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The end has been coming for a while. With the EPA’s new power plant emissions rules, though, it’s gotten a lot closer.
There’s no question that coal is on its way out in the U.S. In 2001, coal-fired power plants generated about 50% of U.S. electricity. Last year, they were down to about 15%.
On Thursday, however, the Biden administration arguably delivered a death blow. New carbon emission limits for coal plants establish a clear timeline by which America’s remaining coal generators must either invest in costly carbon capture equipment or close. With many of these plants already struggling to compete with cheaper renewables and natural gas, it’s not likely to be much of a choice. If the rule survives legal challenges, the nation’s coal fleet could be extinct by 2039.
Coal plant retirement presents a two-pronged problem: Utilities have to figure out how to replace lost power generation, and the surrounding community must reckon with the lost tax revenue and jobs from the power plants and the coal mines that supplied them.
From the beginning, Biden has promised to help revitalize the economies of the communities left in coal’s wake. “We’re never going to forget the men and women who dug the coal and built the nation,” he said when he laid out his energy transition plan just a week after entering office. “We’re going to do right by them.”
Economic revitalization doesn’t happen overnight, of course, or even in the span of a four-year term. But money is already rolling out in the form of targeted investments in new energy sources, businesses, and jobs in coal communities, and there’s more to come.
It’s the proactive planning aspect, however, that remains underresourced and scattershot.
Emily Grubert, a civil engineer and sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, told me there are few plants that are expected to make it past 2039 regardless, due to their age and the economics of operating them. The emissions rule’s real potential, then, is to bring about a more orderly — and potentially less painful — exit.
A Heatmap analysis of Energy Information Administration data found that of the nation’s roughly 230 remaining coal plants, 38 are scheduled to fully shut down by 2032. These plants won’t have to make any changes under the new rule. An additional five will shutter by 2039. These will be required to reduce their emissions in the interim, beginning in 2030, by replacing some of the coal they burn with natural gas. That leaves about 190 plants with either partial retirement plans or no plans at all that will be forced to make a decision between carbon capture and shutting down.
Grubert told me that many of these plants have, in fact, communicated informal plans to shut down that are not recorded in the federal data. That aside, she called it “amazing” how many have no retirement plans at all.
For surrounding communities, an impending coal transition can look really different in different places, depending on geography and how diverse the local economy is. Still, the first step should be the same everywhere. “What you need to do, really practically, is figure out what that plant is supporting,” Grubert told me. “What needs to be replaced, for whom, and by when?
It’s a lot more concrete than it seems: It’s some specific number of people, it’s some specific amount of tax revenue. It’s much easier to move forward once you actually know what those are.”
How much of that work has been done so far depends, in part, on the state. Some, like Colorado, New Mexico, and Illinois, have established new positions or entirely new offices dedicated to helping communities transition off fossil fuels. But other states, like Wyoming and Ohio, have advanced measures to keep coal plants open as long as possible.
Successful planning also depends on how clearly a retirement date is articulated and stuck to, Jeffrey Jacquet, an associate professor of rural sociology at Ohio State University who leads a multidisciplinary research project on coal communities there, told me. Some communities have been told one date and then been blindsided when a plant has been forced to shut down years earlier for economic reasons. He noted one success story in Shadyside, Ohio, where the local school board was able to negotiate a deal to slowly step down its tax collections over four years after learning the RE Burger coal plant was going to close. “Had they not weaned us off losing that tax revenue, we would have been in terrible shape,” a school board administrator told a student on Jacquet’s project. “Fiscally we’re pretty good on solid ground now, but at one point it was an extremely bleak time.”
The new power plant rule could help address some of these problems by putting the entire country on the same set timeline, forcing plant operators to put retirement dates in writing. There’s still a risk some will fail early, in unforeseen ways, but at least communities will have been put on notice.
Those who go looking for help will find ample resources. When I started looking into all of the programs that exist to bring investment into coal communities, or otherwise help them diversify their economies, I was surprised at how much investment in coal communities had already been set in motion:
This list is far from comprehensive. In fact, there are so many programs, it’s kind of a problem.
