Can the war on coal still be won?

The chardonnay set isn’t what’s throttling coal generation in fossil-fuel-friendly Republican states like Utah and Texas. It’s math. The economics of coal plants have continued to deteriorate as they’ve gotten older and creakier. A Sierra Club report on the Oklahoma facility that OG&E kept afloat found it brought in $1.2 billion less revenue over five years than the utility had predicted, because it was so often either down for repairs or unable to produce competitively priced power. The Trump administration just held the largest coal-lease auction on federal land in more than a decade, but had to postpone it after receiving only one bid for less than one cent per ton. The last similar lease sold for more than a dollar per ton.

Meanwhile, the costs of wind, solar, and batteries have continued to plunge; they made up 94% of the U.S. grid’s new capacity in 2024. They now generate more than a quarter of the electricity in California — and a third in Texas. And battery storage is expanding even faster, growing by two-thirds in 2024.

Still, Beyond Coal’s job keeps getting harder. That’s partly because the most egregiously indefensible coal plants are already shuttered, partly because the Trump EPA does not seem to care whether the remaining plants comply with environmental laws, and partly because Trump’s brazen war on renewables has slashed subsidies for existing wind and solar farms while making it much harder to develop new ones. There’s also a less political reason: It suddenly looks like America might need a lot more electricity.

The Sierra Club’s war on coal began in the early 2000s, after a White House energy task force led by former Vice President Dick Cheney called for the construction of 200 new coal plants. That would have been a climate disaster, locking the grid into decades of dependence on the dirtiest fossil fuel, so the club’s leaders mobilized volunteers and lawyers to fight the proposed projects all over the country.

They managed to stop almost all of them, but that feat wasn’t just a triumph of passion and grit. It also turned out no one needed that many new plants of any kind. After the financial crisis of 2008, utilities began scaling back their projections for future electricity demand and struggled to justify a building binge. That’s when the club shifted its focus from blocking new coal plants to shuttering old ones, and Bloomberg cut the organization a $50 million check to launch Beyond Coal as a formal campaign.

The combination of coal getting expensive and power demand remaining flat gave the campaign a huge boost as it targeted the least efficient plants. The club’s ultimate goal was a fossil-free grid, but back then it was laser-focused on killing coal. In Oklahoma, Henry did not object to OG&E’s proposal to convert one of its aging coal boilers to natural gas, and I sat in on a closed-door strategy meeting between Henry and a gas-industry group that shared most of her objectives in the case. At the time, the Sierra Club was under fire for accepting gas-industry donations.

Today, Beyond Coal is fighting the buildout of gas as well as coal, but the AI frenzy has changed the context, now that American utilities have proposed a total of 200 new gas plants to meet the surge in demand they expect from new data centers. Many experts estimate that AI will increase power demand as much as 10% nationally, but the Sierra Club has calculated that the various utility proposals would increase power capacity by more than 100%.

“It’s a lot like the coal situation 20 years ago, with a real threat of digging the hole even deeper with new fossil infrastructure,” said Holly Bender, who oversees Beyond Coal as the club’s chief program officer. ​“We’ve got to be even clearer about what we’re fighting for, not just what we’re fighting against.”

Meanwhile, global coal generation hit a record high last year, even though it continued to decline as a share of electricity. Worldwide the vast majority of new electric capacity came from wind and solar, but that wasn’t enough to meet ballooning demand. So the race is on: The world needs more juice, and unless we can build out an extraordinary amount of clean stuff, we’ll keep burning the dirty stuff. 

Before the AI boom, when Laurie Williams was a frontline attorney with Beyond Coal, she helped pressure Xcel Energy to commit to retire all its Minnesota coal plants by 2030. Now she’s the head of Beyond Coal, and she was appalled in 2023 when Xcel Energy, which the Sierra Club had ranked the nation’s most responsible utility, proposed to meet soaring demand from AI by building out nearly as much new gas as wind, and hardly any new solar or storage. But with gas prices spiking and gas plants taking much longer than renewable plants to get up and running, her team eventually worked with Minnesota regulators to get Xcel to delay all but one small gas plant, while committing to twice as much wind, three times as much storage, and five times as much solar as its initial plan.

“We maximized clean energy, and we saved customers $1.5 billion,” Williams told me. ​“We’re facing serious headwinds these days, even with the best utilities, even in progressive states. But we know how to win these fights.”

The Sierra Club still has NIMBY elements, and its local chapters sometimes care more about protecting turtles than expanding renewables, but it supported the controversial Grain Belt Express transmission line that would have distributed wind to Midwestern cities before Trump and Republican senators killed it. Beyond Coal is now as focused on the beyond part as it is on the coal part, because utilities are going to need more capacity, even if they’re exaggerating how much, and it really matters whether that capacity is zero-emissions.

So Beyond Coal is sticking to its affordability message, at a moment when Democratic candidates around the country just won big by talking about rising costs, especially rising utility bills. The campaign is trying to remind Americans that Trump’s fossil-fueled war on wind and solar makes power more expensive, even though that war also makes existing coal (as well as new gas) marginally more competitive. It’s continuing to challenge outdated industry talking points portraying coal as what keeps the lights on — the aging fleet is increasingly unreliable — and renewables as a woke green scam. You can still find its lawyers at rate-setting commission meetings, arguing the facts and the law and the math.

These days, though, facts and law and math will only go so far. The war on coal is just one theater in the larger political culture war, and public opinion is just one weapon; most people want cheap and clean power, but it’s not yet clear whether voters in red states will punish politicians and utilities that keep them from getting it. It now seems unlikely that Beyond Coal will achieve its goal of ending U.S. coal by 2030. Closing the last 140 plants might be even harder than closing the first 390.

But of course this stuff is hard. If it were easy, it would’ve been done already. A key lesson of the Beyond Coal campaign is that the energy transition isn’t going to happen on its own. People have to do the work to make it happen.

“It’s a lot of Whac-A-Mole,” Henry said. ​“We stop them over here; they try to come back over there. But we’ll keep showing up. We’re built for this.”