But … how reliable is coal, actually? According to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund of data from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit that oversees reliability standards for the grid, coal has the highest “equipment-related outage rate” — essentially, the percentage of time a generator isn’t working because of some kind of mechanical or other issue related to its physical structure — among coal, hydropower, natural gas, nuclear, and wind. Coal’s outage rate was over 12%. Wind’s was about 6.6%.
“When EDF’s team isolated just equipment-related outages, wind energy proved far more reliable than coal, which had the highest outage rate of any source NERC tracks,” EDF told me in an emailed statement.
Coal’s reliability has, in fact, been decreasing, Oliver Chapman, a research analyst at EDF, told me.
NERC has attributed this falling reliability to the changing role of coal in the energy system. Reliability “negatively correlates most strongly to capacity factor,” or how often the plant is running compared to its peak capacity. The data also “aligns with industry statements indicating that reduced investment in maintenance and abnormal cycling that are being adopted primarily in response to rapid changes in the resource mix are negatively impacting baseload coal unit performance.” In other words, coal is struggling to keep up with its changing role in the energy system. That’s due not just to the growth of solar and wind energy, which are inherently (but predictably) variable, but also to natural gas’s increasing prominence on the grid.
“When coal plants are having to be a bit more varied in their generation, we're seeing that wear and tear of those plants is increasing,” Chapman said. “The assumption is that that's only going to go up in future years.”
The issue for any plan to revitalize the coal industry, Chapman told me, is that the forces driving coal into this secondary role — namely the economics of running aging plants compared to natural gas and renewables — do not seem likely to reverse themselves any time soon.
Coal has been “sort of continuously pushed a bit more to the sidelines by renewables and natural gas being cheaper sources for utilities to generate their power. This increased marginalization is going to continue to lead to greater wear and tear on these plants,” Chapman said.
But with electricity demand increasing across the country, coal is being forced into a role that it might not be able to easily — or affordably — play, all while leading to more emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, mercury, and, of course, carbon dioxide.
The coal system has been beset by a number of high-profile outages recently, including at the largest new coal plant in the country, Sandy Creek in Texas, which could be offline until early 2027, according to the Texas energy market ERCOT and the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
In at least one case, coal’s reliability issues were cited as a reason to keep another coal generating unit open past its planned retirement date.
Last month, Colorado Representative Will Hurd wrote a letter to the Department of Energy asking for emergency action to keep Unit 2 of the Comanche coal plant in Pueblo, Colorado open past its scheduled retirement at the end of his year. Hurd cited “mechanical and regulatory constraints” for the larger Unit 3 as a justification for keeping Unit 2 open, to fill in the generation gap left by the larger unit. In a filing by Xcel and several Colorado state energy officials also requesting delaying the retirement of Unit 2, they disclosed that the larger Unit 3 “experienced an unplanned outage and is offline through at least June 2026.”
Reliability issues aside, high electricity demand may turn into short-term profits at all levels of the coal industry, from the miners to the power plants.
At the same time the Trump administration is pushing coal plants to stay open past their scheduled retirement, the Energy Information Administration is forecasting that natural gas prices will continue to rise, which could lead to increased use of coal for electricity generation. The EIA forecasts that the 2025 average price of natural gas for power plants will rise 37% from 2024 levels.
Analysts at S&P Global Commodity Insights project “a continued rebound in thermal coal consumption throughout 2026 as thermal coal prices remain competitive with short-term natural gas prices encouraging gas-to-coal switching,” S&P coal analyst Wendy Schallom told me in an email.
“Stronger power demand, rising natural gas prices, delayed coal retirements, stockpiles trending lower, and strong thermal coal exports are vital to U.S. coal revival in 2025 and 2026.”
And we’re all going to be paying the price.
Activists at COP28 call for negotiators to "hold the line" on ending fossil fuels. Sean Gallup/Getty Images
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