Which Coal Units Are Retiring, and Which Plants Will Continue Operating

One of the oldest power plants in the United States, perched on the edge of the nation’s largest coal mine, was slated to close in 2027. But the plant’s operator recently cancelled the retirement of the 66-year-old station, according to a draft utility plan published in late December.

Now, three coal-burning units at the Dave Johnston Power Plant, near Glenrock, Wyo.,are among dozens nationwide that could keep burning coal far past scheduled retirement dates. Utilities like Rocky Mountain Power, which operates the Glenrock plant, could be taking advantage of growth in energy demand and changes in environmental regulations to keep these plants operating. But experts say that won’t do much to slow coal’s inevitable decline.

Coal has been dwindling for over a decade. Once the dominant source of energy in the United States, today nearly 400 coal units supply roughly 16 percent of the nation’s grid. That’s far below natural gas, nuclear power and renewables.

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

But a New York Times analysis shows that utilities have extended the life of nearly a third of coal units with planned retirement dates, either through delays or by reversing course and canceling retirements entirely, between 2017 and today.

“In the last year or so, several larger utilities have backslid off emissions-reductions targets and, more specifically, retirement dates for some coal units,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a research and advocacy group.

Continued use of coal means more carbon emissions, increasing the glut of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, along with airborne hazards that can harm human health. Many of the plants date back to the 1960s and are expensive to operate, requiring heavy maintenance and retrofitted pollution controls.

In 2023, a study showed that 99 percent of operating U.S. coal plants were more expensive to run than the cost of building renewable replacements. That’s without factoring in the hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives included in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act or expensive unit upgrades required by new federal pollution standards passed in 2024.

“Even without I.R.A. incentives we’re far past the crossover point for most coal plants,” said Michelle Solomon, an author of the 2023 study and senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group. “It really becomes a no-brainer for not only adding new wind and solar but also funding a lot of battery storage with your savings.”

But global energy demand has also ticked up. Utilities have argued that load growth, or the increasing demand for electricity, means they need to keep coal units on the grid while they build out new sources of energy. They’ve predicted a 20 percent increase in electricity demand by 2035, according to data compiled by RMI, a nonprofit group focused on energy research.

“There’s been a delay over retirements based on grid stability and the energy needs arising from our data centers and A.I. usage,” said Emily Arthun, chief executive of the American Coal Council. The new administration’s plans to roll back regulations and policies around the coal industry, “gives utilities the opportunity to use their coal longer,” Ms. Arthun said.

In Indiana, Duke Energy proposed extending the life of its Gibson Generating Station, a 50-year-old plant that can burn enough coal to produce more than 3,300 megawatts of electricity, until 2038, backtracking on the utility’s previous plan to be coal-free by 2035.

In an emailed statement, Duke Energy cited “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 clean-energy transition, and it doesn’t require coal, experts say. Utilities have the option to increase their use of renewables like wind, solar and battery storage.

Critics, including tech giants, have also called the projected increase in energy demand from A.I. and data centers overblown. Last year, Microsoft argued that utilities are overestimating how much energy they’ll require while underestimating how renewables could meet the demand.

Renewables could exceed the increase in power demand, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy research firm. Since 2019, U.S. generation from wind and solar exceeded the growth in power demand by almost 100 million megawatt-hours. In 2024, renewables out-generated coal for more than 80 percent of the year. At that rate, renewables could top coal every day in 2026, according to the institute.

But along with market forces, utilities could also take advantage of changes in environmental regulations to keep coal stations open, especially in coal-friendly states like Wyoming, where two-fifths of U.S. coal is still mined.

“For an investor-owned monopoly utility, it’s not costing them to keep running the plant, necessarily, it’s costing the ratepayers who are paying for that,” Dr. Solomon said. “Politically, there’s a lot of support for coal in Wyoming and Utah where Rocky Mountain power is operating so I think they just don’t feel a ton of pressure to move to cleaner energy sources.”

In a Clean Air Act regulation passed last year, coal units with plans to operate past 2032 must comply with lower carbon regulations. While Rocky Mountain Power has plans for at least two units to employ carbon capture technology by 2030, other requirements from the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon pollution regulations are “not modeled as a formal requirement,” according to an emailed statement from Pacificorp, the parent company of Rocky Mountain Power. The law is under litigation and Mr. Trump is not expected to enforce it.

“A lot of it is politics,” said Christine Shearer, a project manager at Global Energy Monitor. “The pending E.P.A. regulations on coal plants are now uncertain, and utilities can see they have a friendlier political atmosphere and could be looking for ways to keep coal plants online longer, even though it’s more profitable to shut down and replace them with solar and wind.”

Other utilities have responded to economic forces and state-level regulations to close coal units more quickly. Between 2017 and January 2025, nearly a quarter of coal units had their planned retirement dates accelerated. In Michigan, for example, a coal operator decided to retire its 1,500 megawatt fleet six years early, by the end of 2026. The J.H. Coleman plant, which dates to 1962, will be replaced by natural gas, the production of which emits methane, another potent greenhouse gas. The transition will save customers almost $600 million, according to Srikanth Maddipati, a vice president for Consumers Energy, the utility that operates Coleman.

Mr. Maddipati pointed to regulations over clean water and coal waste disposal as reasons to retire the units early, but said the bigger issue was the expensive upkeep the old units would require if kept online. Michigan’s clean energy standards required Consumers Energy to serve customers 60 percent renewable energy by 2035 and 100 percent by 2040. Renewables were also cheaper, Mr. Maddapati said.

“How we produced energy 200 years ago is different from today,” Mr. Maddapati said. “Our customers benefit as we continue to adopt new technologies to provide safer, more reliable energy.”

Almost two-thirds of the accelerated retirements occurred at the Kingston Fossil Plant, a behemoth 1.4 gigawatt coal plant owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Kingston, once the largest coal plant in the world when it opened in 1955, was also the site of one of the nation’s largest industrial disasters when billions of gallons of coal residue spilled in 2008. The units will also be retrofitted to burn gas.

But even the units that are kept open will continue to decline in capacity as more planned gas, nuclear, and renewables enter the grid.

“They’ll keep those units open to keep their options open, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to be used very much,” said Seth Feaster, a data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “They’re just not competitive.”