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| A train receiving a load of coal in Price, Utah, last year. For decades, electric utilities have been the largest consumers of coal, but have in large part turned to natural gas, wind and solar for power generation. Credit George Frey/Bloomberg |
WASHINGTON
— In Page, Ariz., the operators of the Navajo Generating Station, the
largest coal-fired power plant in the West, have announced plans to
close it by 2019. The electric utility Dayton Power & Light will
shut two coal plants in southern Ohio by next year. Across the country,
at least six other coal-fired power plants have shut since November, and
nearly 40 more are to close in the next four years.
President
Trump campaigned on a pledge to restore the limping American coal
industry, vowing to bring jobs and production back to a sector that has
been on a steady decline for over a decade. But to do that, he would
have to revive demand for coal by electric utilities, which for decades
have been the largest consumer of the heavily polluting fuel. Nearly all
the coal mined in the United States generates electricity.
On
March 28, Mr. Trump headed to the Environmental Protection Agency,
where, flanked by coal miners and coal company executives, he signed an executive order
directing the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, to begin rolling
back a set of regulations on coal-fired power plant pollution that made
up the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate change legacy.
“Today
I’m taking bold action to follow through on that promise,” Mr. Trump
told the miners. “My administration is putting an end to the war on
coal.”
But
executives at the nation’s largest electric utilities say Mr. Trump’s
announcement and the eventual fate of the regulations known as the Clean Power Plan
make little difference to them. They still plan to retire coal plants —
although perhaps at a slightly slower pace — and, more significant,
they have no plans to build new ones.
“For us, it really doesn’t change anything,” said Jeff Burleson, vice president of system planning at Southern Company,
an Atlanta-based utility that provides electricity to 44 million people
across the Southeast, of the prospective rollback of the Clean Power
Plan. “Whatever happens in the near term in the current administration
doesn’t affect our long-term planning for future generation,” he said.
As
do most electric utilities, Southern Company plans its investment on a
50-year horizon, the expected life span of a new power plant. Its
planners do not see coal as economically viable in that time frame.
With
or without the Clean Power Plan, power companies say, coal is simply no
longer the fuel of choice for keeping the lights on in America — and
they do not expect it to make a comeback. Cheaper natural gas and renewable sources like wind and solar power have replaced it.
“We’ll
continue to grow the renewables portion of our business and meanwhile
rely on natural gas, but we don’t see investing in new coal,” Mr.
Burleson said.
A decade-long boom in extracting gas and oil
from rock in a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has
led to a glut in natural gas, causing its price to plummet below that of
coal. Electric utilities have turned away from buying coal and toward
the cheaper fuel, a market shift was already underway well before Mr.
Obama announced the Clean Power Plan.
“This
is not an environmentally driven trend we are seeing,” said Jairo
Chung, an associate vice president at Moody’s Investors Service. “What
we are seeing now is in the interior of the U.S., where wind is very
rich, states and utilities are pushing ahead in investing in it — not
because of regulation or environmental concerns, but because it’s
economically driven.”
Natural
gas produces just half as much planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution
as coal — an additional benefit, electricity generators say, as they
invest in the new power generators that will provide electricity to
America for the next half-century.
This
decision is also driven by economics. Electric company executives are
including in their long-term profit-and-loss calculations an expectation
that the federal government will eventually tax or regulate carbon
dioxide pollution.
Several
electric utilities, including Southern Company of Atlanta, have already
incorporated an anticipated carbon tax into their business models,
plugging in estimated fees of $10 to $40 per ton of carbon dioxide
pollution. “We don’t know exactly what the future holds, but we hold a
presumption that there will be a price on carbon on the horizon, either
from legislation or regulation,” Mr. Burleson said.
Legal experts say it is not certain that Mr. Trump will succeed in efforts to roll back the Clean Power Plan.
And
under the current statute, which has yet to be put into effect, the
federal government is still required to regulate carbon dioxide
pollution. So, even if Mr. Trump does succeed in repealing his
predecessor’s carbon dioxide rules, either he or his successor will be
required to issue replacement rules.
While
Mr. Trump tries to roll back the rules today, executives of electric
power generators assume that his successors will eventually reinstate
them in some form. Essentially, they say, Mr. Trump’s moves are a bump
on the road to a future in which the government constrains
climate-warming pollution and consumers increasingly demand cleaner
power.
“At
this point, it really, in terms of how we’ve been transitioning our
fleet and transmission — it probably won’t have a big impact,” John
McManus, a vice president at American Electric Power, an Ohio-based utility that provides power to five million people in 11 states, said of Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. announcement.
American
Electric Power was once built entirely around coal. In 2005, 71 percent
of its electricity was coal-fired. But that figure has dropped to 47
percent and is expected to fall further, according to the company’s
projections. Natural gas-fired power has grown to 27 percent from 20
percent in 2005, and that share is expected to grow.
Over
the next three years, the company plans to invest about $1 billion in
new wind and solar generation and $3 billion in new transmission lines
to move that electricity, Mr. McManus said. “We have been relying on
what makes sense for a different kind of electrical system in the
future.”
Still,
companies say, the changing environment matters. “This is our long-term
view — unless the entire issue of climate change goes away,” he said.
“And we don’t expect that to happen.”
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