President Donald Trump‘s newest executive order represents his second attempt to extend a lifeline to coal-fired power plants.
Tuesday afternoon, Trump signed the executive order underscoring his administration’s priorities in securing as much reliable baseload power, including from coal plants, as swiftly as possible.
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The first Trump administration sought to boost the coal industry, arguing that it is worth paying more to keep coal power plants online because they are highly reliable and can provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
He wasn’t successful then. But the need for reliable power has only grown more urgent as artificial intelligence advancements, data centers, electrification, and manufacturing send energy consumption soaring.
Through the order signed Tuesday, Trump is seeking to offer regulatory relief to mining operations and coal-fired facilities facing retirements, as the industry has been on the decline for decades.
Coal has long been considered the dirtiest form of energy due to its higher carbon intensity, its emission of other harmful pollutants, such as mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and more, and its extensive mining and transportation processes.
Despite this, coal is one of the most reliable sources of energy when compared with intermittent renewables like wind and solar, though it is directly rivaled by natural gas and nuclear power.
Where Trump went wrong on coal in his first term
Trump officials have long wished to reward coal for its reliability, promising to revive the industry during his first administration. At the time, the Republican made promises to bring back mining jobs, slash Obama-era regulations, and provide federal financial backing to power plants at risk of closing.
But not everyone was aboard the coal train.
In 2017, the Department of Energy under Trump, headed by then-Secretary Rick Perry, made a request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to support struggling coal and nuclear plants. Perry asked that FERC guarantee financial payments to facilities facing retirement. The commission, though, unanimously rejected the request in January 2018.
Then-Commissioner Richard Glick wrote in his concurrence that the government had provided no evidence to suggest that delaying retirements of coal and nuclear facilities would meaningfully improve the grid.
“The Proposed Rule had little, if anything, to do with resilience, and was instead aimed at subsidizing certain uncompetitive electric generation technologies,” Glick wrote.
As renewable energy sources have grown considerably cheaper to install and operate, costs for aging coal power plants have trended up.
In 2019, Energy Innovation Policy and Technology evaluated that 62% of existing coal plants had become more expensive to run than the cost associated with replacing those facilities with new renewable sources.
By 2023, that percentage had jumped to 99% of coal power plants in the United States, according to an updated analysis from the research firm. The analysis found that the average cost for coal plants is around $36 each megawatt hour. Solar, on the other hand, costs around $24 each megawatt hour.
“The truth is that coal is extraordinarily expensive, and it’s more expensive to run than other types of generation,” Christy Walsh, a senior attorney and federal markets director with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Washington Examiner.
“That’s what’s causing the retirement. It’s not any political calculus on the part of any administration,” Walsh said.
Amid rising costs for coal, cleaner alternatives like natural gas and nuclear energy have become more attractive. Utility operators have become more likely to support new natural gas projects, particularly those paired with carbon capture and storage technologies. There has also been a growing trend of retiring coal plants being redeveloped into natural gas-powered facilities.
While the first Trump administration did roll back certain climate-related rules regarding coal, and introduced its own regulations prolonging the lives of coal-fired plants, its efforts ran into market headwinds.
Thousands of coal miners lost work, and more coal plants closed under Trump than in the last four years of the Obama administration.
“Coal’s not back. Nobody saved the coal industry,” Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said in September 2019.
Grid security at stake
Trump’s rhetoric this time around is more focused on national security, winning the AI race, and securing as much reliable energy as possible on the grid.
“Pound for pound, coal is the single most reliable, durable, secure, and powerful form of energy,” Trump said Tuesday afternoon, claiming the power source is also cheap, efficient, high density, and nearly “indestructible.”
“The value of untapped coal in our country is 100 times greater than the value of all the gold at Fort Knox, and we’re going to unleash it and make America rich and powerful again,” the president said.
In a separate executive order focused on strengthening the reliability and security of the national grid, Trump called for utilizing all available power generation resources in order to meet the unprecedented demands brought on by AI and domestic manufacturing.
