Despite Clean Power Plan rollback, utilities say coal isn’t ascendant

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Despite the executive order signed by President Trump this afternoon to roll back the Clean Power Plan, it's unclear that much will change in the US for the declining coal industry. An annual survey conducted by UtilityDive and research firm PA Consulting asked 600 utility executives from around the country to answer a series of questions about how their utility is run and how it's preparing for the future. Notably, only four percent of the respondents said that they expected to increase coal power in their energy mix moderately or significantly. Most responded that coal power would remain the same or decrease over the next 10 years. Fifty-two percent of the respondents expected coal power to "decrease significantly" in their energy mix.

The story is similar for oil, which would also benefit from a Clean Power Plan rollback. Only four percent of utility executives expected their utility to increase oil in their energy mix moderately or significantly. The majority (42 percent) expected oil to stay the same in their energy mix over the next 10 years. The rest expected oil to decrease.

Trump's Tuesday executive order asks the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw the 2014 Clean Power Plan set by the Obama Administration and put in place another, weaker set of rules governing greenhouse gas emissions. The Clean Power Plan asked states to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to 32 percent of 2005 levels by 2030 and gave states considerable leeway in how they achieved the rule's goals. But aging, polluting coal infrastructure would have had trouble meeting its requirements.

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