It was the best of times, it is the worst of times, it is the winter of despair. Is it the spring of hope for coal? Playing with the famous opening paragraph of the 1859 Charles Dickens masterpiece A Tale of Two Cities lays out the precarious position of coal in the U.S. now and in the future.
It’s a familiar refrain, perhaps a dirge, from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration: “Electric generators report that they plan to retire 8.1 GW of coal-fired capacity in 2025, or 4.7% of the total U.S. coal fleet that was in operation at the end of 2024. Coal retirements decreased to 4.0 GW last year, less than the 9.8 GW of coal capacity retired in each of the last 10 years.”
Leading the passing pack: The giant, venerable 1.9-GW Intermountain Power Project in western Utah, which the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power operates. Formed in 1977, the two 950-MW coal-fired units supply power to southern California and municipal utilities in the Beehive State through AC and DC transmission. The Intermountain Power Agency plans to replace the coal units with 8.5-GW from gas combined-cycle generation, starting this year.
The power agency plans to fire the new generators with 70% natural gas and 30% “green” hydrogen, transitioning to all H2 by 2045.
Next on the coal hit list is Detroit-based CMS Energy’s three-unit, 1,400-MW J.H. Campbell plant on Lake Michigan about 100 miles north of Chicago. It’s an ancient mixed-vintage station. The first unit, at 265-MW capacity, went into service in 1962, followed in 1967 with 385-MW unit 2, and, in 1980, 770-MW unit 2. According to CMS, “Thousands of megawatts of wind and solar energy will be added through 2040.”
Third on EIA’s list of major coal-fired plants to be hit with closure this year is Talen Energy’s two-unit, 1,289-MW Brandon Shores station near Baltimore. The units went into service in 1984 and 1991. Talen says it will shut down the plant “on June 1, 2025, unless needed for reliability purposes under an approved reliability must-run contract” with the PJM Interconnection.
According to EIA, 2025 will see minor gas-fired power plant retirements, amounting to “2.6 GW of U.S. natural gas capacity, representing 0.5% of the natural gas fleet in operation at the end of 2024.” Almost all the gas retirements are combustion turbine plants, not the more efficient combined-cycle plants that include both combustion turbines and heat recovery raising steam to run through steam-turbine generators.
Once king of the electric generating hill, coal has fallen to the bottom in terms of the major generating technologies, according to EIA. For 2024, gas was the top generating technology for at 1.9 million MWh, followed by renewables, including conventional hydro (977,000 MWh), nuclear (782,000 MWh), and coal (653,000 MWh).
Coal’s decline has been more than matched by the rising sun. Solar generation in 2024 grew 27% compared to 2023. In December, utility-scale solar grew by 42% compared to December 2023.
Will U.S. coal’s decline continue at its precipitous pace? The rising predictions of the impact artificial intelligence and its power-hungry data centers may slow coal’s decline.
At the end of January, Southern Company subsidiary George Power announced a new “integrated resource plan”, replacing a 2022 plan and a 2023 update filed at the Georgia Public Service Commission. Georgia Power is predicting some 8.2 GW of power demand growth over the next six years, “an increase of more than 2,200 MW in peak demand by the end of 2030 when compared to projections in the 2023 IRP Update.”
A key element of the utility’s response is to delay closure of two major coal-fired power plants, the giant 3.2-GW Plant Bowen, one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the U.S. beyond 2034 and the 648-MW Plant Scherer to 2038. The earlier IRP called for closing Plant Bowen in 2027 and Plant Scherer in 2028.
On Feb. 6, the New York Times reported that its analysis “shows that utilities have extended the life of nearly a third of coal units with planned retirement dates, either through delays or by reversing course and canceling retirements entirely, between 2017 and today.”
The NYT highlighted its article by pointing to the plan by Berkshire Hataway’s PacifiCorp to keep the 816-MW, four-unit, 66-year-old Dave Johnson Power Plant in Wyoming running beyond its scheduled retirement dates: 2027 for Unit 3, 2028 for Units 1 and 2, and 2039 for Unit 4.
The Times quoted David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, that “In the last year or so, several larger utilities have backslid off emissions-reductions targets and, more specifically, retirement dates for some coal units.”
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