President Trump issued new executive orders, on Tuesday April 8, 2025, that would try to reverse the decline of the coal industry in the U.S. This about-face for coal is driven by the administration’s goal to become number 1 in the world of AI (artificial intelligence).
The success of AI depends on data centers that store billions of words and pictures, and data centers need a huge amount of electricity to run. How much electricity? S&P Global Commodity Insights have calculated the U.S. will need an additional 1,000 GW of power by 2040, just 15 years away. If all of this explosion of electric power were supplied by gas-fired power plants, the plants would need an extra 82 Bcfd (billion cubic feet per day). This is almost as much as the current total production of natural gas in the U.S., about 100 Bcfd. The gas industry would have to duplicate itself in the next 15 years. Not feasible!
Why Resuscitate Coal?
There are two main reasons why President Trump acted to resuscitate coal. One, it would be an obvious win for a coal industry that has virtually collapsed. The collection of hardhats that surrounded the president when he announced the executive orders would affirm this. A report by Canary Media said that coal in 2011 held almost 50% of U.S. capacity to generate electricity, but last year this had fallen to only 15%. “Cheaper fossil gas and even cheaper clean energy and batteries have decimated its [coal]
economics.” In the next five years, over 120 coal plants in the U.S. are planned to close.
Two, the Trump administration doesn’t trust renewable energies. Trump has removed the U.S. from the Paris agreement of 2015 concerning climate change. It follows that the administration doesn’t see the need to reduce carbon emissions from fossil energies and his drill, baby, drill mantra testifies to this.
What Is Feasible To Supply Massive Electric Power To Data Centers?
An obvious answer is renewables such as solar, wind, and storage batteries, because these have supplied 90% of new energy in the U.S. in 2024. In South Australia, solar, wind and batteries supply about 75% of the state’s electricity, and the goal is 100% by 2027.
What about natural gas? Yes, but only a partial solution. S&P Global estimate that only 10%, or 100 GW of the additional 1,000 GW, could be provided by gas-fired plants. The reasons are the development cycle for gas turbines is much longer than solar and batteries, and there is a logjam on orders for gas turbines, and because solar PV and batteries are cheaper and faster to install.
But coal? There are three big issues with coal as fuel for electrical power. First, it burns to particulates that can cause asthma-like symptoms for young and old. Second, it burns to carbon dioxide, CO2, which is the major greenhouse gas that causes global warming. Third, new-build coal power plants are more expensive than renewable energies plus battery storage.
Further, many coal power plants have closed in the past decade, and have been replaced by solar or wind renewables. Coal has been dying in the U.S., as coal generation of electricity dropped from 50% in 2011 to only 15% now. The remaining coal-fired plants, about 200 of them, will close by 2040. To replace this coal-fired electricity, S&P Global estimate 60-100 GW of new gas-fired power will be needed.
It follows that if Trump’s new order were to force all of the 200 remaining coal power stations to continue operating, instead of closing by 2040, this would reduce the gas-fired 60-100 GW needed. The Trump order could reduce the total of 1,000 GW of new electricity needed by 2040, by a fraction of 6% – 10%. This is a small fraction of the power needed to support data centers. Given that half of these coal plants would probably cost too much to upgrade and continue operating, the contribution from extending the lifetimes of active coal plants would fall to something below 5%. Extending the life of coal power plants would be a minor part of the power needed for AI data centers and EVs.
Restarting Coal-Fired Power Plants
Restarting coal plants that have closed is generally not feasible. It’s expensive to restart decommissioned plants of any kind, due to deterioration or demolition. The prospect of building new coal-fired power plants would entail even more cost premiums than new-build gas-fired plants, and face the extra problem of emitting twice as much carbon emissions.
Buried dynamite destroyed the 4 smokestacks in the San Juan Generating Station, August 2024. Source Albuquerque J., Eddie Moore.
New Mexico is a case in point. The state had three coal-fired power plants. The Escalante station stopped in 2020. The San Juan Generating Station was demolished last year. The Four Corners plant is scheduled to fully close by 2031.
Drew Goretzka, a spokesman for the New Mexico Environmental Department said to revive the closed plants would require “extensive, and prohibitively costly, renovations.”
What are the priorities in New Mexico? In 2019, the state passed the Energy Transition Act that set ambitious targets for renewable energy by 2030. The utilities decided on their own to pull away from coal because it would spell cheaper electricity in the long run. The Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), plans to be fully carbon-free by 2040.
Fast-Track Solar Renewables And Battery Storage
The development cycle for installation of solar PV with batteries is faster and cheaper than wind farms or fossil power plants (gas-fired or coal-fired).
Two prime examples exist of fast-tracked solar and batteries. The first is China which globally has dominated solar capacity increase in 2024. By the end of 2024, China had installed a total solar PV capacity of 887 GW. Since 2020, the growth amounts to 28% year-on-year.
Source: Palmer, PV-Magazine.
In the U.S., renewables with batteries have produced 90% of new installed capacity in 2024—the market has spoken. The second example is in California, where the biggest US solar project came online in January 2024 in the Mojave Desert of Kern County. The megaproject, called the Edwards & Sanborn project, contains two million solar panels and 120,000 batteries, to store electricity until the sun goes down. The capacity of this project is 875 MW and 3,287 MWh, which implies the battery could run at almost full capacity for four hours to maintain power during the night, or if needed in the event of a power outage. Electrical power is provided to a couple of large utilities plus the city of San Jose, plus Starbucks, which just proves again that Starbucks is everywhere.
However, in the U.S. the interconnection queue for electrical transmission is maxed out: it was a wait of nearly 5 years in 2023, for example. This is currently delaying many GW of solar and wind power waiting in the pipeline. But this delay would apply to all electrical sources, including new-site fossil power plants as well as renewables.
A Worrying Statement In The Coal Executive Orders
The new coal executive orders include a plan to give the Department of Energy (DOE) authority over the usual state, regional, and federal regulators, in special circumstances. DOE could force unprofitable and polluting coal plants to stay open under the guise of electricity reliability. But worse, utilities and paying customers, would absorb the costs. So, if a failing coal power plant is instructed by DOE to stay open to help maintain the electric supply for new data centers, the public would likely be stuck with extra utility costs as well as potential health costs.