Originally published December 18, 2017. Updated September 28, 2026.

Coal supplied about 17% of US electricity in 2025, a small fraction of what it once was. Natural gas passed coal as the country’s top power source back in 2016, and coal has been the smaller partner ever since. That pattern broke in 2025, when utilities retired only 2.6 gigawatts of coal capacity, the least in any year since 2010, largely because the Department of Energy issued dozens of emergency orders keeping aging plants running past their scheduled shutdown dates.

Coal’s share of the US grid has been shrinking for decades

Coal ran 52% of the country’s power in 1990 and still supplied half of it by 2005, with gas at a distant 19%. Fourteen years later, coal had fallen to 23% of generation while gas had climbed to 38%. By 2023, coal’s share was down to 16.2%, against 43.1% for gas. Nuclear held 18.6% of the mix that year, and renewables made up 21.4%. Coal ended 2025 at roughly 17% of generation and 14% of installed capacity.

That slide hasn’t been a straight line down. Coal’s share ticked up slightly in 2025 from the year before, as natural gas prices rose and electricity demand grew. It’s a small wobble against three and a half decades of decline, and the physical plants behind those numbers are closing on a slower schedule than the share figures alone would suggest.

Coal retirements slowed sharply in 2025 as Washington stepped in

Coal retirements fell to only 2.6 gigawatts in 2025, the smallest amount since 2010 and far below the 13.7 gigawatts retired in 2022. Operators also pushed 4.8 gigawatts of planned 2025 retirements into later years and canceled another 1.1 gigawatts outright.

Retirements haven’t always moved this slowly. One 2017 industry count found 27 coal-plant closures or conversions that year, 22 gigawatts total, as cheap gas from fracking and falling wind costs undercut aging coal plants.

The schedule for 2026 looks busier on paper. Coal and gas plants are due to retire about 11 gigawatts of combined capacity that year, 6.4 gigawatts of it coal. Recent history says don’t bank on it. Actual 2025 retirements came to only 4.6 gigawatts, far short of the 12.3 gigawatts originally planned for that year.

Much of the gap traces back to Washington. Picture the smokestacks at a plant that was supposed to go cold on schedule, still running because of one signature out of Washington. The Department of Energy issued 43 emergency orders under Section 202(c) between May 2025 and its latest count, keeping about 4.4 gigawatts of coal capacity running past its planned retirement date.

The plants held open under those orders include Michigan’s J.H. Campbell plant and Washington’s Centralia plant, plus Indiana’s Schahfer and Culley plants, according to DOE’s own order log. They also include Colorado’s Craig Station, ordered to keep running one day before its scheduled retirement, on December 31, 2025. If your utility runs one of those plants, DOE’s order decides its retirement date now, regardless of what the utility filed years ago.

Regulators frame those orders as a reliability necessity. NERC’s 2025 long-term reliability assessment projects roughly 92 gigawatts of fossil-fuel and nuclear retirements nationally through 2035, with the SERC-East region alone projecting more than 5.7 gigawatts of coal-unit retirements over that span. That’s the kind of capacity loss capacity markets are built to price and plan around.

Coal production and mining jobs kept falling anyway

That federal intervention hasn’t shown up in the mines yet. US coal production totaled 578 million short tons in 2023, less than half the country’s 2008 peak. EIA doesn’t expect a rebound. It forecasts production falling to 483 million tons in 2025 and 467 million in 2026, down from 512 million in 2024. The forecast comes from the same EIA report that logged coal’s 2008 peak, and it doesn’t show that peak coming back.

Mining jobs have followed the same line down, and faster in some places than others. Coal mining jobs in Appalachia’s East fell from 68,605 workers in 2008 to 28,314 in 2021, a 59% drop, EIA counted. The West’s coal mining states lost jobs more slowly over the same years, down 39%, from 18,114 workers to 11,115. If you’re from Appalachian coal country, that’s a local job base cut by more than half in a little over a decade.

What less coal has done to power-sector emissions

US power-sector CO2 emissions fell 36% between 2005 and 2021, with about two-thirds of that decline from coal-to-gas switching and about one-third from wind and solar growing from under 1% of generation in 2005 to roughly 13% in 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of EIA data. Electricity output itself stayed roughly flat over that period, so the decline tracked a change in fuel mix, not a drop in how much power the country used. Switching power plants from coal to gas, plus wind and solar growth, explains why your area’s air got cleaner, even though you didn’t have to do anything differently.

Measured over shorter stretches, the picture is the same story at an earlier point. Through 2019, EIA put the drop at 32%, with a similar split, about 65% from coal-to-gas switching and about 30% from renewables. Through 2017, EIA logged the decline at 28%, with power-sector emissions down to 1,744 million metric tons that year, the lowest total since 1987. Different end years, same basic story. Coal-to-gas switching does most of the work, and renewables cover most of the rest.

That’s the power sector alone. Emissions economy-wide, including transportation and industry, fell 20% between 2005 and 2023, and the per-person drop was steeper still, at 30%, given population growth of 14% over that same span. EPA’s own national inventory shows a similar economy-wide decline, with total US greenhouse gas emissions 17% below 2005 levels in 2022 after accounting for land-sector carbon sequestration.

Why 2026’s retirement schedule probably slips too

The emergency orders that kept coal plants open cover named plants for set time windows. About 11 gigawatts of coal and gas capacity is still scheduled to retire in 2026, the same kind of schedule that shrank to 2.6 gigawatts of actual coal retirements in 2025. Electricity demand is climbing along with natural gas prices, and that combination is part of why coal’s 2025 share ticked up slightly from the year before.

None of that has slowed the mines. EIA forecasts coal production falling to 467 million tons in 2026, and coal mining jobs in Appalachia’s East were already down to 28,314 workers by 2021, less than half the region’s 2008 total. If you live in one of those coal counties, the plants your utility keeps open under a DOE order aren’t bringing those jobs back.