The two-unit Cumberland coal plant in northwestern Tennessee, owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is one of the largest coal-fired power plants in the United States, capable of supplying electricity to as many as 1.4 million homes when it is running.
But lately, the plant has been failing right when customers need electricity the most.
In the middle of the heat wave that hit the eastern United States this June, one of the units tripped offline, forcing the T.V.A. to declare a power emergency and ask customers to cut back on electricity use. For consumers, this meant raising the temperature of their air-conditioning on some of the hottest days of the year.
Cumberland’s problems run so deep that the T.V.A. plans to retire the 52-year-old units in 2026 and 2028. It has warned the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that keeping the plant open any longer would require significant investment and create economic and reliability risks.
“Clean, beautiful coal” has become a mantra for the Trump administration. But it is neither clean nor beautiful. More to the point, it is neither economical nor reliable — central concerns for utilities and power producers across the country. In contrast, wind and solar energy and battery storage, which the administration actively opposes, are less expensive, more reliable and far better for the climate.
Most of the coal mined in the United States today fuels aging electric power plants such as Cumberland that are costly to maintain and increasingly unsound. It’s why America gets just one-third as much electricity from coal as it did in 2007, when power production from coal peaked. Since then, large coal-fired plants have been steadily replaced by cheaper, cleaner and more efficient alternatives. In 2025 alone, 23 units are scheduled to close or be converted to gas by utilities and other power producers. From 2026 to 2030, 109 more units are expected to stop burning coal, according to research by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, where we work.
The Trump administration is betting that forcing coal plants to stay open, offering $625 million to upgrade plants, giving away coal on federal land, cutting pollution limits and opening more land to coal mining will spark a turnaround for coal-fired power generation. But while these measures could prolong the operating lives of some coal plants for a short period, these measures will not reverse the decline of an industry hurtling into economic and technological obsolescence.
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The post Coal Is Unreliable, Expensive and Dirty. Trump Is Going All In. appeared first on New York Times.
