The last coal-fired power plant in the UK will officially retire in September 2024. This is not merely a symbolic gesture but a consequence of market logic: as the costs of renewable energy and flexible power sources decline rapidly, coal power has become increasingly untenable, making its exit merely a matter of time.
In this context, however, the United States is moving against the tide. The political faction associated with Trump has invoked emergency powers from the Department of Energy to keep aging coal plants, originally slated for retirement, operational, citing grid stability and energy security. Yet, most of these units are outdated and inefficient, driven not by market demand but by administrative intervention. From the perspective of the power system, coal power, even when regarded as a ‘dispatchable source’, lacks the flexibility required by modern grids. Natural gas peaker plants can start up within minutes to meet peak loads, while coal plants often require hours to ramp up and stabilize output, exhibiting poor regulation capabilities and incurring high costs for labor, maintenance, fuel storage, and environmental compliance, resulting in a slow and expensive process.
Cost figures further elucidate the issue. Recent mainstream estimates indicate that the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for coal power ranges from $71 to $173 per MWh; for natural gas combined cycle, it is about $48 to $109 per MWh; and large-scale wind and solar have largely fallen between $50 and $80 per MWh. In this context, forcibly prolonging the lifespan of coal power will merely shift higher costs onto electricity prices. Various studies estimate that such policies will impose an additional annual cost of approximately $3.1 billion on American consumers, with retail price increases in some states potentially reaching several percentage points.
The core issue in the United States is the ‘use of high-cost power sources’, while China has opted for ‘massive new construction of erroneous power sources’. In recent years, China has continued to approve new coal power projects and heavily relies on public resources, including local government financing support, policy bank loans, and various subsidies. Official narratives often cite energy security as the rationale, but the reality is that, amid the rapid expansion of wind, solar, and energy storage, the utilization rate of coal power has been low and is still declining. Increasingly, newly constructed units operate only as backups or at low loads, yet they must bear high capital costs, making it economically challenging to recoup investments within their designed lifespan. In other words, these coal plants are on a trajectory to become stranded assets from the moment they are completed, consuming public funds and emission allowances without generating corresponding value in electricity generation.
In both the United States and China, the underlying logic of policy is not long-term efficiency but rather short-term political risk management. Power outages represent an immediate, visible risk with high political costs; high costs or stranded assets are chronic, diffuse issues that can be deferred. Thus, the choice tends to lean towards ‘first avoiding power outages, and we will deal with the rest later’. The UK has simply accepted the reality earlier: coal power has been eliminated by rational economic logic. This path is one that other countries will ultimately be unable to avoid.
