This is of course due to the massive increase in natural gas prices, so coal generated electricity is now cheaper.
Interesting optics: Pro-coal Trump and big coal decline; Anti-coal Biden and big coal increase.
But it’s very depressing news for those of us who hoped for some progress in winning the war against climate change.
That sucks but considering the issues with natural gas production, it was a no win either way. Time for a lot more renewables to get built and a lot more efficiencies mandated.
The global economy needs to use more fossil fuels because much of it is still developing, and the developed economies are counting on them to do that because their own income and ROIs are dependent on increasing sales of goods and services worldwide, many of which need fossil fuels for mining, manufacturing, shipping, and even mechanized agriculture.
Uh, that does not match the article when it mentions at the end that:
In the coming years, coal and natural gas prices will likely have less impact on the price of power. As power plants age, though, the EIA anticipates that new fossil fuel plants will be less competitive with renewables like solar and wind. For new plants entering service in 2026, solar, onshore wind, and geothermal are expected to be the cheapest sources of electricity, undercutting new natural gas plants by nearly 20 percent and new coal plants by more than 50 percent. Even standalone battery storage will be within 10 percent of the cost of so-called peaker natural gas plants that only run in times of high demand. Hybrid solar-battery installations will be nearly 60 percent cheaper than peaker plants.
While coal prices are more stable than natural gas prices, the cost of electricity produced from coal has still skyrocketed over the last decade or so. In West Virginia, where nearly 90 percent of electricity is produced from coal, electric prices have risen 122 percent, far outpacing inflation, which was 21 percent.
Other states that have traditionally relied on coal, like Ohio, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, have all slashed their use over the last decade. Pennsylvania, for example, used to get about 50 percent of its electricity from coal in 2010. Today, coal plants are responsible for just 10 percent.