It’s the Magic of the Free Market: coal simply can not compete with cheap fracked natural gas.
It’s the Magic of the Free Market: coal simply can not compete with cheap fracked natural gas.
Or maybe, coal can’t compete with ridiculous regulations from the Dicktators administration which were put in place to destroy the coal industry. Just part of the plan Stan, just part of the plan.
Not so. Coal is only having problems because it’s unfairly penalized by the EPA, which drives up the cost due to having to comply with overly-zealous regulation not only on the generation plants but on extraction as well. If it were allowed to compete properly, it’d be one of the cheapest energy sources; it’d be even more so if some of the largest deposits weren’t arbitrarily locked away in dubious “national monuments”. There’s enough market pressure out there that “clean coal” would become the norm, if it weren’t so outrageously expensive to implement the technology due to the EPA compliance costs.
It’s not a free market when one type of fuel has artificial burdens placed on it.
Unless you already have an existing coal-fired plant that can't be effectively converted to gas.