By Chris Hamilton | President, West Virginia Coal Association | Member, West Virginia Energy Authority | Member, National Coal Council

July 8, 2026 - Julie McNamara writes for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group whose name sounds like a government agency, but functions as lapdogs of the political left. Her recent column attacking coal-fired power plants rests on two foundational claims: that coal is expensive, and that coal is unreliable. She states both with the confidence of someone who has never been wrong and the precision of someone who has decided the conclusion before consulting the data – an attitude akin to a petulant 8th grade science student. West Virginia ratepayers deserve better than that, so let’s take her claims apart, one at a time.

Claim One: Coal Is Expensive. Her Math Is Rigged.

McNamara’s first argument is cost. But her cost argument is built on a comparison she never names explicitly because naming it would expose it. She is comparing the cost of building a new coal plant to the cost of building new wind and solar. On that narrow question, in that artificially constrained frame, her numbers are roughly defensible. New coal construction is expensive. It is also, for the existing fleet she wants shuttered, completely irrelevant to the policy decision on the table in 2026.

The bulk of the debate is whether to continue operating existing plants whose construction costs were paid off years or decades ago. Those plants run at an operational cost of $20 to $40 per megawatt-hour. That is it. That is the number that matters. It is the number McNamara chose not to use.

And on the one front where new coal is genuinely back on the table, the facts cut against her even harder. On June 4, President Trump and the Department of Energy committed up to $850 million to American coal — funding to modernize more than a dozen existing plants and to build two brand-new ones: a 1.25-gigawatt plant near Anchorage, Alaska, and a 1.6-gigawatt plant at the West Virginia Energy Campus at Mount Storm, right here in Grant County. They will be the first new coal-fired plants to come online in this country since 2013, with private investors putting up roughly $1.7 billion to match the federal dollars. Why would anyone build new coal in 2026 if McNamara’s economics held? Because both plants exist to feed the new data centers that wind and solar cannot serve around the clock. When billions in private capital line up behind new coal to power the digital economy, the people writing its obituary are not reading the market. They are arguing with it.

The analytical benchmark she and her allies invoke is Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy report. Lazard compares new construction to new construction. Lazard itself states plainly that its analysis does not apply to the retirement economics of existing generation. Using Lazard to justify shutting down a depreciated coal plant is not an analytical error. It is a deliberate misapplication of a tool everyone in this industry knows was designed for a different purpose. McNamara knows it too.

The paid-off house analogy is instructive. You own your home free and clear. It costs you $800 a month to maintain. A contractor tells you that building a new house would cost $400,000. McNamara’s logic says you should tear down the one you own because new construction is getting cheaper. Nobody with any financial sense would accept that argument at a kitchen table. Ratepayers should not accept it in their electricity bills either.

Then there is what McNamara leaves completely out of the renewable ledger: integration costs. Wind and solar cannot exist on the grid alone. They require backup generation for the hours — and sometimes days — when the wind dies and clouds move in. They require transmission infrastructure to carry power from remote sites to load centers. They require battery storage that remains expensive, mineral-intensive, and geographically constrained. They require capacity payments to keep dispatchable plants available for grid emergencies. Grid engineers put these integration costs at $15 to $50 per megawatt-hour or more, depending on the region and the penetration level. Add that to the sticker price McNamara is quoting and the economics of her argument stop looking like a revolution. They start looking like a very expensive gamble with other people’s money.

In West Virginia, with its transmission constraints, its topography, and its existing generation infrastructure, a fully depreciated coal plant delivering power at $30 per megawatt-hour is not a relic. It is an asset. Retiring it and replacing it with a wind-plus-storage combination at $80 to $120 per megawatt-hour all-in is not progress. It is a rate increase — paid by families, by manufacturers, by hospitals, by every business trying to operate in a state that can least afford energy inflation.

Claim Two: Coal Is Unreliable. Tell That to NERC.

McNamara describes coal plants as “old, outdated, and increasingly unsuited for a modern grid.” It is a satisfying line. It also runs directly counter to the conclusions of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the independent federal body that exists for one purpose: to assess whether the North American grid can keep the lights on. NERC has spent three consecutive years issuing increasingly urgent warnings that accelerated retirements of dispatchable generation — coal and gas — are creating reliability risks that the grid cannot absorb. NERC is not a coal industry front group. It is the most authoritative voice on grid reliability in North America. McNamara’s column does not mention it once.

PJM Interconnection manages the grid for West Virginia and twelve other states serving 65 million people. PJM’s most recent capacity auction produced price spikes that shocked even veteran market observers, driven by a simple and brutal fact: dispatchable capacity is leaving the system faster than reliable replacement capacity is arriving. PJM has formally warned that its reserve margins are tightening to levels that threaten reliability. The plants driving that tightening are not old wind turbines. They are retiring coal and gas units — exactly the kind McNamara wants gone faster.

McNamara notes that coal plants require maintenance and that some are aging. This is true and completely beside the point. Scheduled maintenance is manageable. Grid operators plan around it weeks in advance. What is not manageable is a wind farm that goes dark for 72 hours because a winter high-pressure system settles over the mid-Atlantic. What is not manageable is a solar array that produces nothing for four days during a January ice storm. Coal’s maintenance schedule is a known variable. Renewable intermittency is an uncontrollable one. These are not equivalent reliability concerns, and treating them as such is either ignorance or deception.

NERC has spent three years warning that coal retirements are threatening grid reliability. McNamara’s column does not mention NERC once. That omission is not an oversight. It is a choice.

The federal government has now put money where the warnings are. The same June 4 package that funds the new plants also bankrolls modernization upgrades at more than a dozen existing coal units, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright has spent the past year issuing emergency orders to stop dispatchable plants from shutting down before replacements exist. When the agency charged with national energy security is paying to keep coal running and building new coal to meet rising demand, the “old and outdated” line stops being analysis and becomes wishful thinking.

Texas in February 2021 is the case study McNamara would prefer everyone forget. ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, came within four minutes and 37 seconds of a complete statewide grid collapse. Extended cold weather disabled wind turbines, reduced solar output, and sent demand surging simultaneously. The system nearly failed catastrophically. The blackouts that followed killed an estimated 246 to 700 Texans, depending on the methodology, and caused $295 billion in economic damage — the costliest weather disaster in Texas history. That was not a coal plant reliability failure. It was precisely what NERC, PJM, and every serious grid engineer has been warning will happen when you dismantle dispatchable generation faster than the system can compensate.