In the United States, the use of coal as a source of electricity has tumbled. As recently as 2008, coal created over half the electricity consumed in the country, but by 2020 that percentage had dropped to just 19%. That decline is continuing as across the nation coal-powered power plants continued to be decommissioned. In just the last two years, almost 20,000 megawatts of generation capacity from coal has been phased out. In 2020, there were literally 1 million megawatts less electricity produced by coal in the United States than there were 10 years earlier. Too much of that capacity has been replaced by natural gas which, thanks to fracking, has become cheaper and more abundant in the last two decades. But solar and wind have also been expanding quickly, thanks to plummeting costs per megawatt in both forms of renewables. In 2019, the amount of electricity produced from renewables exceeded that from coal for the first time. With most plants now over 40 years old, and the maintenance cost of coal plants exceeding the cost of building new solar or wind generators from scratch, the only question for coal is how long its death will be dragged out. And the people doing that dragging … aren’t doing either the miners or mining communities any favors. No one, but no one, is going to build a new coal plant in the U.S.  Despite all this, the United States is still funding coal power plants overseas, where they’re often treated as the fastest way to bring populations out of “energy poverty.” Or at least they have been. Until this week. Read more