As part of the Trump administration’s continued efforts to attack renewable energy and bolster the fossil fuel industry, officials are considering using emergency powers to bring retired coal plants back online and prevent others from shutting down. But doing so would raise electricity prices for Americans, come with disastrous environmental impacts for the world, and only benefit coal companies.
While at CERAWeek, an energy conference by S&P Global, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgim told Bloomberg Television about the potential coal resurgence. “Under the national energy emergency, which President Trump has declared, we’ve got to keep every coal plant open,” he said. “And if there had been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back.”
Coal’s dominance has been declining in the U.S. for years. It currently supplies just 16% of the country’s power, down from just over 51% in 2000. And since 2000, about 780 U.S. coal-fired units across the country have come offline; more than 120 coal plants are expected to shutter here within the next five years.
Bringing those coal plants back is “an incredibly dumb idea,” says Peter Gleick, a climate scientist with a background in energy systems and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. “It’s dangerous. It’s expensive. It’s impractical.”
The logistics alone of bringing retired coal plants online would be difficult. “It’s not like turning on and off a lightbulb,” he says. Many plants have been entirely decommissioned, and some have even been repurposed into renewable energy and storage projects. Bringing back the equipment to allow them to burn coal—or updating outdated infrastructure—would be expensive and time consuming. In the last five years, most of the U.S. coal plants that closed were, on average, 50 years old; globally, coal plants have retired at an average age of 37 years, says Christine Shearer, an analyst at Global Energy Monitor.
Those coal plants were also retired for economic reasons; it’s more expensive, Gleick says, for a utility company to run a coal plant than to build renewables or operate natural gas plants. A 2019 analysis found that about three-quarters of U.S. coal plants would save money by switching to wind or solar. A 2023 analysis upped that figure to 99% of coal plants. That means utilities likely wouldn’t want retired coal plants to come back online. “Any attempt to do this will raise electricity prices for everyone,” he adds.
Coal producers themselves would profit from more coal, of course, and some utility companies have actually delayed coal plant retirements because of concerns around grid stability—but the cost of keeping those “zombie” coal plants open ends up falling on consumers. One Maryland coal plant set to close in 2025 will now be kept open until 2029, a move that could cost residents up to $250 million per year through higher energy bills.
Then there’s the environmental and health impacts. Burning coal is linked to air pollution that contains toxins and heavy metals, and can cause asthma, brain damage, heart problems, cancer, and even premature death. Bringing back retired coal plants would have a direct environmental and health impact on the local communities around such plants. When four Kentucky coal plants were either retired or retrofitted with emissions controls, one study found, local asthma-related hospitalizations plummeted. Coal plants have also primarily been located in low-income communities, as well as communities of color.
But bringing back coal would do more than just damage people in the U.S. The environmental costs would be borne by the entire globe. “Coal is by far the worst offender at releasing damaging, polluting greenhouse gasses,” Gleick says. Environmental experts say the world needs to completely phase out coal power by 2040 in order to meet the Paris Climate Agreement goals.
Some places have already completely retired their coal power plants. In September 2024, the United Kingdom—the first country to build a coal power plant—became the first major economy to completely stop using coal to make electricity when its last coal power plant shut down. Even India and China, which both still burn immense amounts of coal, are trying to transition away from that energy source, because of both the economic and environmental costs.
“For us to go in the other direction is just lunacy,” Gleick says. It’s not coal specifically that Americans want, he notes; it’s energy broadly, and there are far more cheaper, faster ways to produce energy—like through solar and wind. “If we are in an energy emergency then we should roll back the recent pauses on wind and solar permitting, not try to bring back old coal plants already a decade past their lifetime, on the backs of American ratepayers,” Shearer says.
Solar specifically is the cheapest source of electricity, the International Energy Agency says, and also the fastest energy source to deploy. (Besides finding new sources of energy, we could also work to increase how energy efficient our systems and tools are, Gleick says, which is even less expensive to do.)
No country that has reduced its dependence on coal would voluntarily go back to that energy source, Gleick adds. “The only people who want more coal to be burned are fossil fuel company executives. No one else wants this,” he says. “Bringing coal back to the U.S. is not making America great again.”
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