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The Trump administration is threatening to force U.S. grid operators and utilities to keep money-losing coal-fired power plants running, no matter how dirty and expensive their power is.
Its stated reason? To shore up the reliability of the U.S. power grid.
It’s the latest salvo in a long-running battle over the country’s increasingly brittle grid — one that pits those in favor of hanging on to fossil fuels, and particularly coal, against those who put their faith in a future powered by cleaner and cheaper alternatives.
That battle is entering a critical phase as the grid faces challenges on multiple fronts.
Ever more intense summer heat waves and winter cold snaps driven by climate change are already straining the grid. An unprecedented boom in electricity demand, spurred by AI data centers and a resurgent manufacturing sector, threatens to push the grid even closer to its limit. Meanwhile, aging and unprofitable coal power plants have been closing at a rapid clip — and grid backlogs are preventing new solar, wind, batteries, and even fossil-gas plants from being built fast enough to replace them.
If these imbalances persist, more than half of North America faces significant risk of energy shortages over the next five to 10 years, according to a 2024 report from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which oversees the nation’s electric system. Utilities and regional grid operators are sounding the same alarm. Many say they need to build more fossil gas–fired power plants and keep costly coal plants open to deal with what is evolving into a genuine crisis.
But energy experts insist that there’s no single, simple solution to this high-stakes challenge. Maintaining reliability will certainly require retaining some otherwise unprofitable fossil-fueled power plants. But it also requires pressing utilities and regional grid operators to rapidly bring solar, wind, and batteries online — and enlisting electricity users to shift power use to reduce costly peaks in demand.
This multifaceted approach would bolster the grid without sacrificing cost and climate concerns. Flocking back to coal and ratcheting up gas, meanwhile, would cost consumers more, increase climate and air pollution, and ultimately result in a less diversified and therefore more fragile grid than one balanced by renewables.
In the longer term, the U.S. must break barriers to building far more high-voltage power lines to connect clean energy across regions and share power when extreme weather strikes, experts say. It also needs to support the economics for “clean firm” technologies like advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal power, or long-duration energy storage systems that can fill the gaps when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
“Reliability is actually a characteristic of the entire electricity system, and individual resources contribute to reliability as part of a balanced portfolio,” Sara Baldwin, senior electrification director at think tank Energy Innovation, said during a March webinar introducing the group’s February report on the complexities of keeping the grid running in a time of energy transition.
“So whenever you hear someone talking about the reliability of a single resource, that should raise a flag that is not necessarily grounded in full truth,” she said.
Baldwin’s “single resource” comment nods to a common refrain from the Trump administration and congressional Republicans that today’s grid reliability problems have a simple solution: Keep burning coal.
Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that authorizes the Department of Energy to prevent uneconomical coal plants from closing, even if they’re violating federal and state carbon and environmental mandates and imposing higher power costs on customers. This would be the most aggressive federal intervention in modern history into the authority of states to regulate utilities, and of regional grid operators to manage competitive energy markets.
Many Republicans in Congress have long insisted that grid reliability problems are primarily caused by climate and clean-energy policies put in place by states and the Biden administration. They argue that regulations, not economics, are forcing coal plants into “premature” retirement and that cleaner alternatives can’t be relied on to fill the gap left by those retirements.
During two grid-reliability hearings last month in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans leveraged this framing in questions for utility executives, grid operators, and energy experts. “Too many electric-generating facilities have been retired in recent years,” said Rep. Bob Latta, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that held the hearings.
Under questioning, most representatives of the U.S. grid operators, which are responsible for managing the systems that deliver electricity to about two-thirds of U.S. customers, concurred with Republicans that the shuttering of coal power plants presents a major reliability challenge.
But Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and ranking member on the energy subcommittee, pushed back on Republicans’ framing. Instead of trying to keep coal plants open, he said, utilities, grid operators, and regulators must clear bottlenecks preventing new clean energy and energy storage from taking over the role that fossil fuels have previously played.
Grid operators are “saying they need every new electricity generator they can get to come online in the next five years,” Pallone said. “If Republicans are really interested in unleashing American energy, they should work with us to clear interconnection queues and let resources get on the grid as quickly as possible.”
