President Trump spent the supervisor last week who were designed to breathe new life into the use of coal in power plants, a practice that has been steadily falling for more than a decade.
But the effort is likely to fail, said energy experts, because the fossil fuel is confronted with some critical obstacles. The power that coal plants produce cannot usually compete with cheaper, cleaner alternatives. And many plants that burn coal are just too old and would need extensive and expensive upgrades to keep running.
“It will be very difficult to reverse this trend,” said Reicher, an assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration and a former director of the climate and the energy at Google. “There are various forces at work that do not paint a very bright future for coal.”
Why has the use of coal taken?
As soon as the primary source of electricity in the United States, coal -fired power stations now only produce 17 percent of the power of the country. The main reason is that natural gas, another fossil fuel, became abundant and cheap because of the Schale -Fracking tree that started in the early 2000s. The use of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, has also grown a lot.
Natural gas now offers around 38 percent of American electricity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind and hydropower products produce around 25 percent and nuclear energy generates around 20 percent.
Some regions, such as New England, are planned to close their last coal -fired power stations soon. The most densely populated is in the country, California, uses virtually no coal for generating electricity.
Coal is also under pressure because burning the greenhouses that are responsible for climate change and pollutants that harm people and nature. To bypass those worries, Mr. Trump said, he will refrain from certain limitations of air defense for dozens of coal -fired power stations.
Where is coal still used?
In the southeast and midwest, many utilities continue to generate electricity from coal -fired power stations. Companies such as Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Duke Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority-de largest power provider-rusting to the largest users of coal.
States with a long history of coal extraction are still very dependent on the fuel. They include West Virginia, which last year received 85 percent of his electricity from coal, and Kentucky, who received 67 percent, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Mr. Trump has ordered the energy department to use emergency powers to have unprofitable coal -fired power stations operate. The president said this was necessary to prevent power failure. He tried a similar strategy during his first term.
He has also issued orders to withdraw any regulations that “discriminate” against coal production, to open new federal countries for coal extraction and to investigate whether coal -burning installations can operate data centers used for artificial intelligence services such as chatbots.
Peabody, the largest coal producer in the United States, said that the world used more coal in 2024 than in any other year in history, a fact that it said that the need for the resource was emphasized to support the growing energy requirements.
“To support the growing needs of our country in affordable, reliable energy, we believe that the US should stop the pension of the coal -fired power station, use existing plants with a higher use and restart the coal plants of the shutter,” said Vic SVEC, a spokesperson for Peabody.
Can the Trump government breathe new life into the coal?
Although federal policy can play a role, utilities and state laws and regulators who supervise them ultimately determine how coal is burned in power plants.
The Edison Electric Institute, or EEI, a trade association of Nut, said in a statement that it agreed with the administration that the United States needed more electricity sources, but refused to speak for or against the use of coal.
“The demand for electricity is growing at the fastest pace in decades, and EEI's member of the electric members of EEI uses a diverse, domestic and balanced energy mix to meet this demand, while keeping the customer's accounts as low as possible,” said the institute.
Some large utilities, such as Xcel Energy, have converted coal -fired power stations into solar farms, partly to take advantage of federal stimuli created during the Biden administration. In Becker, Minn. For example, Xcel has built a large solar and battery installation to replace its Sherco -Kolencentrale. The company converts another coal -fired power plant, in Colorado, to natural gas.
A spokesperson for Xcel, Theo Keith, said that Mr. Trump's orders evaluated “to understand if they could influence our activities”, but that in the meantime it would work to offer clean energy at low costs for his consumers.
In some states, such as Texas, conservative legislators have proposed legislation to require greater use of fossil fuels to guarantee a sufficient power supply and to meet the rising demand of data centers, electric cars and heat pumps. But energy analysts expect that if assumed, such measures would first of all benefit from natural gas, not with coal.
Environmental activists said the efforts to breathe new life into coal were misled. They point out that states that more coal use, usually higher electricity accounts, more health problems and have a greater risk of power plants errors due to aging equipment.
“We turn around for decades,” said Holly Bender, Chief Program Officer at the Sierra Club, who held a campaign that is further called Coal to end the use of that fuel. “It is clear that Trump tries to put his finger on the scale to keep the coal open. But these are pieces of infrastructure that are at the end of their useful lifespan.”
