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From the article:
From emergencyorders to the war in Iran, the Trump Administration has kept coal in the headlines, but even before the 202(c) orders started rolling in, coal generation’s decline in America had slowed.
Volatile natural gas prices, load growth, rising capacity payments, slowdowns across supply chain and planning processes, and a rollback of environmental regulations have all converged to provide purchase for America’s remaining coal fleet. Not only to extend survival, but even increase generation across the country.
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Many were quick to blame coal’s decline on the push to bring wind and solar online, but the main driver was another fossil fuel, natural gas. Following the fracked shale revolution in 2008, and the year Tony Stark became Iron Man, natural gas production boomed and prices, while not immune to volatility, cratered. This fueled the buildout of combined cycle plants, which were substantially more efficient and flexible than traditional coal-fired steam turbines. Falling energy and capacity prices made coal increasingly uneconomic, which, paired with plant aging, limited flexibility, rising maintenance costs, and stricter environmental standards made retirement the typical choice.
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The Trump administration’s slogan has been Energy Dominance, but this ethos only extends to certain technologies. If you’re big, loud, and burn you’re getting support, missing any one of the trifecta and you’ll have a much harder road from the federal government. Coal represents all three attributes to a T. Energy Dominance hasn’t just been executive order rhetoric, but manifested in significant and ongoing extension orders for coal plants that had previously planned retirement.
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Section 202(c) orders were not just issued for plants that were fully expected to retire. Two coal units in Colorado, Craig 1 and Comanche 2, were kept online in 2025, though under different circumstances. Comanche 2 was extended for reliability reasons as the plant's other unit, Comanche 3, is currently undergoing extensive repair. These repairs, which are expected to take over a year, left PSCO with limited dispatchable power during the peak seasons.
The extended outage at Comanche 3 points to a wider issue at many plants, one that is also impacting Craig 1. As plants age, maintenance, as well as new costs, like scrubbers to meet enhanced emissions standards, cut into operating expenditures. While rising power and capacity prices have made existing assets more profitable in recent years, these costs come after tight margins at many units over the 2010s and early 2020s. This is the case at Craig 1 as well, which has seen generation drop over the years and suffers from deferred maintenance. Plant operators argued that they had built up sufficient wind and solar resources that made the plant unnecessary, filing a petition against the DoE making that exact argument. Craig also has units 2 & 3 that are currently in better condition and continue to run and support the stack.
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While gas is displacing coal, it doesn’t travel along the same paths. Coal relies on rail and barge, while natural gas is transported almost exclusively via pipeline with the US. Many natural gas producers even own pipelines, and pipelines only transport natural gas. Conversely, transit via 3rd parties comes with cross-commodity competition and the potential for disruptions such as rail strikes. Five states dominate US coal production: Wyoming, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kentucky. Massive surface mines in the Western US account for the majority of coal extraction in the country, and rail is the main transportation method for coal from these locations to power plants.
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The differences in logistics between the thermal fuels create an environment where they can act complementary to one another. Providing different levels of support should one resource become constrained physically and subsequently economically. Coal can be stored more readily, while natural gas can be transported more quickly in its just-in-time system with very expensive and limited storage. In fact, this mirrors an older version of the US power system, a vast coal baseload with natural gas balancing. That environment, pre-shale, pre-renewables, is the one in which power markets were conceived of and originally designed. Market development in the context of a more predictable system is having knock-on effects today, with core elements like FTRs struggling to keep up.
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In the short term, coal has tailwinds in the US and abroad. In fact, it’s possible that the attacks on Iran were the single most impactful pro-coal policy decision the Trump administration has made to date. Reminding the world of the difficulties associated with storing and transporting liquids and gas through highly concentrated corridors of supply with a history of instability can be a powerful motivator to cling to coal
On the flip side, the US has retired nearly 150 GW of coal capacity, and the last plant to be built was six years ago, in Railbelt Alaska, near (for Alaska) a mine, and replacing an older plant in the same spot. Meanwhile, that same reach for stability could trigger demand destruction for fossil fuels entirely. After all, everywhere has access to sun and wind, allowing some freedom from the whims of ancient life and geology.
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For the immediate future, all signs point to continued extensions of existing plants. While the twin forces of Trump 2.0 and load growth seem unlikely to abate in the immediate future, it’s important to keep in mind that retiring any part of the energy system is fundamentally difficult. Many observers have noted that historically we’ve layered new systems on top of old, rarely reaching complete excision. Where it has come, regions have taken different paths. Just in North America we have CAISO’s monomaniacal focus on new technologies while maintaining strong regional interconnections, Ontario’s pivot to focus on the baseload they already had in excess, or a market like NYISO where coal had become uneconomic relative to gas and the state had big future plans.
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