It’s no secret that the coal industry is in sharp decline. In fact, one of the pillars of the Trump Campaign was schmoozing residents of coal towns, promising to bring coal roaring back, reviving the industry and presumably their jobs and local economies. If voting results are any indication, many of them seem to have bought the fantasy hook, line and sinker.
The reality is that the coal industry has been suffering from a hard one-two punch supplied by cheap and abundant natural gas (partly due to fracking, but that’s a story for another diary), and the rise of renewable sources of energy. Facing these twin market factors, coal simply is unable to compete effectively.
Making matters worse for those coal miners and the towns and local economies dependent on them is that the coal industry has been mechanizing more and more in recent decades, sharply reducing the need for large numbers of actual human beings in the industry. By the end of 2016 the coal industry employed only about 50,000 people, give or take. In it’s heyday, the coal industry peaked at well over 800,000 jobs in the 1920’s. More recently, there was an uptick in coal jobs in the 2000’s, peaking at just shy of 90,000 jobs in 2012.
Since Trump has been in office, there has been a slight uptick in coal jobs, but it’s a blip. Current stats show a total for February 2019 of 52,700 miners. Sure, that’s about a 5% increase since 2016, but it still really amounts to noise in the numbers.
The reality is that renewables are grabbing an ever-increasing market share of power generation. A new article on CNN today, “More bad news for coal: Wind and solar are getting cheaper” tells the story:
Wind and solar costs have plunged so rapidly that 74% of the US coal fleet could be phased out for renewable energy -- and still save customers money, according to a report released on Monday by Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank.That figure of at-risk coal plants in the United States rises to 86% by 2025 as solar and wind costs continue to plunge.
The article later goes on to note that “solar prices have plummeted 90% since 2009 -- and they're projected to continue declining, according to Energy Innovation,” and that
Utility-scale solar power is expected to increase by 10% in 2019 alone, while wind power is expected to vault ahead of hydropower for the first time, the EIA said."Coal's biggest threat is now economics, not regulations," O'Boyle said.