“So much of it comes down to the local capacity to take advantage of these opportunities,” Jacquet told me. “A lot of these communities are losing population, they’re facing out-migration. Community leaders are already overworked and overstressed.” (Possible case in point: I reached out to several local groups doing coal transition work in West Virginia and Kentucky for this story, and wasn’t able to get anyone on the phone.)
This isn’t a new problem, per se. The federal government had dozens of programs and pots of money set aside for rural economic development before the Biden administration came into the White House, but they were scattered across different agencies and departments within those agencies, making it difficult for any overworked, overstressed town manager to know where to start.
Jeremy Richardson, a manager of the carbon-free electricity program at the think tank RMI, told me he was involved in a group that pitched policies to the incoming president that would help ease the process. “It shouldn’t be on the community to navigate the entire federal bureaucracy to figure out what they qualify for,” he said.
Biden took the note. In his first climate executive order, he established the Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization, which is building tools to help companies and local governments identify funding opportunities. Its “getting started guide,” which Richardson called a “fantastic piece of work,” walks communities and workers through 10 concrete steps, from identifying needs to developing a transition strategy to finding funding and implementing a project, with curated resources for each step. The group also established four “rapid response” teams to provide more targeted assistance to communities in areas with the highest loss of coal assets.
Jacquet summed up the group’s work as “hand holding,” stressing that it still required people at the local level that were willing and able to take advantage of these services. “I think we’re sort of seeing this phenomenon where the communities that are already best positioned to take advantage of these are going to be the ones that take advantage of it,” he said.
There are other limitations to the broader suite of federal assistance programs. For instance, even if a community is able to attract a big manufacturing project, there may be a several-years gap between the coal plant closing and the new job opportunities and local tax revenue manifesting.
That’s why the coordination efforts in states like Colorado, which was the first to establish an Office of Just Transition in 2019, are so promising. The office has a small staff of six, and a meager budget of $15 million, but is making progress by focusing on highly targeted assistance. In the town of Craig, two nearby coal-fired power plants are scheduled to retire over the next four years and four coal mines will shutter by 2030, taking with them 900 jobs and about 45% of the county’s tax revenue. A new “transition navigator” hired in January will help match the town’s needs with federal and state funding opportunities and serve as a central point of contact for coal workers and their families seeking connection to services.
“I think it’s been really helpful,” said Richardson. “They’ve had long conversations — several years of conversations — with those communities in northwest Colorado that are facing closures soon.” The office was controversial at first. Republicans called it “Orwellian” and unanimously opposed it. But in the years since, some of its staunchest critics have become its biggest champions. “To me that says that they’re doing some good work and they’re making some inroads.”
There’s progress on the energy side, too. RMI is pushing a model called “clean repowering,” enabled by a suite of IRA incentives that offer tax credits and loan guarantees for clean energy projects in fossil fuel communities. The idea is that renewable energy projects can get around the yearslong bottleneck of connecting to the grid by building in close proximity to existing fossil fuel plants. A lot of these plants have “spare” interconnection rights that a solar or wind farm could use to connect a lot sooner.
RMI found 250 gigawatts of spare rights available — which is more than the capacity of the entire existing coal fleet. “If you can build a renewable facility alongside where that fossil plant is, maybe you use the fossil plant a little less because it’s cheaper to generate from the renewables, but you know, you don’t have to close it immediately,” said Richardson.
As Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future, told me, even though the coal transition has been in motion for decades, it’s still early. There hasn’t been enough research. Much of the funding and programs are new. No one really knows yet what’s working, or what could work better.
The only thing that’s clear, he said, is that if these communities are going to develop alternative economic futures, they really need to begin that process now.
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Whichever way you cut it, this has been an absolute banner year for nuclear deals in the U.S. It doesn’t much matter the metric — the amount of venture funding flowing to nuclear startups, the number of announcements regarding planned reactor restarts and upgrades, gigawatts of new construction added to the pipeline — it’s basically all peaking. Stock prices are up across all major publicly traded nuclear companies this year, in some cases by over 100%.
