Burning coal to make electricity is just dumb

by Steve Schmidt, Darby

There certainly was a time in history when extracting and burning fossil fuels was a reasonable, even necessary choice.  It was far better than burning whale oil and helped power industrial growth in America.

But nostalgia and tradition cannot override hard data. Today, the argument for keeping coal-fired power plants running has entirely lost its financial and logical footing.

Burning coal is fundamentally outdated technology.  Modern coal plants are incredibly inefficient, converting only about a third of their raw thermal energy into actual electricity. The remaining 60 percent is completely lost to the atmosphere as waste heat. Contrast this with wind and solar, which bypass the massive thermal waste of combustion entirely, capturing kinetic and radiant energy and converting it directly into power.

The environmental toll of this inefficiency is staggering. Coal generates roughly 20 times more carbon emissions per unit of energy than solar power, and up to 80 times more than wind.  Burning coal is very harmful to our environment.

A decade ago, renewables were a relatively expensive alternative. Today, thanks to plummeting technology and battery storage costs, unsubsidized utility-scale solar and onshore wind are consistently the cheapest sources of new bulk electricity generation. In fact, it is now frequently cheaper to build brand-new wind and solar infrastructure from scratch than it is to simply pay the operating and fuel costs of keeping an existing coal plant running. Furthermore, solar and wind ‘fuel’ is permanently free. 

Perhaps the most overlooked cost of coal, however, is its drain on natural resources—specifically, our water. In regions where drought, native vegetation and wildlife management, and the health of local watersheds are constant concerns, fossil fuel power plants are a massive liability. They require millions of gallons of water just to create steam and cool their systems. Solar and wind technologies consume a mere 1 to 5 percent of the water required by coal to produce the exact same amount of energy. Transitioning a power grid entirely to renewables can cut total energy-related water consumption by up to 95%, easing the strain on our rivers and drought-prone landscapes.

The Trump administration’s intent on propping up the coal industry is misguided at best.  It is disappointing that our nation’s treasure is spent on fossil fuel industries instead of moving America toward sustainable renewable energy.

We are standing at a crossroads of energy production and land use. Embracing the transition to clean energy isn’t just an environmental imperative—it is the only economically sound choice for our future. It’s time to leave coal in the past and put displaced coal workers to work building renewable energy systems.