Coal news and updates

The coal industry’s decline has been a long time coming, thanks to an aging fleet of power plants. True, the Supreme Court’s pending decision on the legality of the administration’s carbon-cutting Clean Power Plan could dramatically speed coal’s demise. But it’s happening nonetheless.

In 2015, 94 coal-fired power plants closed, with the combined net summer capacity of 13,556 megawatts, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. To put that in context, the country lost roughly the same total capacity of all of Kentucky’s electric sector coal plants that year.

Another 41 coal plants are scheduled to close in 2016, with a combined net summer capacity of 5,326.5 megawatts. That’s slightly greater than all of Colorado’s electric sector coal plants.

Those figures don’t account for combined heat and power coal plants, which recycle the heat generated from burning coal and use it for another industrial purpose. These plants aren’t exactly booming, but they face less opposition from environmental interests than straightforward electric sector coal power plants because they use the energy more efficiently.

These closures are happening regardless of whether the Clean Power Plan, or any more regulations, move forward.

The country’s coal fleet is shrinking and aging. The median-aged coal plant in the United States was built in 1972, according to the EIA. The vast majority (91 percent) were built in the 1980s or earlier. Those older plants make up 697 of the total 765 utility-level coal plants. The average retirement age of coal plants in 2015 was 58 years old, which indicates that much of the country’s coal fleet is facing its demise in the relatively near future.

Source: Morning consult