Trump Wants to Bail Out Coal and Nuclear
Power. Here’s Why That Will Be Hard.


When Mr. Trump came into office, he vowed to revive America’s coal mining industry by rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations. But coal keeps getting edged out by cheaper and cleaner alternatives. At least 15.4 gigawatts of coal capacity is set to retire this year, one of the biggest years on record, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. And the coal units that are left now operate far less frequently than they used to, replaced by natural gas, wind and solar power.

For many utilities, the decision to abandon coal comes down to simple economics. Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest electric utility, recently concluded that it could save $213 million by retiring two of its older coal-fired units a decade ahead of schedule and replacing them with a mix of wind, solar, battery storage and natural gas.

“We built a lot of our coal fleet 40 years ago, and it’s costly to maintain,” said Joshua D. Rhodes, an energy expert at the University of Texas Austin. “Many utilities are now finding that there are plenty of lower-cost options.”


Coal generation dropped precipitously over the past two decades, and nuclear power plateaued…

… while natural gas and renewable energy, like wind and solar, are on the rise.

That shift has been beneficial for efforts to slow global warming because coal produces more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than any other source in common use. Its decline has lowered CO₂ emissions in America’s power sector 27 percent below their 2005 levels.

But as coal companies continue to lose business, some have appealed to Mr. Trump to intervene.

On June 1, Mr. Trump ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to “prepare immediate steps” to halt the further closure of coal and nuclear plants. And a leaked internal memo suggested that the administration was considering a drastic intervention in America’s electricity markets to do so.

Right now, in parts of the country with deregulated electricity systems, like the Mid-Atlantic region, energy companies compete in auctions to sell their electricity to the grid. A glut of cheap natural gas has caused the prices to fall sharply in recent years — a big reason that many coal and nuclear plants have become unprofitable.

The memo suggested that the Energy Department could try to circumvent these forces by ordering grid operators to buy electricity at above-market rates from certain at-risk coal and nuclear plants for at least two years.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/13/climate/coal-nuclear-bailout.html