“This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told me. “It’s spanning the gamut from bringing a 40-year-old reactor back to things that have not even been proven scientifically yet.”
To name just a few announcements from this year: planning for a 4.4-gigawatt nuclear power complex is now underway in Texas; South Carolina’s state-owned utility is seeking buyers to restart construction on two partially built AP1000 reactors; New York governor Kathy Hochul is looking to build a new reactor in upstate New York; The Tennessee Valley Authority submitted a construction permit for a small modular reactor; Google signed a power purchase agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems; and another fusion company, Helion Energy, raised a whopping $425 million round of venture capital. On top of all that there’s the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, which is targeted to restart by year’s end, bringing 800 megawatts of new nuclear power online.
Heading into the second Trump term, there were plenty of indications that the administration would support this technology with increasingly bipartisan appeal. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that while the One Big Beautiful Bill eviscerated tax credits for solar and wind, it preserved them for both existing and new nuclear facilities. Now that this support is assured, Stein expects the nuclear announcements to keep rolling in. “We might have seen more deals earlier this year if there wasn’t uncertainty about what was going to happen with tax credits. But now that that’s resolved, I expect to hear more later this year,” he told me.
How much of this is, I asked him, is due to data centers and their seemingly insatiable demand for clean, firm power? “Most of it,” he said simply. By way of example, he pointed out how data center load growth has changed the outlooks for two small modular reactor companies in particular. “NuScale has been trying to find their first project for a long time now, after they had to cancel their [Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems] project. Kairos didn’t have a clear buyer for its first-of-a-kind, even though it was building two test reactors,” Stein explained. “Then all of a sudden, they all had additional deals in the works because of data center demand.”
Last year, Kairos inked a 500-megawatt deal with Google to meet the hyperscaler’s growing data center needs, while this year, Texas A&M selected the company — along with three others — to build a reactor at the university’s research and development campus. And while NuScale infamously canceled its first project in 2023 due to rising costs, this year it received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a new and improved reactor design. Now the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, told Reuters that NuScale is in talks to deploy its tech with five unnamed “tier one hyperscalers.” Its stock is up more than 150% on the year.
That’s a big turnaround for a company that, less than two years ago, was widely considered a cautionary tale — and it’s not the only one in the industry with this type of comeback story. Right before NuScale’s project failed, another nuclear company, X-energy, announced that it would no longer go public due to “challenging market conditions” and “peer company trading performance.” But while X-energy still has yet to IPO, it appears to be doing just fine. In February, the company announced the close of a $700 million Series C follow-on round, coming on the heels of Amazon’s strategic investment last year.
“I think every company has their stories about how things are changing,” Seth Grae, CEO of the advanced nuclear fuel company Lightbridge, told me. Things have moved a lot faster, Grae said, since Trump released a series of executive orders aimed at accelerating nuclear energy deployment. “Just since May, we’ve received this highly enriched uranium [from the Department of Energy], made these fuel samples, got them qualified already at Idaho National Lab. We expect they’ll be in the reactor this year. Grae told me. “Things didn’t used to happen that fast in nuclear.”
Trump’s plans to fast track nuclear development have also raised serious concerns, however, as critics worry that acceleration could lead to laxer safety standards The executive orders call for, among other things, cutting staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, just as the industry enters a period of intense activity. In June, the President fired one of the agency’s commissioners, Christopher Hanson, without cause. Another commissioner, Annie Caputo, resigned in July.
But right now, the nuclear industry is mostly basking in optimism. Grae credits the government’s strong support for the surge in nuclear stocks — Lightbridge’s own stock price has jumped 180% this year, while another nuclear fuel company, Centrus Energy, is up even more. The small modular reactor company Oklo is up 285% for the year, on the heels of last year’s 12-gigawatt non-binding deal with the data center company Switch — one of the largest corporate clean power agreements to date.
