coal

Has Trump changed the retirement plans for the country’s largest coal plants?

coal, coal power, Policy, power plant, Science, syndication / Paul Patrick / January 18, 2025

A growth in electricity demand is leading to talk of delayed closures.

A house is seen near the Gavin Power Plant in Cheshire, Ohio. Credit: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

There is renewed talk of a coal power comeback in the United States, inspired by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency and forecasts of soaring electricity demand.

The evidence so far only shows that some plants are getting small extensions on their retirement dates. This means a slowdown in coal’s rate of decline, which is bad for the environment, but it does little to change the long-term trajectory for the domestic coal industry.

In October, I wrote about how five of the country’s 10 largest coal-fired power plants had retirement dates. Today, I’m revisiting the list, providing some updates and then taking a few steps back to look at US coal plants as a whole. Consider this the “before” picture that can be judged against the “after” in four years.

Some coal plant owners have already pushed back retirement timetables. The largest example, this one from just before the election, is the Gibson plant in Indiana, the second-largest coal plant in the country. It’s set to close in 2038 instead of 2035, following an announcement in October from the owner, Duke Energy.

But the changes do not constitute a coal comeback in this country. For that to happen, power companies would need to be building new plants to replace the many that are closing, and there is almost no development of new coal plants.

That said, there have been some changes since October.

As recently as a few months ago, Southern Co. was saying it intended to close Plant Bowen in Georgia by 2035 at the latest. Bowen is the largest coal plant in the country, with a summer capacity of 3,200 megawatts.

Southern has since said it may extend the plant’s life in response to forecasts of rising electricity demand. Chris Womack, Southern’s CEO, confirmed this possibility when speaking at a utility industry conference in November, saying that the plant may need to operate for longer than previously planned because of demand from data centers.

Southern has not yet made regulatory filings that spell out its plans, but this will likely occur in the next few weeks, according to a company spokesman.

In October, I reported that the Gavin plant in Ohio was likely to get a 2031 date to retire or switch to a different fuel once the plant’s pending sale was completed. The person who shared that information with me was involved with the plans and spoke on condition of anonymity because the sale was not final.

Since then, the prospective buyer of the plant has said in federal regulatory filings that it has no timetable for closing the plant or switching to a different fuel. The plant is changing hands as part of a larger deal between investment firms, with Lightstone Holdco selling to Energy Capital Partners, or ECP. Another company, coal exporter Javelin Global Commodities, is buying a minority share of the Gavin plant.

I went back to the person who told me about the 2031 retirement date. They said forecasts of rising electricity demand, as well as the election of Trump, have created enough uncertainty about power prices and regulations that it makes sense to not specify a date.

The 2031 timeline, and its abandonment, makes some sense once you understand that the Biden administration finalized power plant regulations last spring that gave coal plant operators an incentive to announce a retirement date: Plants closing before 2032 faced no new requirements. That incentive is likely to go away as Trump plans to roll back power plant pollution regulations.

Gavin’s sale is still pending. Several parties have filed objections to the transaction with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, arguing that the sellers have not been clear enough about their plans.

An ECP spokesman said the company has no comment beyond its filings.

Other than the changes to plans for Bowen and Gavin, the outlook has not shifted for the rest of the plants among the 10 largest. The Gibson and Rockport plants in Indiana still have retirement dates, as do Cumberland in Tennessee and Monroe in Michigan, according to the plants’ owners.

The Amos plant in West Virginia, Miller in Alabama, Scherer in Georgia, and Parish in Texas didn’t have retirement dates a few months ago, and they still don’t.

But the largest coal plants are only part of the story. Several dozen smaller plants are getting extensions of retirement plans, as Emma Foehringer Merchant reported last week for Floodlight News.

One example is the 1,157-megawatt Baldwin plant in Illinois, which was scheduled to close this year. Now the owner, Vistra Corp., has pushed back the retirement to 2027.

A few extra years of a coal plant is more of a stopgap than a long-term solution. When it comes to building new power plants to meet demand, developers are talking about natural gas, solar, nuclear, and other resources, but I have yet to see a substantial discussion of building a new coal plant.

In Alaska, Gov. Mike Dunleavy has said the state may build two coal plants to provide power in remote mining areas, as reported by Taylor Kuykendall of S&P Global Commodity Insights. Flatlands Energy, a Canadian company, has also talked about building a 400-megawatt coal plant in Alaska, as Nathaniel Herz reported for Alaska Beacon. These appear to be early-stage plans.

The lack of development activity underscores how coal power is fading in this country, and has been for a while.

Coal was used to generate 16 percent of US electricity in 2023, down by more than half from 2014. In that time, coal went from the country’s leading fuel for electricity to trailing natural gas, renewables, and nuclear. (These and all the figures that follow are from the US Energy Information Administration.)

