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Plus a pre-seed round for a moon tech company from Latvia.
“Additionality” is back.
Deep Fission says that building small reactors underground is both safer and cheaper. Others have their doubts.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats have a coherent idea of how to move forward.
A lookahead with Heatmap’s own Emily Pontecorvo, Matthew Zeitlin, and Jillian Goodman.
Atomic Canyon is set to announce the deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
According to a new analysis shared exclusively with Heatmap, coal’s equipment-related outage rate is about twice as high as wind’s.
The Trump administration wants “beautiful clean coal” to return to its place of pride on the electric grid because, it says, wind and solar are just too unreliable. “If we want to keep the lights on and prevent blackouts from happening, then we need to keep our coal plants running. Affordable, reliable and secure energy sources are common sense,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on X in July, in what has become a steady drumbeat from the administration that has sought to subsidize coal and put a regulatory straitjacket around solar and (especially) wind.
This has meant real money spent in support of existing coal plants. The administration’s emergency order to keep Michigan’s J.H. Campbell coal plant open (“to secure grid reliability”), for example, has cost ratepayers served by Michigan utility Consumers Energy some $80 million all on its own.
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, a Republican, 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.
Rob talks New Jersey past, present, and future with Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath.
Electricity prices are the biggest economic issue in the New Jersey governor’s race, which is perhaps next month’s most closely watched election. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate and frontrunner, has pledged to freeze power prices for state residents after getting elected. Can she do that?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a center-left think tank that aims to encourage a “full-employment, robust-growth economy.” He’s also a nearly lifelong NJ resident. They chat about how New Jersey got such expensive electricity, whether the nuclear construction boom is real, and what lessons nuclear companies should take from economic history.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Is there a nuclear bubble? … As people who are interested in long-term decarbonization, number one, this is quite reminiscent of the environment that hit clean energy companies right as Biden was taking office. And number two, is there a nuclear bubble, and what does this mean for how we should think about nuclear going forward? Because at the end of this, I think the only way that any of this helps the climate is if we build a lot more plants.
Skanda Amarnath: We are definitely in a moment when there’s a lot of froth. I don’t want to say everything — it’s always like, it’ll feel unfair and not accurate to go after every single proposition that’s in markets. Like for example, Rick Perry’s Fermi America, they did an IPO and raised a lot of capital pretty successfully. And they have a plan for how they want to build a lot of stuff out — gas, solar, batteries. They want to build four AP1000s, the large, light-water reactors that are seen as the most recent that we’ve built in the United States, and they think they could do them at the same speed that China builds those same reactors.
On the surface of it, there are parts of it that seem interesting and promising. On the other hand, there’s also parts of it that feel very much wrapped up in the speculative frenzy. It gets more exaggerated when you get to like examples like Oklo. They seem to be very politically connected, specifically to Chris Wright. That plus some very small milestone successes in the fuel supply chain are now being sort of magnified into, They’re going be very successful in building out there first of a kind technology. And even in the space of small modular reactors, what they’re offering seems at least substantially more risky than what may be — outside of the space, so even compared to GE’s proposition for a small boiling water reactor, the technology that’s involved with like Oklo is kind of out there.
And one of the things, the lessons of nuclear, if you look through the history, is the more new stuff you’re doing, the harder it is, the more likely it is that you will get heartburn in terms of cost, in terms of schedule, and you never want to do this again. And it’ll involve a lot of bankruptcy, as it did with the case of the Georgia reactors that were built in the last decade. And so this is a sign that there’s clearly a lot of hype and a lot of willingness to take risk, and it’s not really backed up by fundamentals. That can be sometimes overrated in a boom. But that is something that people will look to in a bust and say, what were we doing here? Why was the price of the stock so high?
Mentioned:
How Electricity Got So Expensive
New Jersey’s Next Governor Probably Can’t Do Much About Electricity Prices, by Matt Zeitlin for Heatmap
Previously on Shift Key: The Last Computing-Driven Electricity Demand Boom That Wasn’t
Meta lays off 600 workers
Amazon lays off 14,000 workers
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