Last year’s slew of deals involving Oklo, X-energy, and Kairos show that the sector’s momentum had been building well before Trump took office. By 2023, the writing was already on the wall in terms of data center load growth, as grid planners began to predict a sharp rise in electricity demand after over a decade of stagnation. But when I asked Erik Funkhauser of the Good Energy Collective whether the prior two years compared with this one, he concurred with Stein. “Nope,” he told me. “We’re seeing capital infusion at a really, really high pace, as high of a pace as the company’s suppliers can keep up with on projects.”
Still, the party may not go on forever. “I see a potential for a Valley of Death,” Stein told me, similar to what many startups go through when they’re trying to raise later-stage funding rounds.
“If things don’t start to actually move forward with real progress, either getting licenses or building prototypes on time, then all of that investment will be pulled back.” That’s what the U.S. saw during the last so-called “nuclear renaissance” in the late 2000s, he explained, when a rash of large reactors were proposed with only two actually reaching completion.
These were the notorious Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia, which finally came online in 2023 and 2024 respectively, running billions over budget and years behind schedule. In order for this latest round of nuclear enthusiasm to avoid the same fate, Stein told me it’s critical that leading projects demonstrate enough early success to maintain developer confidence in the economic and technical viability of new — and old — nuclear technologies.
That being said, the sector will inevitably contract. “Back when we saw this last scale-up, there were three designs that were really competing for attention, and now there are 75. So we’re going to see a lot of failures,” Stein said. The question for venture investors, he told me, is “how many failures of startups that you didn’t invest in are you willing to tolerate before you start to think the whole segment has trouble?”
The second main way this could all fall to pieces, he told me, is if “somebody tries to move too fast,” and that recklessness leads to “either a bankruptcy or an accident or something like that that will send ripples or shock waves through the whole sector.”
Indeed, a metaphorical or literal meltdown in the sector could put a quick halt to this year’s frenzied momentum. But within the next few years, as these announced projects begin to line up their licenses and come online — or fall apart— we’ll soon see whether this latest nuclear revival is a true turning point or just another bubble.
On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.
Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.
An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA
The United States’ demand for electricity broke records twice last month. Air conditioners cranking on hot days, combined with surging demand from data centers, pushed the peak in the Lower 48 states to a high of 758,053 megawatts on July 28, between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. EST, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Hourly Electric Grid Monitor shows. The following day, peak demand set another record, hitting 759,180 megawatts. That’s nearly 2% above the previous record set on July 15, 2024.
The EIA predicted demand to grow by more than 2% per year between 2025 and 2026. Forecasts are even higher in areas with large data centers and factories underway, such as Texas and northern Virginia. The milestone comes as the Trump administration cracks down on solar and wind energy, two of the fastest-growing and quicker-to-build sources of new generation. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to eliminate $7 billion in spending on grants for solar energy, though when Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo asked the agency, it said only that, “With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, EPA is working to ensure Congressional intent is fully implemented in accordance with the law.”
Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, locked down enough votes on Tuesday to replace Illinois Senator Dick Durbin as the Democrats’ whip in the chamber. Durbin, who is retiring next year, has served in the Senate Democrats’ No. 2 position since 2005. In his endorsement on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Schatz “a close friend and one of my most valued allies.”
Schatz crusaded for the Inflation Reduction Act and told Heatmap he supported last year’s failed bipartisan permitting reform deal, even as progressive greens campaigned against its giveaways to fossil fuels. In a Shift Key podcast interview with my colleague Robinson Meyer and his co-host, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins, in February, Schatz pitched a big tent for climate action. “We all have to hang together. It’s the American Clean Power Association. It’s the energy company that does both clean and fossil energy. It’s the transmission and distribution companies. It’s the manufacturers. It’s labor. It’s Wall Street. It’s K Street. Everyone has to hang together and say, not only is this good for business, but there’s something that is foundationally worse for business than any individual policy decision.”
