Coal in the U.S. is now being so economically eliminated by renewables that it’s more expensive for 99% of the country’s coal-fired power plants to keep running than it is to build a solar operation. or brand new wind nearby, a new activity Analysis found.

The plummeting cost of renewables, which was supercharged by the Inflation Reduction Act last year, means it’s cheaper to build a bunch of new solar panels or a cluster of wind turbines and connect them to grid rather than keep operating all of the 210 coal plants in the contiguous United States, according to one study.

“Coal will be more expensive than wind and solar resources,” said Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation Energy, who performed the analysis. This report certainly challenges the narrative that coal will be here.

The new analysis, carried out after a $370 billion tax credit and other support for clean energy passed by Democrats in the Inflation Reduction Act last summer, compares fuel costs material, operation and maintenance of the US coal fleet with new solar or new solar wind construction from scratch in the same utility area.

On average, the marginal cost for coal plants is $36 per megawatt hour, while new solar is about $24 per megawatt hour, or about a third. Only one coal plant – dry fork in Wyoming – is able to compete with new renewables. A bit surprising to find this, Mr. Solomon said. This shows that it’s not just renewables that reduce costs, the Inflation Reduction Act is accelerating this trend.

Coal, which is a heavy carbon-intensive fuel and is responsible for 60% of planet-warming emissions from electricity generation, once formed the backbone of the US electricity grid, generating enough energy to light 186m homes at its peak in 2007. 2021 This output has fallen 55%, while coal mining jobs have more than halved over the past decade, to less than 40,000.

Most U.S. coal plants are aging and increasingly expensive to maintain, while their fuel sources have been widely displaced by cheap gas sources. Environmental regulations, which Donald Trump has vowed to roll back in an unfulfilled quest to revive the coal industry as president, have also imposed costs on the sector by enforcing cuts. harmful emissions such as mercury and sulfur dioxide.

Coal production has hit a 55-year low in 2020 but the industry has seen signs of an uptick in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has pushed up energy prices worldwide and seen pressure on countries to find alternative fuel sources for Russian gas.

Coal advocates see it as a reliable source of fuel at a time of uncertainty and have attacked Joe Biden for trying to move the United States away from fossil fuels. Being forced to support them – will only deepen the reliability and economic challenges, said Rich Nolan, president of the National Mining Association, in November.

Look at our friends in Europe who rushed to shut down coal plants at a rapid pace and are now working from Germany to Denmark to bring those plants back online. . The global energy crisis is real and imposes a costly burden on people around the world and at home; Take deliberate steps to reinforce that the crisis is reckless and unthinkable.

Although coal is in long-term decline, it is unlikely to disappear in the immediate future – many utilities are still deeply invested in fuel sources and the scale of renewable infrastructure, including projects power, new transmission lines and other batteries and storage to deal with Intermittent Delivery, not yet large enough to trigger coal shutdown. But analysts say broader trends, underpinned by last year’s climate spending, look set to call time in the era of coal.

“We could just snap our fingers and retire all the coal plants but we need to speed up wind and solar construction so that when the time comes we can wean ourselves,” said Solomon.

There is a huge opportunity here to invest in coal communities, building local economic resilience and saving money in the process.

James Stock, an economist at Harvard University who was not involved in the energy innovation report, said the “Rings True” analysis and coal are no longer economically competitive.

We may close all these factories tomorrow, we need to do it in an orderly manner to support grid reliability but we can do it in order pretty quickly, he said. Coal has been in natural economic decline and those economies will continue, this is a transition that’s going to happen.

We built a lot of coal plants in the US about 50 years ago because we were worried about energy security in the world. It made sense at the time, and they made an important contribution. But now we know more about climate change, so now we need to make different decisions.