April 20, 2025 - President Trump wants to Make Coal Great Again, and that could be good news for America’s high-tech industry.

Most of the debate over coal-generated power focuses on climate, but it also affects the global technology and trade environment.

On April 8, Trump signed four executive orders aimed at bolstering the U.S. coal industry, which was targeted by Biden administration regulators. These orders directed all federal departments and agencies to eliminate policies that “discriminate” against the coal industry and accelerate permitting and funding for coal-related projects.

“Pound for pound, coal is the single most reliable, durable, secure and powerful form of energy,” Trump said at a White House event featuring coal miners. “It’s cheap, incredibly efficient, high density, and it’s almost indestructible.”

Trump also resisted what the administration sees as overreach by blue states trying to use local laws to limit federal power to set energy policy.

Perhaps most significantly, Trump directed the Department of Energy to assess how coal-fired power plants can meet growing electricity demands, particularly for AI data centers. It also instructs the DOE to develop a process within 90 days for issuing emergency orders to keep coal plants operational in areas with potential grid reliability issues.

The fight over who will dominate in the development of artificial intelligence is the most critical geopolitical battle facing America, experts say, and the top competitor is China. Winning that fight will require massive amounts of electricity.

“We are talking about from AI and data centers alone as much as 80 gigawatts in new electricity demand in just the next five years,” said Conor Bernstein with the National Mining Association. “That is the equivalent of the power demand needed for 60 million homes.”

Lanny Nickell of Southwest Power Pool raised similar concerns before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing, telling Congress his group is “forecasting peak demand to be as much as 50% higher over the next 10 years, mostly driven by the AI data center boom.”

While the United States has restricted the development of base-load power generation from coal, in 2024, China commissioned 55.3 gigawatts of additional coal-fired power capacity, according to data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor.

There’s another Trump policy at play, Bernstein added, and that’s the push to bring more manufacturing capacity back to the United States. Those factories and facilities will need electricity, adding to the demand already rising faster than the supply.

“It’s simply not realistic to keep coal out of the mix,” said Michelle Bloodworth, the president and CEO of America’s Power.

“There’s not really another resource to replace coal that has the attributes … during periods of extreme weather like the bomb cyclones and the recent polar vortex where coal and natural gas provided 86% of the nation’s electricity when we needed it the most, during the day and the week in which electricity demand peaked,” Bloodworth said.

Environmental groups are pushing back. The Sierra Club claims that Trump’s orders would drive up electricity prices and increase pollution. “Choking on coal and gas plant pollution is not the American Dream,” it said.

Bonner Cohen, with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, disagrees. He said that “nothing drives up utility bills like being dependent on intermittent — which is a polite term for unreliable — energy like wind and solar.”

Experts say that America’s AI industry cannot rely on intermittent power. Because wind and solar rely on the environment to operate — the wind must be blowing and the sun shining — they must be backed up by reliable sources like coal.

Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, points out the problem.

“In the last 10 years, solar and wind power use has reached unprecedented levels. However, this increase hasn’t led to a reduction in fossil fuel consumption. In fact, fossil fuel use has grown during this period.

“Numerous studies show that adding renewable energy adds to energy consumption instead of replacing coal, gas or oil. Recent research reveals that for every six units of new green energy, less than one unit displaces fossil fuels.”

“The important thing here is that we can have coal, natural gas and nuclear power spearheading our nation’s energy,” Cohen said. “Because the artificial intelligence game is a game the United States cannot allow China to win, we must have as much of our industrial policy driven by artificial intelligence as possible.”