President Donald Trump is poised to leverage the powers of the Pentagon to save the coal sector, but whether the effort is successful will hinge on some gnarly, grid-dy details.
Trump, alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and a host of coal executives at the White House on Wednesday, is slated to tout coal as a “reliable and affordable energy source that keeps the lights on during times of peak demand, like it did during Winter Storm Fern,” according to a White House official.
The president will also receive the Washington Coal Club’s first-ever “Undisputed Champion of Coal” award, the official said, who added that the president since returning to office has expanded coal mining and power production. The National Energy Dominance Council, the official added, is “working with a few companies to help build new coal generation units — which hasn’t happened since 2013.”
One of the president’s biggest moves to bolster the coal sector — in addition to funding announcements — will be an executive order directing the Pentagon to sign power purchase agreements to fuel military installations with coal-fired generation. As it stands, the U.S. operates hundreds of military installations across the nation, which buy power from utility companies and grid operators.
Trump’s move marks a sharp departure from President Joe Biden, who inked an executive order in 2021 to shift the federal government to carbon-free electricity. Trump rescinded that order upon taking office last year.
Yet the exact mechanics — from detailed contracts to grid constraints — could determine whether the effort is a success.
The Trump administration is already planning to use the military to bolster the nuclear power sector. In a May 2025 executive order, Trump directed the secretary of Defense to use nuclear energy at military installations, with an initial reactor coming online by 2028.
The administration cited nuclear’s high reliability and low fuel use as ideal for remote bases, and it expects that making a customer out of the Pentagon will help provide the demand that startups need to make their on-paper reactors into realities.
In the months since, the military has reached agreements with private microreactor developers Oklo — for which Energy Secretary Chris Wright previously sat on the board — for an Alaska Air Force base and Radiant Nuclear. In August it started the “Janus” program to formally implement the EO.
Revving up aging coal-fired power plants for military use faces a separate set of complications for the administration.
Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, noted that previous administrations have pursued power purchase agreements from the General Services Administration and Department of Defense, which are both very large electricity customers.
While the government has the ability to do so to boost coal if there’s sufficient transmission capacity and generation, those agreements hinge on factors like location and price and available capacity. Transmission is yet another wild card, said Gramlich.
“You do have to be able to deliver the power to the site,” he said. “They couldn’t say it’s powering a given site if it’s not deliverable to that site, and there are transmission constraints that affect coal plants just like other power sources. So that would be a challenge.”
Gramlich said the White House effort is likely focused on existing coal plants given the economic realities of coal. “I would be shocked if any investor would put any capital into a new coal plant anywhere knowing that it would be unlikely to run at all in future administrations,” said Gramlich.
Andy Blumenfeld, an analyst who tracks coal markets at the consulting company McCloskey by OPIS, asked similar questions, including what the terms of the power purchase agreements would be and whether the Department of Defense would take ownership of the facilities or whether it’s “purely a contract for the power with the current owners of the generation capacity.”
“Does the power plant have to be directly tied [transmission] to the military facility?” asked Blumenfeld. “What happens to the capacity that is currently serving the military facilities?”
Michelle Solomon, an analyst who tracks the electricity industry at the clean energy think tank Energy Innovation, said electrons flowing freely on the nation’s power grid are hard to trace — as are the contributions of coal. Unless a base is located next to a substation and a power plant, there’s no way to track that fossil input, she said.
“There will be no way to say, ‘Hey, this coal plant is providing the power for this exact military base,’” said Solomon.
Solomon also pointed to a federal report that found that the military used about 28 million megawatt-hours of electricity in 2023 that year, which would be about 6 gigawatts of coal at a typical coal capacity factor.
“They simply wouldn’t need that many coal plants to provide all the electricity for DOD,” she said.
Francisco “A.J.” Camacho and Myah Ward contributed to this report.
Clarification: A previous version of this article included an incorrect quote from Rob Gramlich. It has been corrected.
