This year was a big one for moving our country beyond coal, despite the efforts of Trump and EPA head Andrew Wheeler to continue rolling back environmental and public health protections for their fossil fuel buddies. We’re projecting 2019 to be our second biggest year ever for coal retirements—a year when some of the biggest and dirtiest plants in the country closed—and in April we generated more power from renewable energy than from coal for the first time in history.
Most importantly, we drove real progress on the climate crisis, delivering results that match the scale of the problem. New climate reports released in December found the biggest factor driving emissions down globally is our plummeting use of coal, while the biggest factor driving them back up is the increased use of fracked gas. We spent 2019 pulling hard on those two levers that are so important to our climate—continuing to phase out coal and ramping up work to stop the fracked gas rush—and we built significant momentum on both fronts that we’ll carry into 2020.
We began our work to move the US power sector off of coal in 2010 and, as we end the first decade of that work, 2019 has been a pivotal year. Here are some highlights:
2019 is projected to be second biggest year in history for coal plant closures, with some 17,885 megawatts of coal power projected to retire.
Over the past 12 months, coal power accounted for only a quarter of all US electricity generation, a record low—down from half of our electricity at the start of this decade.
The largest single coal boiler announced for retirement to date was this year—the filthy 1.3 gigawatt Rockport coal unit 1 in Indiana. What a breath of fresh air for those nearby.
This year also saw the three largest coal unit retirement announcements: Rockport 1, Paradise 3 in Kentucky, and the Bull Run 1 unit in Tennessee. That Paradise plant-closure decision came even after Trump directly pressured the Tennessee Valley Authority to keep it open.
Want something even bigger? This year we saw the largest coal plant ever retired and taken offline: the Bruce Mansfield plant in Pennsylvania.
Out west we saw the largest coal plant in the western US (and third-largest nationwide) ever retired: the Navajo Generating Station on the Navajo Nation.
Need something else to cheer on New Year’s Eve? New York State will be coal-free in 2020, as its last coal plant will close by December 30.
This progress continues despite the Trump administration—in fact, of the 299 coal plants and 149,583 megawatts (MW) announced to retire to date, 61 coal plants or 39,847 MW have been announced to retire since Trump was inaugurated.
Time for some clean energy on this list! In April 2019, for the first time ever, the US generated more power from renewable energy than from coal!
And what a year for clean energy legislation: 100% clean energy legislation is now the law in seven states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
More than one in four Americans now live in a state or city committed to moving to 100% clean energy.
The eastern US is a big fan of wind energy—US states along the Atlantic Coast committed to purchase 25 gigawatts of offshore wind.
New construction is getting cleaner, too. This year a wave of more than 23 cities in California and Massachusetts passed building codes that ditch fracked gas by requiring or supporting all-electric construction for new buildings.
The fight against the rush to gas in the power sector is gaining steam too—in fact, 70% of proposed new gas plants could become stranded assets within a decade according to the Rocky Mountain Institute.
At the federal level, the Beyond Coal campaign continues to fight the constant attempts to roll back environmental health standards. For example, a federal court ruled in April that the Trump administration’s reversal of the 2016 coal-leasing moratorium on federal lands violated the law, keeping in place the ordered review of the coal-leasing program to ensure protection of the climate.
And our activists have been busy on the federal level as well. In May, the Sierra Club and our partners turned out dozens of people to testify before the EPA against its proposal to withdraw the regulation of mercury and other air toxics from coal plants. We also helped to organize a press event and rally that featured Senator Tom Carper and other members of Congress objecting to the proposed health and safety rollbacks.
In October, at another EPA hearing on rolling back Obama-era standards, the Sierra Club helped bring people to D.C. to testify against a proposal exempting two extremely dangerous ways of disposing coal ash—the creation of mountainous, uncontained piles of toxic waste and the use of ash in construction projects, as a cheap alternative to soil as fill.
When it comes to federal legislation, we’ve come leaps and bounds as well. More than 150 members of Congress—representing a geographically and politically diverse cross section of the Democratic Caucus—introduced the “100% Clean Economy Act” in November. The legislation aims to move the US to a 100% clean economy with net-zero emissions by 2050 across all sectors of the economy, including transportation, buildings, and manufacturing. Prior to the introduction of the 100% Clean Economy Act, the Sierra Club organized a fly-in to D.C. of state and locally elected officials, clean energy advocates, business people, scientists and others to lobby members of Congress to cosponsor the bill.
Finally, we worked to support a just transition for coal workers and communities. Following an extensive lobbying campaign from the Sierra Club and many organizations across the country, the House Natural Resources Committee approved two bipartisan bills to support economic development and environmental protection in coal communities. One of those bills, the bipartisan RECLAIM Act, would commit $1 billion in existing funds to clean up abandoned coal mining sites and affected waterways.
Phew! Now that’s an awesome list to keep with you if you start feeling a little sad or anxious about the state of environmental affairs in the US today. People power works! Join us in keeping all these amazing efforts moving forward in 2020.
