(CNN) — It’s been 13 years since the last large coal-fired power plant was built in the US. Now, the Trump administration wants to build another two, but experts say even federal support likely won’t make that feasible.
President Donald Trump and his administration have made no secret of their preference for coal-fired power, arguing it is an important source of firm, always-on electricity prized by large users like data centers and industry.
Most of their efforts have been directed at keeping existing coal plants operating longer, but last month, the administration announced it would give more than $100 million in federal funding to two proposed plants in West Virginia and Alaska.
These projects are in the planning stage, and the federal money will be used for early-stage feasibility studies. If they are built, it would be a momentous turn of events for coal-fired power in the US. However, that’s a big “if” because the cost could be astronomical to build coal plants with proposed carbon capture — a technology that would stop most of their plant-warming pollution from escaping into the atmosphere, storing it instead.
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It would cost more than $10 billion to construct a 1.6 gigawatt coal plant outfitted with carbon capture, like the proposed one in West Virginia, according to an independent analysis prepared for the Wyoming Energy Authority this year. Similarly, it would cost more than $8 billion to build a plant the size of the 1.25 gigawatt Alaska project.
It’s more than double the cost of building a natural gas plant with carbon capture, and more than four times the cost to establish new solar, according to the Wyoming analysis (this analysis did not factor federal tax credits into building costs). Only erecting a new nuclear power plant is more expensive.
Those price tags are “stunningly high,” energy data analyst Seth Feaster said. And that could stop the projects before they even start.
“My baseline reaction is these plants will never get built,” said Feaster, an analyst at global energy firm the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “The cost of that power is going to be far higher than the other forms of energy that are out there, including gas, solar and wind.”
Even existing coal plants have slowly been on their way out for years, too old and costly to compete with cheaper natural gas and renewables. The new plants say they’ll utilize carbon capture — technology with bipartisan support. It got a hefty tax credit in former President Joe Biden’s 2022 clean energy law and Biden’s EPA nodded to it as a technology coal plants should utilize to control their emissions. The funding for the new coal plants came from money that Congress initially designated for reducing and capturing carbon emissions.
But the technology is still “not proven,” said Phil Wagner, associate director of research and analysis at energy consulting company McCloskey by OPIS, which tracks coal and electricity markets. “If it can be done, it’s going to be put on natural gas plants first. They’re already lower cost; they’re already 40% of the power grid. It’s less carbon to capture.”
“It’s still super uncertain whether either of these (new coal) plants will be built,” he added.
An Energy Department spokesperson for the Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office said the projects had been “competitively selected,” but did not answer CNN’s questions about DOE’s criteria to fund the projects, or whether the projects had demonstrated outside funding or buyers for their power. Developers for the projects did not return CNN’s requests for comment.
The Trump administration is “committed to stabilizing, optimizing, and growing the American coal industry while restoring coal as a cornerstone of the US energy mix,” the Energy Department spokesperson said.
Coal’s resurgence
Energy demand is a big part of why coal has made an unexpected comeback, despite its costs. US power demand has ballooned in recent years, driven by artificial intelligence data centers and their need for always-on power. The entry of data centers to the market has also spurred a race to make sure there’s enough energy on the grid to handle times of peak demand during the hottest summer days and coldest winter nights.
“Unlike renewable energy sources, coal plants can generate electricity at all times of day and in all weather conditions,” Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of coal-fired power plant trade group America’s Power, said in a statement. “This makes them critical for ensuring electric reliability.”
The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to keep old coal plants from retiring, citing the need for reliable power on the grid. The most consequential move the administration has made is rolling back a suite of EPA rules that cracked down on air and water pollution from the plants. But Trump’s Energy Department has gone further, ordering several plants to stay open beyond their retirement date — even ones that are broken and inoperable.
Their efforts have shifted the needle; the US last year recorded a jump in its greenhouse gas emissions, driven in large part by power plants burning more coal.
But even though coal plants are seen as reliable stalwarts of the grid, it’s not always the case.
Two semi-recently built coal plants, Comanche Unit 3 in Colorado and Sandy Creek in Texas, have experienced severe mechanical issues and outages that have lasted hundreds of days. Sandy Creek has sat idle since a major failure last year and isn’t expected to be turned back on until March 2027. And Comanche 3 has experienced more than 40 unplanned outages due to mechanical issues; the most recent one has lasted about a year.
Comanche Unit 3 “is perhaps the major source of unreliability on our electric system,” said Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office. “We certainly have not seen coal units as being the most reliable units in the mix.”
In addition, the Comanche unit’s spate of unplanned outages has increased the price of its power, said Keith Hay, managing director of policy at the Colorado Energy Office. Hay added that the unit’s mechanical problems “literally date to its initial construction period” owing to frequently malfunctioning equipment and poor maintenance.
Feaster called Comanche 3 and Sandy Creek “two of the biggest problematic coal plants in the country.”
Bloodworth, the CEO of the coal plant trade group, said the two outage-plagued plants are outliers, and that 18 other coal-fired units that came online in the early 2010s haven’t experienced as many problems.
“We would caution against drawing a broader reliability conclusion from two units out of 20,” Bloodworth said.
Wagner, the coal energy analyst, said the Trump administration will probably get more bang for its buck with rules and funding going toward propping up existing coal plants, compared to new builds.
The $100 million the Trump administration has given the new projects is “almost less than a drop in a bucket,” he said.
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