Editor’s note: The war on coal is real, and it’s been happening on several fronts. Solar power is replacing coal. Wind power is replacing coal. Natural gas is replacing coal. At the end of the day, coal has been on a long, big decline in the USA. The following update from the U.S. EIA provides more info on that.Use of the coal fleet in PJM, the country’s largest wholesale electricity market, has fallen over the last decade, driven largely by higher relative fuel costs.
PJM is the largest wholesale electricity market in the nation, covering all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, DC.Operating costs of competing resources are significant factors for PJM to determine which plants will run. How much the plant is called on affects operator decisions to keep coal-fired plants open.
In 2023, 11 coal-fired power plants made up more than three-quarters of the coal-fired generation in the region. These plants wererelatively infrequently, operating on average 330 days out of the year and averaging only three shutdowns, each with an average duration of about a week. Output from the other 22 PJM coal plants with outage data varied more by season. Those plants operated for an average of 175 days in 2023, shutting down nine times, each with average durations of about a month.