Thread by @SeanCasten

There are some really remarkable graphics in this article, but I have a pet peeve with this sentence: hcn.org/issues/53.2/in…

There is this narrative that coal is cheap, and would still be dominant but for falling natural gas prices and clean energy tax credits. That simply isn't true. Coal hasn't been cheap since the Clean Air Act was passed. It's been slowly dying for decades.

Coal is only cheap if we're willing to let it be dirty. Get rid of scrubbers, baghouses, stop caring about acid rain and asthma and you can build a cheap coal plant. We haven't tolerated that since the CAA. Thankfully.

But the Clean Air Act grandfathered those old, dirty plants into compliance. The result was a steadily aging coal fleet as the private market shifted their dollars towards more productive investments.

Those zombie plants kept running for a long time, but it was just a matter of time before they were going to hit end of life. The money was flowing to gas combined cycle and renewables.

I wrote about this over a decade ago, and none of what I said was particularly controversial among my colleagues in the power sector. grist.org/article/beyond…

And yet we still see articles suggesting that the coal industry would have been fine but for factors beyond their control. That's not true! But claiming that it's true absolves coal industry leaders from their responsibility in this transition.

After all, if this was just exogenous cause, then the CEOs are blameless. The reality is that while they were raiding pensions and boosting their compensation, coal miners and workers were losing out, while being told by their bosses that things would be fine.

To be sure, cheap gas and renewables did make a difference. But only because once those new, cleaner plants were built, they were more economic to run than the zombie coal plants sitting in the same markets.

And so as those newly constructed, lower marginal operating costs ran more hours out of every day, the coal plants ran fewer. This was, by the way, the basic investment thesis of those plants. And again, the rest of the industry understood that dynamic.

So did state utility regulators BTW. I recall convos with several saying that because the coal fleet opex had been capitalized, they were working with coal operators to keep them running as long as possible, lest those capital costs had to be brought forward in customer rates.

That issue goes down a rabbit-hole of IOU rate making rules, but suffice to say that no one in the industry was blind to the fact that the coal fleet was aging out and being replaced with cheaper, cleaner alternatives. But some chose to publicly deny that truth.

Words matter. Their words kept their employees from transitioning sooner. They kept politicians in the dark longer. They slowed the transition to cheaper, cleaner energy. Let us not continue that mistake any longer. /fin