Rumors of coal’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. For the past decade, liberal policy wonks and the mainstream media have celebrated the forced closure of numerous coal plants.
The media’s claims to the contrary, most of the closed coal plants weren’t taken offline because they were uncompetitive with wind, solar, or natural gas. It was due to regulations specifically targeting coal driven by climate change hysteria and utility executives who discovered they could make more money building new wind and solar facilities with guaranteed rates of return on construction.
We have all suffered from the closure of coal as electricity rates rose dramatically even as demand stagnated for nearly a decade, and outages due to the intermittent nature of wind and solar increased dramatically.
Still, you can’t keep a good power source down forever. Coal remains the second largest primary energy source in China, India, and other developing countries and is having a modest comeback in some parts of Europe and the United States.
Concerning costs, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) keeps data on trends in industrial, commercial, and residential power rates and reliability. The data clearly show states that have displaced baseload fossil fuel power plants and existing nuclear with wind and solar have seen the fastest-rising electricity rates and the highest number of outages, compared to states that haven’t followed green energy to disaster.
Heartland’s 2025 study titled “Affordable, Reliable, and Clean: An Objective Scorecard to Assess Competing Energy Sources” reinforces and expands on the EIA’s conclusion.
Now the team at Energy Bad Boys (EBB) has undertaken “a system-wide look at the cost of existing coal plants in America.” They looked at 82 coal plants in the United States through the lens of data from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Their research discovered that, “[o]n average, existing coal plants operate at $45.57 per megawatt-hour (MWh).” By comparison, this is far below the average cost of an existing industrial wind facility ($59.78/MWh) and less than half the cost of electricity produced by an existing industrial solar facility ($102.40).
At $62.09/MWh, new industrial wind facilities are even less cost-competitive with existing coal than existing facilities are, 25 percent more expensive. New solar facilities, at an EIA estimated cost of $74.55, remain uncompetitive as well, although less so than existing facilities.
Of importance is the fact that these cost comparisons fail to include the significant firming costs—the battery storage, hydro pumping, or natural gas backup—needed to ensure a reliable electricity supply with intermittent wind and solar power. Had firming power been included, the large cost gap between cheap coal and expensive wind and solar would have been even greater. Even the highest-cost 25 percent of coal plants produce cheaper electricity than new wind and solar. Nor do EBB’s cost comparisons include the transmission buildout that wind and solar require to deliver the energy they produce to the locations where it is in demand, often hundreds of miles away.
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Alaska Leads Epic Coal Revival As Utilities Delay Closures Nationwide
In recent years, there has been much hoopla around the supposed energy transition to wind and solar from fossil fuels in pursuit of inane net-zero emissions climate change goals. Yet despite significant politically induced growth in the percentage of wind and solar added to the grid, it has displaced a small amount of fossil fuels. As a result, renewables have still displaced little fossil fuel energy as part of the overall energy mix, despite decades of rapid growth year over year.
Annual energy reports from the Energy Institute and DNV (Det Norske Veritas) find that fossil fuels account for 86 percent of total energy supply. To put that in perspective, despite decades of subsidies for wind and solar and laws, regulations, and treaties aimed at reducing fossil fuel use, fossil fuels’ share was more than 80 percent a decade ago, and more than 80 percent a decade before that. Despite the rapid growth in the supply of renewables, the world remains wedded with fossil fuels.
The problem with the claim that the world is undergoing an “energy transition” is that even a small percentage of growth in coal, oil, or gas amounts to much more energy produced and used than an increase in solar or wind that is multiple times larger as a percentage of current use. This fact was pointed out by outlets such as The Fraser Institute, Energy Now, and Fox News.
In accounting for the world’s energy, coal may no longer be king (oil has deposed it), but renewables must still call it Daddy! In 1965, coal delivered 1.4 times more energy than wind and solar combined today. At present, it delivers four times more energy than they do combined. That’s a lot of catching up to do.
Coal may eventually fall into disuse, but if it does in the near term, it will be for political reasons, not because wind and solar are cheaper—regardless of what green energy advocates and the lapdog media claim.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., ([email protected]) is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research organization based in Illinois.
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