The Energy Transition Kept Pace Under Trump 1.0. Don’t Count on It Happening Again.

Donald Trump first took the office of the president in January 2017, having called climate change a Chinese-invented hoax and promising to “end the war on coal.” He quickly went to work reversing the climate policy of the previous administration, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and tossing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which restricted greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. He opened up public lands for oil and gas development and jacked up tariffs on solar panels. His budgets continually called for slashing energy research and development done by the federal government’s national laboratories.

And yet emissions fell. In 2016, U.S. annual emissions from industry and energy were 5.25 billion tonnes. In 2021, after Trump left office and in spite of all his many major policy reversals, they were 5.03 billion, more than 4% lower than when he started.

Can it happen again? Trump is returning to Washington amidst a vastly different energy, economic, and climate moment. To meet even looser versions of international climate goals (the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit set in Paris is now essentially dead) requires drastic emissions cuts, beyond the business-as-usual reductions Trump oversaw in his first four years in office. Even those passive cuts may be harder to come by this time around, however, as the dirtiest fuels now make up a smaller portion of the energy mix and electricity demand looks to grow quickly for the first time in decades.

One reason for the steady reductions during Trump’s first term was that the “war on coal” continued apace, driven as much by market forces as anything else. Buoyed by the availability of natural gas and ever-cheaper renewables and depressed by the mounting costs of maintaining aging plants and directed activism against coal investment, plants shut down by the thousands of megawatts every year of Trump’s presidency.

“You have Trump promising to bring back coal: Not only do emissions continue to decline over the course of the Trump administration, on autopilot — to some degree, coal plants close faster in the Trump administration than the Obama administration,” Alex Trembath, deputy director of the energy-focused environmental group The Breakthrough Institute, told me, though he added: “These are secular trends in the short term that the presidency does not have a lot of influence over.”

While Trump has promised to aggressively pursue more drilling and fracking for oil and gas — and nominated an oil-and-gas state governor and a fracking executive to be his Secretaries of the Interior and Energy, respectively — there has been little to no talk of coal this time around. That’s not for lack of specificity. When Trump announced Chris Wright’s nomination to be Secretary of Energy, he mentioned nuclear, solar, geothermal, oil, and gas by name. When Burgum was announced, there were references to “liquid gold” and “ALL” forms of energy.

The coal industry sees hope in the new Trump administration, but its savior from senescence may be rising demand for electricity as much as public policy.

Even as the occupant of the White House changed in 2017, one thing that did not change was the continued slow growth in electricity demand. For about the first 20 years of this century, electricity load growth averaged about half a percent a year, including from 2017 to 2021. This made coal-to-gas switching easier to pull off.

“There was effectively no load growth — not just in those four years, from effectively 2008 to 2022,” Dennis Wamstad, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me.

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions stopped meaningfully rising in the early part of this century and finally peaked in 2009, according to Global Carbon Budget and Our World In Data, thanks to slow load growth, the recession, and the ascendance of natural gas in electricity generation. With next-to-no demand growth, utilities and energy companies could afford to retire their least efficient plants — and indeed, “declines in coal generation appear to be the largest driver of power sector emissions reductions” during the first Trump term, John Bistline, an energy analyst at the Electric Power Research Institute, told me in an email.

Since 2020 when electricity use dipped due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a combination of economic growth, electrification of home heating and transportation, new factories, and data centers have boosted five-year energy demand growth projections from 2.6% to 4.7%, a figure that the energy policy consulting firm Grid Strategies says may still be an underestimate.

This has meant some stalling on emissions reductions from burning fossil fuels. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has projected that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will flatten out in this year and next “because of small, counteracting changes in emissions from coal, natural gas, and petroleum products.” The EIA has also projected a slowdown in coal plant retirements, with this year on pace for the fewest since 2011. Several utilities and electricity markets have pushed out retirement dates to maintain reliability on the grid in the face of sudden demand spikes, including those in Georgia, Maryland, and possibly Indiana.

The chief financial officer of Duke Energy, which owns utilities in the Southeast and Midwest, told Bloomberg that the company’s plans to convert coal plants to co-fire with natural gas could be scrapped or delayed based on the new Trump administration’s plans for the Environmental Protection Agency’s power plant emissions rules. “The pace of the energy transition could change,” he told Bloomberg.

Large coal retirements are still forecast for the rest of the decade, but planned shutdowns have shrunk from 34.2 gigawatts of coal capacity retired over the next three years to 30 gigawatts, a greater than 12% reduction, according to data from S&P Global Commodities Insights.

“American citizens cast their votes for change, a change for the working class, a change that will improve the economy, a change for thoughtful approaches to our energy future,” Emily Arthun, the chief executive officer of the American Coal Council, told me in an e-mailed statement. “Coal is a critical resource needed for the well-being of our economy and the well-being of our citizens.”

Wamstad, the energy analyst, argues that this slowdown is just that: a slowdown, and that the economic case against coal is still overwhelming. “We actually think that structural change is going to continue in the 2020s, regardless of demand growth,” Wamstad told me. “Our findings are more aggressive than EIA or S&P. We expect by end of decade we will have retired another 100,000 megawatts of coal capacity, and by 2030 or 2031 we’ll have retired two-thirds of all capacity.”

Trembath was a little more circumspect about the ability of renewables to meet the lost capacity from shut-down coal, especially if Trump takes an ax to the Inflation Reduction Act and permitting difficulties persist, especially for wind.

“There are quite a few bottlenecks on current trends that will make sustained decarbonization more difficult than it was [from] 2017 to 2021,” Trembath told me. Load growth will put pressure on renewables and other non-carbon sources to keep up, while natural gas turbine providers are seeing orders double. “You have big announcements about small and advanced nuclear reactors, but a lot has to happen for new steel in the ground or Three Mile Island to reopen,” he said, referring to the splashy announcement Microsoft and Constellation made about restarting the 835-megawatt facility. “I think the most likely thing to meet a bunch of that load growth is natural gas.”

Even that may be a glass-half-full perspective, however.

“We have gas that is cheaper and we have renewables that are clearly cheaper and available now,” Wamstad said. Even if coal plants are kept open for another few years due to higher demand, “that’s a bad thing,” Wamstad said. “That doesn’t really change the direction we’re going — it changes the end date.”

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct the time horizon for Grid Strategies’ load growth projections