Instead, Republicans are considering repealing the clean-energy tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Pallone said in his opening statement. That would undercut the economics of not just solar, wind, and battery projects but of many other forms of carbon-free generation and storage, including geothermal power, advanced nuclear power, and long-duration energy storage.
“Repealing billions of dollars in technology-neutral funding for all types of new energy is not the way you address the increasing need for energy,” he said.
Pallone’s comments underscore two of the biggest problems facing the U.S. grid.
The first is that coal simply cannot compete economically against alternatives. Coal has dwindled to providing only about 15% of U.S. electricity supply, as both fossil gas and renewables fall in cost. Last year, solar, wind, and batteries alone made up more than 90% of the 56 gigawatts of power capacity built in the U.S., and they are expected to lead new additions in 2025, too.
The second problem is that many U.S. utilities and grid operators have been unable to move fast enough to embrace the advantages of cheap, clean energy. As Energy Innovation’s February report highlights, “outdated views on grid reliability are colliding with slow-moving institutions,” which has confounded the potential for solar, wind, and batteries to fill the reliability gaps left by shuttered coal plants.
Much of the reluctance from certain grid operators stems from the fact that solar and wind ebb and flow with the weather, whereas fossil-fueled power plants can be turned on and off on command.
“Renewable generators play an important role, and we want them to come onto the grid, but they are not a one-for-one substitute for the fossil-fuel generators that we are replacing,” said Manu Asthana, president and CEO of PJM Interconnection, which manages the transmission grid delivering electricity to about 65 million people from the mid-Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes.
But daytime solar production and nighttime wind generation can still provide a large and predictable amount of the power needed during hot summer afternoons and evenings and cold winter mornings, when demand for electricity spikes and reliability issues loom, said Wilson Ricks, a researcher and energy-modeling expert at Princeton University’s ZERO Lab.
Meanwhile, lithium-ion batteries are becoming a more cost-effective way to store clean power for use when the grid needs it, he said. Utility-scale batteries deployed in California and Texas are storing gigawatts of solar power to cover peak grid demands during sunset and evening hours, for example.
Taken together, “the technologies that are currently experiencing widespread commercial adoption — wind, solar, lithium-ion batteries — can actually go a long way towards ensuring that system-wide resource accuracy,” Ricks said during last month’s webinar.
Real-world experience bears this out, said Ric O’Connell, founding executive director of GridLab, a think tank that contributed to the Energy Innovation reliability report. The standout example is Texas, which is adding wind, solar, and batteries faster than any other state.
The transmission grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas “has been running at 85% carbon-free for the last several weeks in the spring,” O’Connell said during the webinar. That clean power has helped cover the absence of fossil-fueled plants that were shut down for seasonal maintenance, he noted.
Similarly, Southwest Power Pool, which manages a grid stretching from the Dakotas to Oklahoma, has hit 90% wind power during some hours of the year and has seen nearly half of annual power needs supplied by carbon-free energy in recent years, he said.
Last year, on California’s solar- and battery-rich grid, grid operator CAISO clocked 100 days in a row with 100% carbon-free electricity for at least a part of each day. Gigawatts of battery capacity also improved the state’s summer grid reliability by shifting solar power into the evenings.
That’s a big change from the summers of 2020 and 2022, when the California grid faced serious emergencies, CAISO CEO Elliot Mainzer told Congress during last month’s hearings.
“A reliable grid relies on a portfolio of resources with different attributes and complementary characteristics,” he said. Pairing batteries with solar “has helped to increase reliability in recent years.”
By contrast, O’Connell said, PJM’s grid “is in the single digits for wind and solar. PJM has tons of gas, tons of coal, tons of nuclear — and they say, ‘We need even more to meet growing load.’ I’m like, ‘No, we need to add wind and solar and batteries to meet that growing load.’”
PJM’s grid is a microcosm of this problematic dynamic.
The region expects to lose about 40 gigawatts of generation, more than 20% of its capacity, by 2030. But critics say its bigger challenge is its inability to interconnect new resources to replace what it’s losing.
