The explosive growth of AI data centers, the reshoring of industry and the electrification of the economy have sent power demand soaring.
This surge in demand — with the potential to double the nation’s power needs by 2050 — is colliding with a grid reliability crisis that deepened during the Biden administration by targeting the coal fleet for closure.
According to an analysis from the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nation’s grid monitor, over the next decade, more than half of the country faces blackout risks due to power capacity shortfalls. This is an energy emergency that the Trump administration has urgently addressed.
President Trump’s executive orders bolstering the coal power plant fleet and domestic coal production are a centerpiece of this effort. A de-facto moratorium on the closure of essential coal plants is welcome news in coal country. It’s precisely what electricity regulators, grid operators and industrial energy consumers have sought.
The coal fleet is our strategic electricity reserve waiting for this moment. Vastly underused, the fleet can provide far more power than it currently does, and we will need every megawatt of electricity these plants can provide. The potential loss of this capacity would have been catastrophic for the nation’s power supply.
Mark Christie, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman, recently said we must “stop the premature retirement of dispatchable generation” to address projected power shortfalls.
Manu Asthana, the president and CEO of PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest electricity market, told Congress, “We will need to slow down the retirement or restriction of existing generation until replacement capacity is deployed. … Frankly, we see this as the single largest risk in the energy transition.”
Lanny Nickell, the president and CEO of the Southwest Power Pool that operates a grid stretching from New Mexico to North Dakota, told Congress the “growing imbalance between rising demand and a less dispatchable, more intermittent resource mix … is our generational challenge.”
The challenge is immediate. It takes 18 months to build and connect a data center with the power needs of a small city, but it can take a decade or more to build the power plant and infrastructure needed to serve it. A recent forecast sees electricity demand rising 128 gigawatts over the next five years — equivalent to adding 80 million homes to our already overstretched and under-supplied grid.
Failure to meet that demand could mean two things: acute grid crises with rolling blackouts for millions or demand destruction, where surging power prices from constrained supply not only wallops consumers but stops the addition of proposed industrial projects in their tracks, leaving untold investment, tax revenue and jobs sitting on the table.
The Industrial Energy Consumers of America — representing manufacturers with 12,000 facilities and more than 1.9 million employees — has warned that “the manufacturing sector’s economic growth has never before faced such a growing crisis” due to constrained energy supply. They have asked for one critical, difference-making action: to not prematurely shut down coal-fired electric generating units.”
The administration has risen to the moment and is determined to make electricity not a crippling constraint on our economy but a distinct advantage. Its recognition of the value of the coal fleet provides a critical tool to manage demand reliably and affordably. This is the abundance agenda in practice, and the coal industry is ready to underpin it.
