The Trump administration is threatening to force U.S. grid operators and utilities to keep money-losing coal-fired power plants running, no matter how dirty and expensive their power is.
Its stated reason? To shore up the reliability of the U.S. power grid.
It’s the latest salvo in a long-running battle over the country’s increasingly brittle grid — one that pits those in favor of hanging on to fossil fuels, and particularly coal, against those who put their faith in a future powered by cleaner and cheaper alternatives.
That battle is entering a critical phase as the grid faces challenges on multiple fronts.
Ever more intense summer heat waves and winter cold snaps driven by climate change are already straining the grid. An unprecedented boom in electricity demand, spurred by AI data centers and a resurgent manufacturing sector, threatens to push the grid even closer to its limit. Meanwhile, aging and unprofitable coal power plants have been closing at a rapid clip — and grid backlogs are preventing new solar, wind, batteries, and even fossil-gas plants from being built fast enough to replace them.
If these imbalances persist, more than half of North America faces significant risk of energy shortages over the next five to 10 years, according to a 2024 report from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which oversees the nation’s electric system. Utilities and regional grid operators are sounding the same alarm. Many say they need to build more fossil gas–fired power plants and keep costly coal plants open to deal with what is evolving into a genuine crisis.
But energy experts insist that there’s no single, simple solution to this high-stakes challenge. Maintaining reliability will certainly require retaining some otherwise unprofitable fossil-fueled power plants. But it also requires pressing utilities and regional grid operators to rapidly bring solar, wind, and batteries online — and enlisting electricity users to shift power use to reduce costly peaks in demand.
This multifaceted approach would bolster the grid without sacrificing cost and climate concerns. Flocking back to coal and ratcheting up gas, meanwhile, would cost consumers more, increase climate and air pollution, and ultimately result in a less diversified and therefore more fragile grid than one balanced by renewables.
In the longer term, the U.S. must break barriers to building far more high-voltage power lines to connect clean energy across regions and share power when extreme weather strikes, experts say. It also needs to support the economics for “clean firm” technologies like advanced nuclear and enhanced geothermal power, or long-duration energy storage systems that can fill the gaps when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
“Reliability is actually a characteristic of the entire electricity system, and individual resources contribute to reliability as part of a balanced portfolio,” Sara Baldwin, senior electrification director at think tank Energy Innovation, said during a March webinar introducing the group’s February report on the complexities of keeping the grid running in a time of energy transition.
“So whenever you hear someone talking about the reliability of a single resource, that should raise a flag that is not necessarily grounded in full truth,” she said.
Why coal isn’t going to save the grid
Baldwin’s “single resource” comment nods to a common refrain from the Trump administration and congressional Republicans that today’s grid reliability problems have a simple solution: Keep burning coal.
Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that authorizes the Department of Energy to prevent uneconomical coal plants from closing, even if they’re violating federal and state carbon and environmental mandates and imposing higher power costs on customers. This would be the most aggressive federal intervention in modern history into the authority of states to regulate utilities, and of regional grid operators to manage competitive energy markets.
Many Republicans in Congress have long insisted that grid reliability problems are primarily caused by climate and clean-energy policies put in place by states and the Biden administration. They argue that regulations, not economics, are forcing coal plants into “premature” retirement and that cleaner alternatives can’t be relied on to fill the gap left by those retirements.
During two grid-reliability hearings last month in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans leveraged this framing in questions for utility executives, grid operators, and energy experts. “Too many electric-generating facilities have been retired in recent years,” said Rep. Bob Latta, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that held the hearings.
Under questioning, most representatives of the U.S. grid operators, which are responsible for managing the systems that deliver electricity to about two-thirds of U.S. customers, concurred with Republicans that the shuttering of coal power plants presents a major reliability challenge.
But Rep. Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat and ranking member on the energy subcommittee, pushed back on Republicans’ framing. Instead of trying to keep coal plants open, he said, utilities, grid operators, and regulators must clear bottlenecks preventing new clean energy and energy storage from taking over the role that fossil fuels have previously played.
Grid operators are “saying they need every new electricity generator they can get to come online in the next five years,” Pallone said. “If Republicans are really interested in unleashing American energy, they should work with us to clear interconnection queues and let resources get on the grid as quickly as possible.”
Instead, Republicans are considering repealing the clean-energy tax credits created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, Pallone said in his opening statement. That would undercut the economics of not just solar, wind, and battery projects but of many other forms of carbon-free generation and storage, including geothermal power, advanced nuclear power, and long-duration energy storage.
“Repealing billions of dollars in technology-neutral funding for all types of new energy is not the way you address the increasing need for energy,” he said.
Getting the grid-reliability diagnosis right
Pallone’s comments underscore two of the biggest problems facing the U.S. grid.
The first is that coal simply cannot compete economically against alternatives. Coal has dwindled to providing only about 15% of U.S. electricity supply, as both fossil gas and renewables fall in cost. Last year, solar, wind, and batteries alone made up more than 90% of the 56 gigawatts of power capacity built in the U.S., and they are expected to lead new additions in 2025, too.
The second problem is that many U.S. utilities and grid operators have been unable to move fast enough to embrace the advantages of cheap, clean energy. As Energy Innovation’s February report highlights, “outdated views on grid reliability are colliding with slow-moving institutions,” which has confounded the potential for solar, wind, and batteries to fill the reliability gaps left by shuttered coal plants.
Much of the reluctance from certain grid operators stems from the fact that solar and wind ebb and flow with the weather, whereas fossil-fueled power plants can be turned on and off on command.
“Renewable generators play an important role, and we want them to come onto the grid, but they are not a one-for-one substitute for the fossil-fuel generators that we are replacing,” said Manu Asthana, president and CEO of PJM Interconnection, which manages the transmission grid delivering electricity to about 65 million people from the mid-Atlantic coast to the Great Lakes.
But daytime solar production and nighttime wind generation can still provide a large and predictable amount of the power needed during hot summer afternoons and evenings and cold winter mornings, when demand for electricity spikes and reliability issues loom, said Wilson Ricks, a researcher and energy-modeling expert at Princeton University’s ZERO Lab.
Meanwhile, lithium-ion batteries are becoming a more cost-effective way to store clean power for use when the grid needs it, he said. Utility-scale batteries deployed in California and Texas are storing gigawatts of solar power to cover peak grid demands during sunset and evening hours, for example.
Taken together, “the technologies that are currently experiencing widespread commercial adoption — wind, solar, lithium-ion batteries — can actually go a long way towards ensuring that system-wide resource accuracy,” Ricks said during last month’s webinar.
Real-world experience bears this out, said Ric O’Connell, founding executive director of GridLab, a think tank that contributed to the Energy Innovation reliability report. The standout example is Texas, which is adding wind, solar, and batteries faster than any other state.
