Well looky here, Trump is outperforming Obama!
According to data from the Sierra Club and the Energy Information Administration, though, more coal capacity closed in the first 45 days of 2018 than in the first three years of the Obama administration.
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060076419
U.S. power companies are set to unplug almost 12 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity this year, or about 4 percent of the American coal fleet, according to an E&E News review of federal figures. More than half of those retirements were announced after Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
2017 alone brought a rash of retirement announcements. One Texas power company announced last fall that it was closing three power plants with a combined capacity of roughly 4 GW (Energywire, Oct. 16, 2017).
It was a similar story in Florida, where the Jacksonville Electric Authority said it was closing a 1.2-GW facility, and Ohio, where Dayton Power & Light announced the closure of two facilities with a total capacity of nearly 3 GW. All those plants will shut down this year.
The retirements illustrate the urgency of coal's predicament. Many of the coal plants that retired during the Obama administrations were laggards by industry standards. They tended to be old and small, and ran only a fraction of the time. New federal mercury rules played a large role in their closure (Climatewire, April 27, 2017).
M.J. Bradley & Associates, a consultancy, found that the average coal unit retired between 2010 and 2016 was 57 years old and listed a capacity of 166 megawatts.
By contrast, the plants on the chopping block this year are newer (their average age is 45) and boast an average capacity of 412 MW, an E&E News review of U.S. Energy Information Administration statistics found.
EIA projects 11.9 GW of coal capacity is slated to close in 2018. That is almost double the 6 GW that closed in 2017, and it's only eclipsed by the 19.5 GW closed in 2015 and 13.5 GW closed in 2016, respectively.
2017 alone brought a rash of retirement announcements. One Texas power company announced last fall that it was closing three power plants with a combined capacity of roughly 4 GW (Energywire, Oct. 16, 2017).
It was a similar story in Florida, where the Jacksonville Electric Authority said it was closing a 1.2-GW facility, and Ohio, where Dayton Power & Light announced the closure of two facilities with a total capacity of nearly 3 GW. All those plants will shut down this year.
The retirements illustrate the urgency of coal's predicament. Many of the coal plants that retired during the Obama administrations were laggards by industry standards. They tended to be old and small, and ran only a fraction of the time. New federal mercury rules played a large role in their closure (Climatewire, April 27, 2017).
M.J. Bradley & Associates, a consultancy, found that the average coal unit retired between 2010 and 2016 was 57 years old and listed a capacity of 166 megawatts.
By contrast, the plants on the chopping block this year are newer (their average age is 45) and boast an average capacity of 412 MW, an E&E News review of U.S. Energy Information Administration statistics found.
EIA projects 11.9 GW of coal capacity is slated to close in 2018. That is almost double the 6 GW that closed in 2017, and it's only eclipsed by the 19.5 GW closed in 2015 and 13.5 GW closed in 2016, respectively.