The United States had about 176,000 megawatts of coal plant capacity as of October, down from about 300,000 megawatts in 2014.

The coal plants that do remain are being used less. In 2023, the average capacity factor for a coal plant was 42 percent. Capacity factor is a measure of how much electricity a plant has generated relative to the maximum possible if it was running all the time. In 2014, the average capacity factor was 61 percent.

Power companies are burning less coal because of the availability of less expensive alternatives, such as natural gas, wind, and solar, among others. The think tank Energy Innovation issued a report in 2023 finding that 99 percent of US coal-fired power plants cost more to operate than the cost of replacement with a combination of wind, solar, and batteries.

The Trump administration will arrive in Washington with promises to help fossil fuels. It could extend the lives of some coal plants by weakening environmental regulations, which may reduce the plants’ operational costs. It also could repeal or revise subsidies that help to reduce the costs of renewables and batteries, making those resources more expensive.

I don’t want to minimize the damage that could be caused by those policies. But even in extreme scenarios, it’s difficult to imagine investors wanting to spend billions of dollars to develop a new coal plant, much less a fleet of them.

Has Trump changed the retirement plans for the country’s largest coal plants? Read More »

Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back

coal, germany, nuclear power, Science, syndication / Rejus Almole / April 28, 2024

Enlarge / Jürgen Trittin, member of the German Bundestag and former environment minister, stands next to an activist during an action of the environmental organization Greenpeace in front of the Brandenburg Gate in April 2023. The action is to celebrate the shutdown of the last three German nuclear power plants.

One year ago, Germany took its last three nuclear power stations offline. When it comes to energy, few events have baffled outsiders more.

In the face of climate change, calls to expedite the transition away from fossil fuels, and an energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Berlin’s move to quit nuclear before carbon-intensive energy sources like coal has attracted significant criticism. (Greta Thunberg prominently labeled it “a mistake.”)

This decision can only be understood in the context of post-war socio-political developments in Germany, where anti-nuclearism predated the public climate discourse.

From a 1971 West German bestseller evocatively titled Peaceably into Catastrophe: A Documentation of Nuclear Power Plants, to huge protests of hundreds of thousands—including the largest-ever demonstration seen in the West German capital Bonn—the anti-nuclear movement attracted national attention and widespread sympathy. It became a major political force well before even the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Its motivations included: a distrust of technocracy; ecological, environmental, and safety fears; suspicions that nuclear energy could engender nuclear proliferation; and general opposition to concentrated power (especially after its extreme consolidation under the Nazi dictatorship).

Instead, activists championed what they regarded as safer, greener, and more accessible renewable alternatives like solar and wind, embracing their promise of greater self-sufficiency, community participation, and citizen empowerment (“energy democracy”).

This support for renewables was less about CO₂ and more aimed at resetting power relations (through decentralised, bottom-up generation rather than top-down production and distribution), protecting local ecosystems, and promoting peace in the context of the Cold War.

Germany’s Energiewende

The contrast here with Thunberg’s latter-day Fridays for Future movement and its “listen to the experts” slogan is striking. The older activist generation deliberately rejected the mainstream expertise of the time, which then regarded centralised nuclear power as the future and mass deployment of distributed renewables as a pipe dream.

This earlier movement was instrumental in creating Germany’s Green Party—today the world’s most influential—which emerged in 1980 and first entered national government from 1998 to 2005 as junior partner to the Social Democrats. This “red-green” coalition banned new reactors, announced a shutdown of existing ones by 2022, and passed a raft of legislation supporting renewable energy.

That, in turn, turbocharged the national deployment of renewables, which ballooned from 6.3 percent of gross domestic electricity consumption in 2000 to 51.8 percent in 2023.

These figures are all the more remarkable given the contributions of ordinary citizens. In 2019, they owned fully 40.4 percent (and over 50 percent in the early 2010s) of Germany’s total installed renewable power generation capacity, whether through community wind energy cooperatives, farm-based biogas installations, or household rooftop solar.

Most other countries’ more recent energy transitions have been attempts to achieve net-zero targets using whatever low-carbon technologies are available. Germany’s now-famous “Energiewende” (translated as “energy transition” or even “energy revolution”), however, has from its earlier inception sought to shift away from both carbon-intensive as well as nuclear energy to predominantly renewable alternatives.

Indeed, the very book credited with coining the term Energiewende in 1980 was, significantly, titled Energie-Wende: Growth and Prosperity Without Oil and Uranium and published by a think tank founded by anti-nuclear activists.

Consecutive German governments have, over the past two and a half decades, more or less hewed to this line. Angela Merkel’s pro-nuclear second cabinet (2009–13) was an initial exception.

