By Rich Nolan

March 8, 2025 - The U.S. needs more dispatchable electricity—and we need it immediately. Power demand is exploding across the country at the very moment the nation’s grid reliability is teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

The reshoring of heavy industry and the unprecedented AI-driven data center boom have collided the with the Biden administration’s effort to wipe out the coal fleet and make it impossible to build new baseload coal and natural gas plants.

President Trump is already tackling this crisis. On his first day in office, he declared an energy emergency, issued an “Unleashing American Energy” executive order and has since established the National Energy Dominance Council to refocus the nation’s energy policy. Reliability and affordability have once again taken center stage.

But the challenge facing the administration is enormous. U.S. electricity demand is projected to fully double by 2050 with a remarkable jump in demand already underway. A recent forecast sees demand rising 128 gigawatts (GW) over just the next five years—equivalent to adding 80 million homes to our already overstretched and under-supplied grid.

As the administration looks for reliable, immediately available generating capacity, the underutilized coal fleet is the answer hiding in plain sight.

Battered by an unrelenting regulatory agenda and unfair competition from heavily subsidized power sources, the coal fleet’s capacity factor – a measure of how often it’s providing power to the grid – rests at just 40%. The fleet is capable of much more. It is our strategic electricity reserve waiting for its moment. And that moment is now.

How much more power can the fleet provide? Consider its performance in critical, high-demand weeks and months. The coal fleet regularly ramps up generation, often reaching capacity factors above 60%. As recently as 2021, there were several months when the fleet had a capacity factor above 65%.

With months of fuel on site and the world’s largest coal reserves, the coal fleet is the nation’s ace in the hole to underpin reliability and dispatchable fuel diversity.

As power demand growth laps efforts to build new generating capacity and energy infrastructure, driving up electricity prices and threatening the economy, greater utilization of what we already have in place is the clear answer.

The Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA) – representing manufacturers with over 12,000 facilities nationwide and more than 1.9 million employees – have already warned “the manufacturing sector’s economic growth has never before faced such a growing crisis as we are faced with today, due to inadequate natural gas pipeline capacity.”

IECA told Congress gas supply on the East Coast is already so constrained it’s all but impossible for manufacturers to consider expansion of existing operations or investment in new facilities.

Semiconductor and battery plants, and even data centers with the energy needs of cities, simply won’t be built if they can’t find affordable energy, leaving untold jobs and tax revenue just sitting on the table.

While reducing barriers and timelines to adding new energy infrastructure is an important piece of the answer, IECA has asked for one critical, difference-making action: “to not prematurely shut down coal-fired electric generating units.”

Utilities are already answering the call, cancelling planned coal plant retirements across the country from Georgia to Indiana to Utah and Wyoming. But federal action to not only preserve the fleet but make greater use of it is what is needed in this energy emergency.

Energy abundance is the key to winning today’s global industrial arms race. The world is using more coal than ever before. It is past time the U.S. recognizes its coal fleet and coal mining industry not as problems to solve but as answers to today’s most pressing challenges. The coal fleet can and should underpin the administration’s energy abundance agenda.

Rich Nolan

Rich Nolan is President and CEO of the National Mining Association.