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The Trump administration may be clawing back funding for cleaning up heavy industry, but Big Tech is still inking deals. On Monday, Amazon agreed to buy low-carbon cement from the startup Brimstone. Then on Tuesday, the data center developer STACK Infrastructure announced the completion of “a pilot pour” of green cement from rival startup Sublime. The moves highlight the growing demand for cleaner industrial materials amid increased scrutiny of the energy and pollution linked to server farms.
America’s uranium enrichment went out of business in the early 2000s after the Clinton-era megatons-to-megawatts program essentially ceded the industry to cheap Russian imports made from disassembled atomic weapons. Since banning imports from Russia last year, the U.S. has been ramping up funding for nuclear fuel again, especially as the industry looks to build new types of reactors that rely on fuel other than the low-enriched uranium that virtually all the country’s operating 94 commercial reactors use. On Monday, the Department of Energy announced its first pilot project for advanced nuclear fuels, giving the startup Standard Nuclear the first federal deal. On Tuesday, the agency signed a $1.5 billion deal to restore the so-called Atomic City on the 100-acre parcel of federal land at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plan in Kentucky.
The Trump administration gave permission to the National Weather Service to hire up to 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians after sweeping cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, CNN’s Andrew Freedman reported. The agency, which was partly blamed for its warnings going unheeded ahead of the deadly Texas floods last month, also received an exemption from the federal hiring freeze.
The move came the same day as a federal judge blocked the administration from diverting billions of dollars in Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for disaster resilience and flood mitigation. The injunction warned FEMA against spending the money on anything else.
Beyond Meat is finally getting beyond meat. The company plans to shed the flesh reference in its name this week as it launches its new Beyond Ground product that promises more protein than ground beef. “With this launch,” Fast Company’s Clint Rainey reported, “Beyond Meat is becoming merely Beyond and turning its focus away from only mimicking animal proteins to letting plant-based proteins speak for themselves. The radical move is cultural, agricultural, and financial.”
Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.
The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.
Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just want to make a related question, which is, you can actually say some of the sentences in the DOE report — you can believe tornadoes don’t show any influence from climate change and still believe heatwaves do, and still believe extreme rainfall events do. In fact, you could believe the cost of heat waves getting worse could justify the entire regulatory edifice.
Jody Freeman: What I love about you, Rob, right now, is you’re kind of incensed about little points that might individually sort of be right, maybe each one separately, but none of it adds up to even a chink in the armor. Right? And what’ll have to happen is the scientific community writ large, en masse, is going to have to come back and say, even if one or two or three of these sentences could possibly, plausibly be actually accurate, it does nothing to change the overwhelming —
Jesse Jenkins: It doesn’t matter.
Freeman: Right. What I think is happening is we’re all getting poked and distracted and tweaked into outrage over science, when in fact, the first argument they’re making is the one where they could actually attract some judges and justices to say, Oh wait, maybe you have a little more discretion here to set a threshold level. You know, Maybe it matters that you’re saying nothing we do here in the U.S. will make a difference in the end to global warming, and maybe that is a reason you don’t want to regulate. Hmm, maybe we’ll accept that reason. And that’s what we need, I think, to be more concerned about.
Jenkins: You’re saying, don’t get distracted by the fight over the climate science. That fight is very clear. It’s this legal argument that this isn’t an air pollutant because it’s not a local air pollutant, it mixes globally with all the other CO2, and we can’t, you know, each class of cars is a tiny contributor to that, and so we shouldn’t worry about it —
Freeman: And much of this is a replay, or a rehash of arguments that the George W. Bush administration lost in Massachusetts vs. EPA. So a lot of this is like, let’s take another run at the Supreme Court.
Mentioned:
The EPA Says Carbon Pollution Isn’t Dangerous. What Comes Next?
The EPA on its reconsideration of the endangerment finding
Jody’s story on the change: Trump’s EPA proposes to end the U.S. fight against climate change
Jesse’s upshift (and accompanying video); Rob’s sort of upshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.