Which coal units will retire and which plants will continue to work

One of the oldest power plants in the United States, settled on the edge of the largest coal mine in the country, was planned to close in 2027. But the operator of the factory recently canceled the retirement of the 66-year-old station, according to one Concept Utility Plan published at the end of December.

Now three coal -burning units in the Dave Johnston Power Plant, near Glenrock, Wyo., Under dozens of rural who can burn coals far beyond planned retirement data. Utility companies can benefit from the growth of energy demand and changes in the environmental regulations to make these factories work. But experts say that it will not do much to delay the inevitable decline of the coal.

Coal has been taken for more than ten years. As soon as the dominant energy source in the United States, today almost 400 coal units deliver around 16 percent of the nation schedule. That is far under natural gas, nuclear energy and renewable energy sources.

About 780 coal units, individual generators with a boiler and a turbine that are able to produce electricity, have retired since 2000. And more than half of the remaining units are also planned for retirement, according to new data from the Global Energy Monitor, an organization that collects international energy data.

But an analysis of the New York Times shows that utilities have extended the lifespan of almost a third of the coal units with planned pension data, either by reversing delays or by turning the course and canceling pension, between 2017 and today.

“In the past year, several larger utilities have a back member of emission reduction goals and, more specifically, pension data for some coal units,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a research and interest group.

Continued use of coal means more carbon emissions, which increases the abundance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, along with dangers in the air that can harm human health. Many of the factories date from the sixties and are expensive to operate, which requires heavy maintenance and disadvantaged pollution controls.

In 2023, an investigation showed that 99 percent of the operational American coal -fired power stations were more expensive to run than the costs for building renewable replacements. This is without taking into account the hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and stimuli included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act of expensive unit -upgrades required by new federal pollution standards adopted in 2024.

“Even without IRA stimuli we are far beyond the crossover point for most coal plants,” said Michelle Solomon, an author of the 2023 study and senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation, a research group for clean energy. “It is really a no-brainer to not only add new wind and solar energy, but also to finance a lot of battery storage with your savings.”

But the global energy demand is also checked. Utility companies have argued that the growth of the load, or the increasing demand for electricity, means that they have to keep coal units on the grid while building new energy sources. They have predicted an increase of 20 percent in the demand for electricity by 2035, according to data collected by RMI, a non -profit group focused on energy research.

“There has been a delay about retirement based on grid stability and the energy needs that arise from our data centers and AI use,” said Emily Arthun, Chief Executive of the American Coal Council. The plans of the new administration to reverse regulations and policy on the coal industry, “gives utilities the opportunity to use their coal longer,” said Mrs. Arthun.

In Indiana, Duke Energy proposed to extend the lifespan of his Gibson-generating station, a 50-year factory that can burn enough coal to produce more than 3,300 megawatt electricity, until 2038, returning to the earlier plan of the utility for coal-free to be by 2035.

In an e -mail statement, Duke Energy called “the high and growing demand for energy” for the delay.

But that increased use of electricity in cars, buildings and industry is part of the transition from clean energy, and it does not require coal, experts say. Utility companies have the option to increase their use of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and battery storage.

Critics, including technical giants, have also exaggerated the expected increase in the energy demand of AI and data centers. Last year, Microsoft argued that utilities overestimate how much energy they need and at the same time underestimate how renewable energy sources can meet demand.

Renewable energy sources can exceed the increase in electricity demand, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a research agency for energy. Since 2019, the American generation from wind and solar energy has surpassed the growth of the power demand with almost 100 million megawatt hours. In 2024, renewable energy sources have generated coal for more than 80 percent of the year. At that pace, renewable energy sources could surpass coal every day in 2026, according to the Institute.

But together with market forces, utility companies could also benefit from changes in environmental regulations to keep coal stations open, especially in coal -friendly states such as Wyoming, where two fifth of American coal is mined.

“For a monopoly nut from investors, it does not cost them to continue running the factory, necessarily, it costs the Ratepayers who pay for it,” said Dr. Solomon. “Politically, there is a lot of support for coal in Wyoming and Utah, where Rocky Mountain Power works, so I think they just don’t feel much pressure to go to cleaner energy sources.”

In a clean air law regulation that was adopted last year, coal units with plans to operate after 2032 must comply with the lower carbon instructions. While Rocky Mountain Power has plans for at least two units to hire Carbon Capture Technology by 2030, other requirements of the carbon protection agency instructions for the Cool Protection Agency “are not modeled as a formal requirement,” said a e -mail statement of Pacificorp, the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power. The law is under a lawsuit and Mr. Trump is not expected to maintain it.

“Much of it is political,” said Christine Shearer, a project manager at Global Energy Monitor. “The hanging EPA instructions for coal -fired power stations are now uncertain and utility companies can see that they have a friendlier political atmosphere and can look for ways to keep coal -fired power stations online for longer, although it is more profitable to close them and replace them with solar and solar and wind. “

Other utilities have responded to economic forces and regulations at state level to close coal units faster. Between 2017 and January 2025, almost a quarter of the coal units had their planned retirement dates accelerate. In Michigan, for example, a coal operator decided to retire his 1500 Megawatt fleet six years earlier, by the end of 2026. The JH Coleman factory, which dates from 1962, will be replaced by natural gas, the production of which is broadcasting methane, another one Powerful greenhouse gas. The transition saves customers almost $ 600 million, according to Srikanth Maddipati, a vice -president for Consumers Energy, the utility that Coleman operates.

Mr Maddipati pointed out in rules above clean water and coal waste removal as reasons to retire the units early, but said that the bigger problem was the expensive maintenance that the old units would require if they were kept online. Michigan’s clean energy standards required consumer energy to serve customers 60 percent renewable energy by 2035 and 100 percent by 2040. Renewable energy sources were also cheaper, Mr Maddapati said.

“How we produced energy 200 years ago is different than today,” said Mr. Maddapati. “Our customers benefit from this while we continue to use new technologies to offer safer, more reliable energy.”

Almost two-thirds of the accelerated retirement took place in the Kingston Fossil factory, a colossus 1.4 Gigawatt Coal Plant from the Tennessee Valley Authority. Kingston, once the largest coal -fired power station in the world when it opened in 1955, was also the location of one of the largest industrial disasters in the country when billions of liters of coal residues were spilled in 2008. The units will also be applied to burn gas.

But even the open units that are kept open will continue to fall in capacity as more planned gas, nuclear and renewable energy sources enter the grid.

“They will keep those units open to keep their options open, but it does not mean that they are used a lot,” says Seth Feaster, a data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “They are just not competitive.”