Dozens of coal plants, including those slated for retirement, could supply the military under President Donald Trump’s latest plan to save the embattled coal industry.
Trump will sign an executive order Wednesday directing the Department of Defense to enter into power contracts with coal plants, according to a White House official. It wasn’t exactly clear how the administration intends to achieve that goal, but an Energy Department official said DOE had identified more than three dozen coal plants that could supply electricity to military installations.
The administration’s stated goal is to provide a reliable source of power to the military and support coal plants that would otherwise retire, said the DOE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.
The move is a major escalation of Trump’s efforts to revive coal. The White House has prepped a broad suite of actions for Wednesday, including announcing millions of dollars to recommission and upgrade coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kentucky, according to a White House official. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the outlines of the administration’s plans.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday during a press briefing that the president on Wednesday would “discuss how clean, beautiful coal is not only keeping the lights on in our country, but also driving down the cost of electricity across the country.” A White House official said Wednesday’s order — titled “Strengthening the United States National Defense with America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Power Generation Fleet” — aims to ensure DOD “has reliable power and to strengthen the grid.”
DOD referred a request for comment to DOE, which did not respond to inquiries about the administration’s plan.
The DOE official provided further details. The administration’s hope is that military installations will enter into power purchase agreements with coal facilities. Those contracts will provide a stable source of revenue needed to keep the plants open and encourage private financing opportunities, the person said.
“They are putting more action to their words,” said Tony Knutson, a coal analyst at Wood Mackenzie who cautioned that he had not seen the details of the plans. He noted that the U.S. coal fleet is aging and that the cost of maintaining coal facilities is often one of the primary reasons power companies chose to close them down.
“If they can have the government pay for that, I can’t see why they wouldn’t keep them online longer,” he said.
Coal boosters have also pushed the idea of leveraging the military to support the use of both metallurgical coal for steelmaking and thermal coal for power production. The government oversees hundreds of military installations across the U.S.
Trump struggled in his first term to fulfill a campaign pledge to revive the coal industry. The combination of cheap natural gas, the falling cost of renewables and stagnant electricity demand resulted in 48 gigawatts of coal capacity closing down. That is the highest four-year total among the Trump, Biden and Obama administrations.
In the first Trump administration, DOE considered a plan to direct utilities to stockpile coal and the Interior Department floated the idea of using military bases to export coal. But those plans were controversial within the administration and ultimately never acted on.
Trump has acted more aggressively to save coal during a second tour in the White House. DOE has issued emergency orders to five coal plants, directing them to operate past their retirement dates. Yet the impact of those orders is relatively limited, affecting 3.6 GW of coal capacity or roughly 2 percent of the U.S. coal fleet.
“Before they were chipping around the edges with emergency orders, but this is definitely the next level as part of their pro-coal policy,” Knutson said.
The U.S. is in a fundamentally different place than it was in 2017, when electricity demand was stagnant and then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry contemplated a plan directing utilities to stockpile coal, said Todd Snitchler, the president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, a trade group representing power plant owners.
In the short term, he said, the country needs every electron it can get as it races to ensure it can meet a sudden projected rise in electricity demand from data centers and artificial intelligence. But the longer-term picture is more complicated.
“We need to be thoughtful about how we approach these solutions, because long-term investment decisions still have to be made for the resources that will be needed to come on and power the grid going forward,” Snitchler said.
Trump’s moves would represent a major setback for U.S. climate policy. Falling coal consumption has been the primary driver in declining U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in recent decades. Greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants fell 39 percent between 2007 and 2024, according to EPA data. Coal’s share of U.S. electricity generation slumped from 48.5 percent to 15 percent over that time.
That trend reversed last year, with growing electricity demand and higher natural gas prices leading to a 12 percent rebound in U.S. coal generation. As a result, U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions rose by nearly 2 percent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Greens lambasted Trump’s plans, saying it would drive up the cost of electricity.
“As energy bills and hospital bills stack up for everyday families, Americans have one man to blame: Donald Trump—the undisputed champion of expensive energy and deadly pollution,” said Sierra Club Climate Policy Director Patrick Drupp.
This story also appears in Energywire.
