After declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office, President Trump said Thursday that coal could be a fuel source for new electricity generation plants.
He announced a plan to issue emergency declarations for the construction of power plants to meet an expected increase in demand for electricity on artificial intelligence.
Mr. Trump said in a… Virtual appearance at the annual World Economic Forum In Davos, Switzerland. He added that if gas and oil pipelines are blown up, coal can be used as a backup energy source.
“We have more coal than anyone else,” Mr. Trump said. “We have more oil and gas than anyone else.”
While the United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas, and while it has More coal reserves From any other country, it just is The fourth largest producer of coal, behind China, India and Indonesia.
But reliance on fossil fuels like coal has made the United States one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane, which have irreversibly warmed the planet and changed the global climate.
Despite Mr. Trump’s talk of building coal plants, the United States has significantly reduced its coal generating capacity in recent years. Most of the decline came because natural gas, and now renewables like solar and wind, were cheaper energy sources. The 2023 study showed that 99 percent of American coal plants They were more expensive to operate than renewable alternatives.
By 2023, the remaining 206 coal plants in the United States were powered Nearly 16 percent of the country’s electricitymuch less than natural gas and less than renewable energy and nuclear energy.
Nearly a quarter of current coal generation is scheduled for retirement by 2040, according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration in October 2024. These reductions cross 51 coal plants.
The pace of those retirements It slowed down last year While the demand for energy increased. Facilities expect a 20 percent increase in demand For electricity by 2035, according to data collected by RMI, a non-profit group focused on energy research.
Experts said a rise in electricity use was expected as part of the clean energy transition and that coal generation would not be required to meet it.
“Utilities are skipping a step and asking everyone to take it as a singular conclusion that if there is growth in demand from manufacturing, cold storage, data centers or artificial intelligence, it will have to be offset by coal, while it is one of the most expensive,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy Institute. and Policy, a research and advocacy group, said the resources it had left to work.
But industry groups said that under Mr. Trump, it may be possible to increase coal exports and build smaller coal plants.
“There is a sense of optimism with the new administration,” said Emily Arthun, CEO of the American Coal Council.
While the coal industry could suffer a small bump under Mr. Trump, experts said coal was simply too expensive to return to.
“Coal is fundamentally uneconomical,” said Sean O’Leary, a senior research scientist at the Ohio River Institute, an energy research center. “Any need not met by wind, solar, or battery storage will be mostly met by natural gas, and coal will remain a distant fourth resource in the mix.”
The Trump administration’s unwavering commitment to fossil fuels could hamper the country’s competitiveness in the energy transition.
China dominates the United States in every aspect of clean energy, and fossil fuel generation has reached a historic low in the European Union. last year, Solar energy has overtaken coal for the first timeWind has outperformed both coal and gas, according to a new report from Ember, an energy research tank.