Trump wants coal again

Apr 11, 2025, 7:06 AM

Trump is Going Backwards. Nobody in the energy sector is gonna buy into his plans for coal. The numbers don’t work anymore. He’s an old man with an old plan.

“We’re going to keep those coal miners on the job,” Trump said. “Can you tell them to just remain calm, because we’re going to have that plant opening and burning the clean coal, beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time.”

[BTW, there is no such thing as clean coal. There is slightly less dirty coal, but not clean.]

In another move, DOE on Tuesday said it was offering loan guarantees for coal-fired power plant projects, such as upgrading energy infrastructure to restart operations or operate more efficiently or at a higher output.

The moves by the Trump administration do little to improve the economics of coal compared to other generating resources, according to Rob Gramlich, CEO of Grid Strategies. “Natural gas fracking killed coal power in the US and neither this nor any previous administration is banning fracking,” Gramlich said.

“I don’t think these orders change the facts that coal-fired power plants are old, expensive to run, and unlikely to operate very often or for many more years,” Gramlich said.

Also, there is no evidence that any company is considering building a new coal-fired power plant or that supply chains or manufacturing could support it, Gramlich said.

Nearly all U.S. coal-fired power plants are more expensive to run than new, local wind, solar, natural gas and energy storage resources.

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most renewables (large scale utility solar is becoming close).

We have a lot of coal plants that were operational that were forced to be shuttered by state regulations/targets and not enough base generation coming up to replace them...all the while, electricity demand is returning to pre-2000 growth curve. This is already placing reliability strains on certain regions in the US and it's forecast to get even worse in the next 5 yrs.

I believe it is the correct and obvious course to slow down the ramping down of coal and to fire back up some of the plants that have been recently decommissioned...not due to age or operational stability, but due to state fossil fuel targets.

And yes, there is cleaner coals AND cleaner coal technology available well past the last generation of scrubbers, like carbon capture, for instance.

We need a bridge to get us to the time that large-scale utility storage is a real option. It's made a lot of progress over the last few yrs, but it's still a LONG way off in terms of economic feasibility.

Smaller-scale modular nuclear technology also shows a lot of potential, but we're also some many years away from that being a real wide-spread solution.

We have to get from here to there and firing back up coal makes a lot of sense from a grid / technical perspective.

Says no one whos ever worked at a coal powered facility

Its dirty stuff before and after its been burned.

Trump wants coal again

A lot of that is incorrect....

Embrace nuclear, renewables and natural gas

Re: Embrace nuclear, renewables and natural gas

The 80s and 90s environmentalists opposed nuclear .

Re: Embrace nuclear, renewables and natural gas

The point though is that coal is not more expensive to run than...

Says no one whos ever worked at a coal powered facility

Its dirty stuff before and after its been burned.

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