That lasted until the 2011 Fukushima disaster, after which mass protests of 250,000 and a shock state election loss to the Greens forced that administration, too, to revert to the 2022 phaseout plan. Small wonder that so many politicians today are reluctant to reopen that particular Pandora’s box.

Another ongoing political headache is where to store the country’s nuclear waste, an issue Germany has never managed to solve. No community has consented to host such a facility, and those designated for this purpose have seen large-scale protests.

Instead, radioactive waste has been stored in temporary facilities close to existing reactors—no long-term solution.

Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back Read More »

US’s power grid continues to lower emissions—everything else, not so much

carbon emissions, coal, electric grid, Energy, natural gas, Science, solar, Sustainability, Wind / Paul Patrick / April 27, 2024

Down, but not down enough —

Excluding one pandemic year, emissions are lower than they’ve been since the 1980s.

John Timmer – Apr 26, 2024 6: 51 pm UTC

Graph showing total US carbon emissions, along with individual sources. Most trends are largely flat or show slight declines.

On Thursday, the US Department of Energy released its preliminary estimate for the nation’s carbon emissions in the previous year. Any drop in emissions puts us on a path that would avoid some of the catastrophic warming scenarios that were still on the table at the turn of the century. But if we’re to have a chance of meeting the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the planet from warming beyond 2° C, we’ll need to see emissions drop dramatically in the near future.

So, how is the US doing? Emissions continue to trend downward, but there’s no sign the drop has accelerated. And most of the drop has come from a single sector: changes in the power grid.

Off the grid, on the road

US carbon emissions have been trending downward since roughly 2007, when they peaked at about six gigatonnes. In recent years, the pandemic produced a dramatic drop in emissions in 2020, lowering them to under five gigatonnes for the first time since before 1990, when the EIA’s data started. Carbon dioxide release went up a bit afterward, with 2023 marking the first post-pandemic decline, with emissions again clearly below five gigatonnes.

The DOE’s Energy Information Agency (EIA) divides the sources of carbon dioxide into five different sectors: electricity generation, transportation, and residential, commercial, and industrial uses. The EIA assigns 80 percent of the 2023 reduction in US emissions to changes in the electric power grid, which is not a shock given that it’s the only sector that’s seen significant change in the entire 30-year period the EIA is tracking.

With hydro in the rearview mirror, wind and solar are coming after coal and nuclear.

What’s happening with the power grid? Several things. At the turn of the century, coal accounted for over half of the US’s electricity generation; it’s now down to 16 percent. Within the next two years, it’s likely to be passed by wind and solar, which were indistinguishable from zero percent of generation as recently as 2004. Things would be even better for them if not for generally low wind speeds leading to a decline in wind generation in 2023. The biggest change, however, has been the rise of natural gas, which went from 10 percent of generation in 1990 to over 40 percent in 2023.

A small contributor to the lower emissions came from lower demand—it dropped by a percentage point compared to 2022. Electrification of transport and appliances, along with the growth of AI processing, are expected to send demand soaring in the near future, but there’s no indication of that on the grid yet.

Currently, generating electricity accounts for 30 percent of the US’s carbon emissions. That places it as the second most significant contributor, behind transportation, which is responsible for 39 percent of emissions. The EIA rates transportation emissions as unchanged relative to 2022, despite seeing air travel return to pre-pandemic levels and a slight increase in gasoline consumption. Later in this decade, tighter fuel efficiency rules are expected to drive a decline in transportation emissions, which are only down about 10 percent compared to their 2006 peak.

Buildings and industry

The remaining sectors—commercial, residential, and industrial—have a more complicated relationship with fossil fuels. Some of their energy comes via the grid, so its emissions are already accounted for. Thanks to the grid decarbonizing, these would be going down, but for business and residential use, grid-dependent emissions are dropping even faster than that would imply. This suggests that things like more efficient lighting and appliances are having an impact.

Separately, direct use of fossil fuels for things like furnaces, water heaters, etc., has been largely flat for the entire 30 years the EIA is looking at, although milder weather led to a slight decline in 2023 (8 percent for residential properties, 4 percent for commercial).

In contrast, the EIA only tracks the direct use of fossil fuels for industrial processes. These are down slightly over the 30-year period but have been fairly stable since the 2008 economic crisis, with no change in emissions between 2022 and 2023. As with the electric grid, the primary difference in this sector has been due to the growth of natural gas and the decline of coal.

Overall, there are two ways to look at this data. The first is that progress at limiting carbon emissions has been extremely limited and that there has been no progress at all in several sectors. The more optimistic view is that the technologies for decarbonizing the electric grid and improving building electrical usage are currently the most advanced, and the US has focused its decarbonization efforts where they’ll make the most difference.