For years, PJM delayed interconnection reforms conducted by other grid operators. It has also failed until recently to undertake the kind of regional grid expansion plans that have been done by grid operators in Texas, California, and the Midwest, which have enabled them to bring much more clean energy online.
Critics say PJM’s failure to institute these reforms and forward-looking plans has played an outsized role in its struggle to replace retiring power plants and in the spiking cost of securing new generation resources. Multiple studies find PJM could have avoided billions of dollars of costs and significantly eased its reliability concerns if it had connected even a fraction of those pent-up clean energy and battery projects over the past decade.
Instead, state regulators and grid operators have been forced to use costly emergency mechanisms to keep power plants from closing. In Maryland, for example, PJM has used its “reliability must-run” authority to pay the owners of coal- and oil-fired power plants to postpone their retirements until at least 2028 to prevent the threat of regional grid instability or outages, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming years.
The high price tag of these emergency stay-open measures highlights the economic burden of poor planning around power plant retirements, O’Connell said.
Those costs are bound to rise if the Trump administration forces coal power plants to stay open under emergency orders — or even demands that utilities reopen closed coal plants, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has said the Trump administration may seek to do.
These poor economics are why backers of renewables are frustrated with those who insist that clean-energy policies are to blame for coal plants closing and thus for grid reliability challenges.
“People are retiring coal plants because they’re uneconomic,” O’Connell said.
Karen Palmer, a senior fellow and director of the electric power program at think tank Resources for the Future, agreed that coal retirements are “not the fault of environmental regulation. The market prices just aren’t there.”
Nor are fossil-fueled power plants as reliable as they’re often made out to be, particularly during weather extremes when the grid needs them the most. Summer heat waves reduce the efficiency of gas-fired power plants and can lead to equipment failures.
And major wintertime grid emergencies of the past several years, such as the Texas grid collapse in February 2021 and rolling outages in the Southeast in December 2022, have been linked to cold-related failures not only at coal and gas-fired power plants but across the wells and pipelines that deliver gas to generate power.
No one technology is immune to weather stresses and disruptions. Subzero temperatures can freeze up wind turbines and sap battery capacity, and scorching temperatures reduce solar-panel output and dampen battery performance. But this reinforces the importance of a portfolio approach to solving reliability challenges, Baldwin said.
None of this is to downplay the complexity that grid operators face — particularly at a time when demand for electricity is growing at a pace not seen in decades.
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which manages a grid serving 15 U.S. states from Louisiana to North Dakota, warned last year that its latest expectations for new power demand from data centers and manufacturing facilities put it at increased risk of reliability challenges if generating capacity doesn’t increase at the same rate.
In New York, state grid operator NYISO has identified a “very concerning decline in statewide resource margins” by 2034 unless it can expand clean-energy deployments, which lag behind state targets. NYISO has already delayed the closure of some gas-fired “peaker” power plants in New York City, which lies at the southern end of a grid bottleneck that constrains how much clean power from upstate New York and Canada can reach the city, NYISO CEO Richard Dewey said at the March 25 congressional hearing.
ISO New England, which manages the grid across six New England states, is struggling during winter cold snaps to meet simultaneous demand for gas for heating and for generating power, CEO and President Gordon van Welie said at the hearing. New England is also relying on Canadian hydropower in the near term and offshore wind farms in the longer term, he said — both sources threatened by Trump administration policies.
And while grid operators at last month’s hearing concurred with Republicans that losing existing generation is one reliability threat, they also agreed that losing federal clean-energy tax credits is another. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat from Colorado, asked PJM’s Asthana if losing Inflation Reduction Act funding would “help or hurt our ability to stabilize the grid and to increase production.”
“In the near term, the interconnection queue is full of a lot of renewable projects, many of whom are, I’m sure, counting on the IRA,” Asthana replied. Repealing those tax credits “would make it less likely for them to come — and we do need them to come.”
“Anybody disagree with that on this panel?” DeGette asked the other grid operators. “No? They’re all shaking their heads no.”
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