1 year later, coal still losing to renewables

After president’s victory, energy sector struggles.

It’s been a year since Pres- ident Donald Trump’s elec- tion and his pledges to trans- form the energy markets haven’t exactly come to pass.

In fact, what was true under President Barack Obama is still true today: Coal’s share of the power mix is declining, and wind and solar remain the fast- est-growing U.S. sources of electricity.

Try as Trump might, economics, not policy, have driven these seismic shifts in the way America uses energy during his first year in office. His second year, though, another story. could prove to be

Trump hasn’t been shy about promoting the revival of coal, or taking credit for a recent comeback in mining. There are just two problems with that: The rebound, such as it was, started before he won the presidency a year ago, and utilities continue to shutter coal-fired power plants. Building and operating a utility-scale wind farm costs as little as $30 a mega- watt-hour over its lifetime — as little as $14 if you count subsidies. Keeping an existing coal plant running costs $26 to $39 a megawatt-hour, according to Lazard Ltd. And solar is on its way to becom- ing the cheapest power source on Earth. “What we are seeing is that renewable technolo- gies on a fully loaded basis are beating” existing coal and nuclear plants in some regions, said Jonathan Mir, head of the North Ameri- can power group at Lazard.

There may be no better showcase for the shift away from coal than Texas. The red state long burned the most coal in the U.S., but is now replacing much of that capacity with wind — lots of it. That trend has continued under Trump: Just last month, Vistra Energy Corp. announced plans to close more than 4,000 mega- watts of capacity in Texas. Wind farms already under construction will fill most of that void.

“Texas has shown that the grid can run on signifi- cant amounts of wind,” said Joshua Rhodes, research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute.

Still, there’s been some talk that coal has broadly rebounded in the past year. And by one metric — jobs — there’s truth to that. After years of decline, coal jobs have increased in the past year.

That has more to do with market forces than Trump’s election.

U.S. coal production began rising in mid-2016, boosted by higher global prices that were mainly due to production cutbacks in China. Cyclone Debbie buffeted Australia’s coast earlier this year, sending prices rallying again. And in the U.S., coal became more competitive in the utility mix after natural gas — a rival power-plant fuel — rebounded from last year’s historically low prices, said Matt Preston, a North American coal analyst at Wood Mackenzie.