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The Coal Industry Gave Trump a Wish List. He's Checking Items Off It.

 
 
 

July 29, 2026 - The Trump administration seems to be doing all it can to give the coal industry everything it wants. Those efforts may not succeed, but they could keep the dying industry on life support, and soak U.S. citizens with the financial and environmental costs of doing so — unless legal challenges compel it to change course.   

The National Coal Council, an advisory group that includes executives from coal mining companies and major U.S. utilities, met with Trump administration officials last week and delivered 19 recommendations. One of its key requests is for the government to issue grants and loans to build the first new U.S. coal plants in over a decade. But the industry also seeks intervention to keep existing coal plants running, including federal government power purchase agreements and the suspension of environmental protections.

 
Trump administration officials were on the same page. “There’s no road for a great, prosperous America without saving the coal plants we have and doing everything we can to remove barriers that can open up the possibility to expand our coal fleet,” said Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
 
Already, Wright’s agency has committed to invest $850 million in existing or new coal facilities and has used emergency authority to force coal plants on the verge of shutting down to keep running indefinitely. The Trump administration has also issued executive orders that free plants from regulations for air pollution and coal ash, lift restrictions on coal mining, and open coal leases on 13 million acres of federal lands.
 
As EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told attendees, “Many of the items that were on your wish list are now done.”
 
Overall, the aim is to halt the coal industry’s ongoing decline in the face of cheaper and cleaner alternatives to provide electricity, said Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel for U.S. clean energy at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. EDF is one of several environmental groups and a handful of state attorneys general challenging the administration’s environmental rollbacks in court.
 
Coal has fallen from supplying nearly half the country’s electricity in 2011 to just 15% in 2024, but it rose slightly last year amid increased power demand and rising natural gas prices.
 
The Trump administration is “openly admitting that it’s their goal to increase profits and increase operations of fossil fuel in any way these companies want, without the interests of ratepayers or Americans at large in mind,” Kelly said.
 
The administration has plenty of tools at its disposal to achieve those goals — particularly when it comes to keeping old coal plants online past their planned closure. But certain other goals, like building new coal plants, will prove much harder to achieve.
 
 
Can the U.S. build new coal plants 
 
New coal plants are the most far-fetched item on the coal industry’s wish list, but that’s not stopping the Trump administration from bankrolling such projects.
 
In June, the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to spend about $425 million under the 1950 Defense Production Act to retrofit and support 13 existing coal-fired power plants it deems vital to national security. It also directed about $100 million for the engineering and design of two new coal plants: a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Alaska and a 1.6-gigawatt plant in West Virginia.
 
But that federal contribution is a drop in the bucket for coal plants of that size. According to reporting from CNN, based on an analysis prepared for the Wyoming Energy Authority, it would cost $10 billion to build the West Virginia plant and $8 billion for the Alaska facility, assuming both use carbon-capture technology as currently planned. Those totals are roughly twice the cost of building equivalent natural gas power plants with carbon capture.
 
The electricity from those plants would, in turn, likely be far more expensive than competing alternatives such as gas, solar, wind, or batteries, said John Miller, a managing director and energy transition policy analyst at investment bank TD Cowen.
 
Utilities and independent power generation companies are “very happy to take federal money to extend the life” of aging coal plants, he said. But beyond the projects in Alaska and West Virginia, “nobody’s proposing to build new coal-fired power plants,” he said.
 
The newest major coal plant in America is the Sandy Creek facility, located in Texas and completed in 2013 — and it’s been offline since 2025 due to “catastrophic failure,” he said. The Texas grid operator reported last year that Sandy Creek is expected to be back online in 2027. Similarly, the Comanche 3 plant in Colorado, which opened more than a decade ago, has been offline since August 2025, and remains idle after missing a projected July restart date.
 
“It doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility that coal plants will open,” Kelly said. “But money has been allocated to that, and we could see the loss of taxpayer money before we come to that conclusion.”
 
More money could be wasted in attempting to restart coal plants that were purposefully shut down, he added. DOE last month offered $78 million to AES, the owner of the Warrior Run coal plant in Maryland, which shuttered the facility in 2024 but has recently explored reopening it to meet growing demand for power.

 

 

“That’s a plant that was shut down because it was not just uneconomic but extraordinarily uneconomic to run,” Kelly said, citing comments from the independent market monitor for PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator for 13 states including Maryland, which protested AES’s restart plan.
 
Subsidizing its reopening “could not only cost a lot of money and increase pollution, but also interfere with the opportunity to have a better, more economic way to improve reliability and address system needs,” he said.
 
 
Costly coal plant interventions
 
Building or reopening long-shuttered coal plants may be a stretch, Kelly said, but the administration has demonstrated that it is able to keep old, costly, and unreliable coal plants open past their planned closure dates.
Through July, the Trump administration has “preserved more than 13 GW of coal capacity that would have closed by now absent intervention,” according to a new report from the National Coal Council.
 
That tally includes just under 10 gigawatts of coal plants whose closure dates were voluntarily extended by their owners, as well as roughly 3.2 gigawatts of coal plants forced to keep running past retirement via Department of Energy emergency orders issued under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act.
 
These interventions for coal plants in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, and Washington state have slowed the pace of coal-plant closures. Only 2.6 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity shuttered in 2025, the lowest amount in the past 15 years, according to an April report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 
 
Energy Information Administration chart of coal generation capacity retirements from 2010 through 2029
(U.S. Energy Information Administration)
The DOE could force more coal plants to stay online this year. In a February briefing paper, EIA tallied 6.4 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity scheduled to retire in 2026, or about 4% of the U.S. coal fleet. But “renewed or new emergency orders could affect retirements planned for this year as well,” it noted.
 
Indeed, environmental advocates have little expectation that the DOE will stop issuing stay-open orders.
“The Trump administration is going to continue to renew them until a court stops it,” said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, citing the legal challenges brought by his group and others.
 
The first stay-open order to see its day in court will be that concerning the J.H. Campbell power plant in Michigan. Environmental groups and the state itself are seeking to undo the DOE’s orders, arguing that the agency has failed to prove that a true grid emergency exists — and pointing out that the utility Consumers Energy, Michigan regulators, and the regional grid operator have all determined that closing the plant would not threaten reliability.
 
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments on the case in May, and could issue a ruling as early as next month, Kelly said. “If we get a good decision from the D.C. Circuit, laying out what the standard is for these — and it clearly hasn’t been met in the case of Campbell — that can start to be used to start short-circuiting DOE using these 202(c) orders to keep plants online,” he said.
 
Meanwhile, the cost of keeping these coal plants open is mounting. The Sierra Club estimates that U.S. utility customers have paid a collective $415 million and counting in excess costs caused by forcing six coal plants and one oil- and gas-fired power plant open under DOE emergency orders. It could balloon further: Consultancy Grid Strategies has estimated that, if unchecked, DOE’s use of 202(c) emergency orders could increase energy costs by nearly $6 billion by 2028.
 
“It’s very clear this is not doing anything to lower energy costs,” said Patrick Drupp, the Sierra Club’s climate policy director.
 
In fact, many of the power plants under the DOE’s must-run orders “are not functional and costing lots of money to get functional and back online,” said Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at think tank Energy Innovation who co-wrote a 2023 report finding that clean energy and batteries are a cheaper alternative to operating 99% of the U.S. coal fleet. “That means they are not contributing to reliability.”