Trump’s multipart order focused on coal directs all departments and agencies to end “discriminatory” policies against the coal industry, ending coal leasing moratoriums, and accelerated permitting and funding for new coal projects.
“It is the policy of the United States that coal is essential to our national and economic security,” the order reads. “It is a national priority to support the domestic coal industry by removing Federal regulatory barriers that undermine coal production, encouraging the utilization of coal to meet growing domestic energy demands, increasing American coal exports, and ensuring that Federal policy does not discriminate against coal production or coal-fired electricity generation.”
The order also directs the National Energy Dominance Council, led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, to designate coal as a “mineral,” following on a separate order issued last month that was aimed at increasing domestic mineral production. It also calls on Energy Secretary Chris Wright to determine if coal used in steel production can be classified as a critical material and critical mineral.
The order also softens Biden administration policies like the Environmental Protection Agency’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standard, which the Trump administration claims would have forced dozens of coal plants to close.
Additionally, it instructs the Department of Justice to investigate state laws and policies the administration believes discriminate against coal. This includes any laws focused on addressing “climate change,” “environmental justice,” “greenhouse gas” emissions, carbon, and more.
“Every day under the Trump administration, we will continue to lower costs for American families, create jobs for American workers, and, very importantly, unlock unlimited amounts of affordable American energy, including … beautiful, clean coal,” Trump said before signing the multipart order.
As energy demand has soared in the last few years, the technology and manufacturing sectors have become more willing to embrace existing coal production as part of an “all of the above” approach.
Last summer, some utility operators also began to doubt whether they would be able to accelerate a phase-out of coal power to reduce emissions, as power reliability and avoiding blackouts has grown into an equally important, if not more important, issue.
AI and data center loads are the primary driver behind this demand, consuming upward of 84 gigawatts of electricity by 2030, according to projections from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
More market analysts have insisted that coal power will help make this demand problem caused by AI more manageable, particularly as renewables lack the infrastructure to keep up.
“Keeping existing coal-fired plants online and building new ones promise to be important ‘gap-fillers’ until renewables can compete without subsidies with fossil fuels,” William Shughart, a research adviser and senior fellow at the Independent Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
“Renewables currently cannot provide reliable baseload power; battery technologies for storing power generated when the sun shines and the wind blows are not yet ready for prime time,” he said.
Other possible pathways
James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute, said that all Trump needs to do to aid coal is to continue his efforts to remove Biden and Obama-era regulations restricting new and extended coal power production.
“I think that simply allowing coal to compete against other resources is all the opportunity coal needs,” Taylor told the Washington Examiner. “The lifeline was attempted to be severed under the Biden administration. Before that, the Obama administration and they were very effective at shutting down coal production and utilization. Simply removing those obstacles is really the only lifeline coal needs.”
The president could also urge the Department of Energy to make a request to FERC, similar to the one made during his first administration.
Yet Glick, the former commissioner, is doubtful the administration would try that route again.
“I tend to doubt it,” Glick told the Washington Examiner, noting that he hadn’t heard if the Department of Energy was thinking of proposing an identical request to the one made by Perry.
“It doesn’t strike me as a winning strategy because the Federal Power Act is pretty clear and there has to be a reason,” Glick continued. “If you want to treat different technologies differently, you have to have a good reason for that.”
The president could move to limit federal subsidies for renewable energy sources like wind and solar, Shughart said.
He noted that the president could also encourage states to stop requiring utilities to hit certain percentages of different power generation, as well as rescind federal regulatory rules accelerating electrification of homes and businesses.
TRUMP TO SIGN EXECUTIVE ORDER TO BOOST COAL INDUSTRY
He encouraged the administration to follow the market needs, rather than giving preference to coal.
“It should not be the government’s business to reward or punish any sector of the economy. Doing so smacks of industrial policies that almost never achieve their stated goals or do so at excessive cost,” Shughart said. “Relying on market price and profit signals facilitates the adoption of the most efficient mix of dependable and affordable power sources.”