Alexandra Moreno
Coal is turning into one of the more expensive bets in the American power sector, even as the Trump administration pushes to keep aging plants running longer. New cost data shows coal generation has climbed 28 percent since 2021, undercutting the White House argument that leaning on fossil fuels will bring down electricity bills.
An Executive Order Built Around Coal
In April, President Trump signed an order titled "Reinvigorating America's Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241," directing the Department of Energy to keep coal plants operating, including ones already slated for retirement. The order calls coal "abundant and cost effective," pointing to reserves the administration values in the trillions of dollars and framing coal as a foundation for energy independence and even future export capacity. It arrived a few months after Trump declared a national energy emergency upon taking office in January, a move that set off a string of executive actions aimed at slowing renewable energy growth in favor of oil, gas and coal.
The Department of Energy followed up in July with a report warning that current plant closures and additions would leave the country vulnerable to widespread blackouts before the end of the decade. Acting on that authority, the department blocked the shutdown of the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, despite the plant's own operator estimating that closing it would have saved customers more than 600 million dollars. More coal plant closures around the country are expected to be delayed under the same reasoning.
The Case That Coal Is Getting More Expensive, Not Less
A June analysis from the think tank Energy Innovation found that coal generation cost 28 percent more in 2024 than it did in 2021, part of a longer term shift away from what the report calls the dirtiest fossil fuel. Of the 162 coal fired plants still running at the start of this year, 95 percent were pricier to operate than three years earlier, and costs at half of those plants rose at twice the pace of inflation.
Part of the problem is simply age. The average American coal plant was 44 years old in 2024, and older units typically demand more maintenance while producing less power over time, a combination that erodes their economics compared with gas or renewables. Several utilities have already begun treating coal as a backup resource, dispatching it only when wind and solar cannot cover demand, because running it continuously has become too costly.
Some energy analysts have pushed back on the Department of Energy's blackout warning, arguing it leans on worst case assumptions and glosses over the renewable capacity being added to the grid. Their concern is straightforward: subsidizing the continued operation of some of the least efficient, least reliable plants on the system could end up costing ratepayers billions more than letting the transition to gas and renewables continue.
What Is Actually Showing Up on Customer Bills
The numbers out of Georgia and South Carolina give a preview of what extending coal's life span looks like in practice. Plant Bowen in Georgia was originally due to retire in 2028, but Georgia Power pushed that date to 2035. Over that same stretch, the plant's generating cost rose from 46 dollars per megawatt hour in 2021 to 72 dollars per megawatt hour in 2025. Georgia Power customers, meanwhile, absorbed six separate rate increases between 2023 and 2025.
South Carolina's Williams Station tells a similar story. Its retirement, once planned for 2028, has now been pushed back to at least 2031, while costs there have jumped by 27 dollars per megawatt hour, a rise of more than 50 percent. These are not abstract projections; they are actual rate filings tied to specific plants that regulators chose to keep alive past their planned shutdown dates.
Coal's Rising Costs Versus a Falling Alternative
The gap matters because gas and renewable generation costs have generally been heading in the opposite direction, giving utilities a cheaper path that the current policy push runs against. Broader market sentiment around energy and industrial commodities has stayed choppy this year, with crude oil (tracked by the USO ETF) swinging on output decisions and demand worries, while the dollar's strength has kept pressure on commodity prices priced in that currency. None of that changes the core math showing up in Georgia and South Carolina: keeping old coal units online is proving to be a costlier choice than the retirements utilities had already planned.
Trump's framing of coal as the fix for an energy emergency runs into a straightforward problem laid out in the financial filings themselves. The plants being kept open longer are getting more expensive to run, not less, and those costs are landing on the same consumers the administration says it wants to protect.
