Originally published December 18, 2017. Updated August 11, 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. The pace of plant closures, though, broke from that pattern in 2025. Utilities retired only 2.6 gigawatts of coal capacity that year, 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.
Cheap gas and cheaper renewables drove years of coal plant closures
In a December 2017 analysis published on Forbes, Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology counted 27 coal-plant closures or conversions that year, a combined 22 gigawatts. That pace worked out to about one closure every 15 days. The driver, by that count, was economics, with new wind now cheaper in many regions than continuing to run the existing coal plants. We Energies in Wisconsin retired its 1.2-gigawatt Pleasant Prairie plant in early 2018 while building a 350-megawatt solar array to help replace it. Ameren Missouri went further, announcing it would retire half its 5.3-gigawatt coal fleet while putting $1 billion into wind and solar.
Cheap natural gas mattered on a longer timeline too. Gas had already overtaken coal as the country’s top power source in 2016, a change tied to the shale gas boom.
That 2017 wave was framed at the time as a single busy year. Coal’s share of the grid kept falling in the years after it, but the pace of actual plant retirements has been far less consistent, and 2025 is the clearest example of why.
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.
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. 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, Washington’s Centralia Unit 2 and Indiana’s Schahfer and F.B. Culley units, alongside Colorado’s Craig Station Unit 1, ordered to keep running one day before its scheduled retirement, on December 31, 2025. If your utility runs one of those plants, its retirement date is whatever Washington decides now, not what the utility filed years ago.
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. Coal mining employment fell from 86,719 workers in 2008 to 39,429 in 2021, a 59% drop in Appalachia’s coalfields and a 39% drop in the mining states of the West. That’s a loss of more than 47,000 jobs in thirteen years, and the East lost them faster than the West did. If you live in one of Appalachia’s coal counties, that 59% drop is the number that lands, not the national count, since mining jobs out west fell at a much slower rate.
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. If the air near you feels cleaner than it did a decade ago and your region used to burn a lot of coal, that fuel switch is the likely reason, not any drop in how much power you’re using.
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.
What could speed up or slow the decline from here
The federal emergency orders that kept coal plants open in 2025 cover specific plants for set periods, which makes the roughly 11 gigawatts of coal and gas capacity scheduled to retire in 2026 the number to watch if you want to know whether 2025 was a one-year pause or the new normal. If that schedule slips the way 2025’s did, expect more orders and more delays.
Electricity demand is rising too, alongside higher gas prices, and that combination is part of why coal’s 2025 share ticked up slightly from the year before. Both pressures point the same way. Utilities are more likely to ask for another delay than to let a coal plant close on schedule.
Watch the mining side too. Coal production and mining jobs have kept falling on their own schedule, through 2021 on employment and into the 2026 forecast on tonnage, regardless of what happens with any single plant’s retirement date. If that keeps holding even as retirements slip, the emergency orders are buying individual plants more time without reversing the trend underneath them.
