President Donald Trump issued an executive order Wednesday directing the Department of Defense to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants.
“We’re going to be buying a lot of coal through the military now, and it’s going to be a lot less expensive and actually much more effective than what we’ve been using for many, many years,” Trump said during an announcement at the White House.
The administration has identified more than three dozen coal plants that could provide energy for Defense Department facilities, an Energy Department official told Politico’s E&E News.
Electricity from coal made up 5% of the department’s energy use in 2020. The department gets most of its energy from natural gas, but the share of energy it purchases from renewable sources has seen an uptick in recent years, and 45% of electricity at U.S. military installations came from renewable energy in 2022.
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The Defense Department under former President Joe Biden announced in 2024 that it would supply power for several military installations across North Carolina and South Carolina using solar energy. The department has also entered into renewable energy contracts under other previous administrations, including a renewable energy supply agreement for Fort Hood in 2016 and a solar power purchase agreement for Navy and Marine facilities in California in 2015.
Electricity purchases for the Defense Department are overseen largely by the Defense Logistics Agency.
The Trump administration is also expected to put $175 million toward upgrading six coal plants in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia, multiple outlets reported.
The new investment comes after Trump and his team put more than $600 million into the coal industry last year, including $350 million to recommission and upgrade coal plants that were expected to close.
The administration has also ordered multiple coal plants to stay open past their scheduled retirement dates, a move that has drawn criticism from coal industry players themselves for the high consumer costs it could create.
Nikhil Kumar, a program director at GridLab, previously told NOTUS that the administration’s investments are “not enough” to make a sustainable difference in an already-declining coal industry.
“You could maybe extend the life of some plants that were expected to retire in the next few months, and you could give them some money to extend it by a year or two,” Kumar said. “It just is not a forever money amount.”
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