From either perspective, it’s clear that the harder challenges are still coming, both in terms of accelerating decarbonization, and in terms of tackling sectors where decarbonization will be harder. The Biden administration has been working to put policies in place that should drive progress in this regard, but we probably won’t see much of their impact until early in the following decade.

Listing image by Yaorusheng

US’s power grid continues to lower emissions—everything else, not so much Read More »

40% of US electricity is now emissions-free

coal, Energy, hydroelectric, natural gas, nuclear power, renewable energy, Science, solar, Sustainability, Wind / Paul Patrick / December 29, 2023

Decarbonizing, but slowly —

Good news as natural gas, coal, and solar see the biggest changes.

John Timmer – Dec 28, 2023 7: 12 pm UTC

Image of electric power lines with a power plant cooling tower in the background.

Just before the holiday break, the US Energy Information Agency released data on the country’s electrical generation. Because of delays in reporting, the monthly data runs through October, so it doesn’t provide a complete picture of the changes we’ve seen in 2023. But some of the trends now seem locked in for the year: wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production.

Tracking trends

Having data through October necessarily provides an incomplete picture of 2023. There are several factors that can cause the later months of the year to differ from the earlier ones. Some forms of generation are seasonal—notably solar, which has its highest production over the summer months. Weather can also play a role, as unusually high demand for heating in the winter months could potentially require that older fossil fuel plants be brought online. It also influences production from hydroelectric plants, creating lots of year-to-year variation.

Finally, everything’s taking place against a backdrop of booming construction of solar and natural gas. So, it’s entirely possible that we will have built enough new solar over the course of the year to offset the seasonal decline at the end of the year.

Let’s look at the year-to-date data to get a sense of the trends and where things stand. We’ll then check the monthly data for October to see if any of those trends show indications of reversing.

The most important takeaway is that energy use is largely flat. Overall electricity production year-to-date is down by just over one percent from 2022, though demand was higher this October compared to last year. This is in keeping with a general trend of flat-to-declining electricity use as greater efficiency is offsetting factors like population growth and expanding electrification.

That’s important because it means that any newly added capacity will displace the use of existing facilities. And, at the moment, that displacement is happening to coal.

Can’t hide the decline

At this point last year, coal had produced nearly 20 percent of the electricity in the US. This year, it’s down to 16.2 percent, and only accounts for 15.5 percent of October’s production. Wind and solar combined are presently at 16 percent of year-to-date production, meaning they’re likely to be in a dead heat with coal this year and easily surpass it next year.

Year-to-date, wind is largely unchanged since 2022, accounting for about 10 percent of total generation, and it’s up to over 11 percent in the October data, so that’s unlikely to change much by the end of the year. Solar has seen a significant change, going from five to six percent of the total electricity production (this figure includes both utility-scale generation and the EIA’s estimate of residential production). And it’s largely unchanged in October alone, suggesting that new construction is offsetting some of the seasonal decline.

Enlarge / Coal is being squeezed out by natural gas, with an assist from renewables.

Eric Bangeman/Ars Technica

Hydroelectric production has dropped by about six percent since last year, causing it to slip from 6.1 percent to 5.8 percent of the total production. Depending on the next couple of months, that may allow solar to pass hydro on the list of renewables.

Combined, the three major renewables account for about 22 percent of year-to-date electricity generation, up about 0.5 percent since last year. They’re up by even more in the October data, placing them well ahead of both nuclear and coal.

Nuclear itself is largely unchanged, allowing it to pass coal thanks to the latter’s decline. Its output has been boosted by a new, 1.1 Gigawatt reactor that come online this year (a second at the same site, Vogtle in Georgia, is set to start commercial production at any moment). But that’s likely to be the end of new nuclear capacity for this decade; the challenge will be keeping existing plants open despite their age and high costs.

If we combine nuclear and renewables under the umbrella of carbon-free generation, then that’s up by nearly 1 percent since 2022 and is likely to surpass 40 percent for the first time.

The only thing that’s keeping carbon-free power from growing faster is natural gas, which is the fastest-growing source of generation at the moment, going from 40 percent of the year-to-date total in 2022 to 43.3 percent this year. (It’s actually slightly below that level in the October data.) The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity. But its use is going to need to start dropping soon if the US is to meet its climate goals, so it will be critical to see whether its growth flat lines over the next few years.

Outside of natural gas, however, all the trends in US generation are good, especially considering that the rise of renewable production would have seemed like an impossibility a decade ago. Unfortunately, the pace is currently too slow for the US to have a net-zero electric grid by the end of the decade.

40% of US electricity is now emissions-free Read More »