Coal Costs
Americans
Tracking expensive giveaways to coal plants
The Trump administration is propping up aging and unreliable coal plants that emit vast amounts of harmful air pollutants – even as it attempts to slow or block the construction of cleaner and more affordable sources of power. Americans are paying with their wallets and their health.
Coal plants in the U.S.
The U.S. still has 184 coal-fired power plants operating across 39 states. Coal plants release mercury, heavy metals, and soot into our air, water, and food.
This pollution damages children’s brain development, is linked to heart disease and cancer, and cuts lives short. Coal is declining as a share of U.S. energy sources – today, these plants generate only 17% of U.S. power, down from over 50% 25 years ago. Cheaper, cleaner alternatives are ready to take their place, and utilities across the country have already made plans to make that transition. But the Trump administration is pledging hundreds of millions of dollars and taking extreme, unlawful actions to weaken health protections for coal plants and force these plants to continue operating past their scheduled retirement dates.
The props
The Trump administration is exploiting a variety of federal mechanisms to prop up 90 coal plants (189 units) in the U.S. That’s almost half of all grid-connected coal plants in the country.
They’re granting exemptions from essential air pollution protections, funneling hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to individual plants, and issuing back-to-back orders forcing specific coal units to keep running—in addition to weakening pollution standards that limit toxic metal pollution from all of the nation’s coal plants. The Trump administration is using every lever it can find to slow coal’s decline, regardless of the health and economic costs to families.
Polluter passes for mercury and air toxics
In 2025, the Trump administration handed out unlawful Clean Air Act exemptions to 154 units across 70 coal plants.
These “passes to pollute” exempted these plants from complying with the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which strengthened essential limits on hazardous air pollutants like mercury and other heavy metals and required plants to adopt modern monitoring technologies to show they are complying with these standards. The Trump administration has since repealed the 2024 updates to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for all coal plants.
Direct DOE money
The Department of Energy has committed $950 million in taxpayer dollars to prop up 24 coal plants, including helping finance two new plants and helping bring one retired plant back online.
This is public money being used as life support for expensive, declining plants instead of helping us transition to an affordable clean energy future.
DOE Coal Plant Mandates
Under a Federal Power Act provision meant for true emergencies, the Department of Energy has repeatedly ordered 6 coal plants to keep operating past their retirement dates, in some cases for over a year.
These plants have been slated for retirement for years and are not cost-competitive with clean energy sources. In September 2026, a federal appellate court found that the Department of Energy’s justifications for an order extending a plant in Michigan were unlawful. Collectively, these plants have already added hundreds of millions of dollars to families’ electric bills and emitted thousands of tons of harmful air and water pollution, affecting the health of people living nearby and damaging the environment.
Coal props cost Americans
Coal is polluting and unreliable – and it’s expensive. In 2021, we were well-positioned to make the U.S. power grid cleaner and cheaper. That year, almost every coal plant in the United States was more expensive to run than to replace with local wind or solar. Coal has continued to get more expensive in the years since. In 2024, it was 28% more expensive to generate power using coal than it was in 2021.
Cost, $/MWh
On a dollars per megawatt-hour basis – the cost per unit of electricity produced – clean energy technologies outperformed coal at almost every plant in 2021.
170 total coal plants with cost data. Clean power was less expensive at 168 of these 170 plants. Chart is sorted by the cost of running the coal plant in 2021.
Since the beginning of 2025, the Trump administration has taken a number of actions to block the deployment of clean energy – from eliminating federal incentives, to issuing stop-work orders for projects already under construction, to suspending routine permitting of new projects – even as demand for electricity has risen sharply due to data center development and other market forces. Even with these strong headwinds, renewable energy continues to be the lowest-cost source of new generation in the United States (opens in a new tab). U.S. clean power continued to grow in the first half of 2026, with enough wind and solar added during this period to power 5 million U.S. homes annually. Since the Trump administration slammed the brakes on clean energy, we have seen residential electricity rates rapidly rise. Rates increased by over 9 percent at the end of President Trump’s first year and as of May 2026 were 16 percent higher, according to NRDC’s 2026 report “An Affordability Crisis of Trump’s Own Making.”
$950M+
Paid to prop up the coal industry
In direct taxpayer subsidies and an additional predicted $593M billed to ratepayers under DOE coal plant mandates
Explore the dataOther actions
to monitor
“Many of the items that were on your wish list are now done.”
EDF recently uncovered a letter (opens in a new tab) sent by a coal trade group to senior officials in the Trump administration explicitly asking for many of the measures we catalogue here. In the March 2025 letter, America’s Power directly asks the administration to use emergency powers to force coal plants to remain open, recommends using public funds to support coal plants, and calls for “repealing or rewriting” health and environmental protections for coal plants “as quickly as possible.”
We have seen the administration delivering the coal industry’s wish list. What the American public has been left with is rising energy costs, more dangerous pollution, and a direct transfer of taxpayer money to a small group of coal interests.
The dashboard catalogues some of these actions, but it is important to note our dashboard is not comprehensive of planned and final actions taken by the administration on coal.
Increasing pollution
In September 2026, the Trump EPA repealed (opens in a new tab) greenhouse gas pollution limits for existing coal-fired power plants (as well as new gas-fired power plants) in the face of a deepening climate crisis – an action that EDF estimated (opens in a new tab) would result in up to 84,000 premature deaths and up to $3 trillion in health and climate-related costs over the next twenty years.
In April 2026, the Trump EPA proposed (opens in a new tab) to severely weaken protections for the safe management of toxic coal ash generated through the burning of coal. This increases the risk of exposing groundwater to toxic pollutants like arsenic, chromium, and lead.
In February 2026, the Trump EPA delayed (opens in a new tab) compliance with safeguards for disposal of toxic coal ash waste.
In December 2025, Trump EPA delayed (opens in a new tab) compliance with clean water standards for wastewater discharges from coal power plants.
Misusing taxpayer money
The Trump administration has made $200 billion (opens in a new tab) in low-cost, long-term financing available for coal projects—redirecting this funding away from investments in clean energy like wind and solar. The program provided a $1.5 billion loan (opens in a new tab) to Wabash Valley Resources, LLC, to help finance a coal and ammonia fertilizer facility in Indiana that will restart and repurpose a coal gasification plant idled since 2016.
President Trump’s Department of Energy has distributed (opens in a new tab) $100 million to “refurbish and modernize” (opens in a new tab) coal plants.
The Trump administration-supported “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (opens in a new tab) lifted a freeze on coal mining leases on federal lands while decreasing the royalty rate from 12.5% to 7%, and separately created a metallurgical coal production tax credit from a program intended to spur clean energy manufacturing.
