Train cars loaded with coal pass California Zephyr as it rolls along the tracks during its daily 2438-mile trip to Emeryville, San Francisco from Chicago (Joe Raedle / Getty Images / AFP)
New York: Coal’s share in the US power mix is projected to fall in half by 2040, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The fossil fuel, which in 2008 generated half of America’s electricity, will see a steep decline in market share starting in the latter half of the next decade as closures of US coal-fired power plants mount, according to BNEF’s New Energy Outlook 2017 report published Thursday. Over that stretch, gas-fired electricity is forecast to rise by 22 percent while power from renewables is seen jumping by 169 percent.
While President Donald Trump has voiced repeated support for coal, the “economic realities over the next two decades’’ will not favor it in the power mix, BNEF said in a statement about the report.
To be sure, coal’s future looks brighter in some other long-term forecasts. The US Energy Information Administration, in its 2017 annual energy outlook, projected that in 2040 coal will be used to generate 31 percent of America’s electricity. That scenario assumes the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, a set of rules designed to curb carbon-dioxide emissions -- doesn’t go into force. Trump’s moved to kill those rules.
BNEF, meanwhile, is forecasting that almost two-thirds of the US fleet of coal-fired power plants will be retired by 2040. At the end of 2016, there were 278 gigawatts of installed coal plant capacity -- and 174 gigawatts of that’s projected to close by 2040.
