing energy landscape is all the more reason for Naperville to weigh its options and bide its time, rather than rush to sign a contract committing it to an outdated energy source — coal — for many years into the future.
“The city spoke,” resident John Doyle said. “We want a greener option than what IMEA has to offer.”
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