The November wind has arrived with winter nipping at its heels. Here in Washington, the mercury dropped below freezing for the first time this fall as snow began to blanket Midwestern states.

Right on cue, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) previewed its annual Winter Reliability Assessment. NERC warns region-wide cold snaps – much less a punishing polar vortex – could cause serious challenges. And with bitter cold blasts a given, challenges are all but a certainty.

NERC says widespread events that stretch across grids could lead to electricity supply shortfalls. The past few winters have seen nail-bitingly close calls and even rolling blackouts. With power supplies now even more stretched due to rising demand driven by the rapid emergence of major new industrial electricity users – notably data centers – we are tapdancing on the edge of catastrophe.

While the Trump administration has worked with urgency to halt the loss of essential dispatchable power plants – with a focus on undoing the unworkable and punishing Biden-era regulatory assault – the loss of so much coal generating capacity over the past decade has left reserve margins perilously tight.

Despite having faced a regulatory blitz, the coal fleet has repeatedly come to the rescue during winter months and it will likely be needed more than ever this year.

Grid Reliability Backstop

During the January 2025 polar vortex, which saw historic low temperatures push power demand to record-breaking levels across multiple regional grids and power markets, the coal fleet was not only able to ramp up its generation but it also proved critically important to holding down consumer costs.

As a case study from Energy Ventures Analysis (EVA) found, the coal fleet on the PJM grid – the nation’s largest serving 67 million customers – ramped up its capacity factor to nearly 70% during the event, surging power onto a grid that needed every megawatt it could find. That surge in coal capacity not only stabilized power supplies, but it also saved consumers from soaring natural gas prices.

EVA found that, “as natural gas prices spiked—from under $2/MMBtu in November to nearly $30/MMBtu at the height of the event—coal’s stable fuel cost (around $2.50/MMBtu) allowed for increased coal plant dispatch and limited wholesale power price spikes.” EVA added that, “without coal-fired generation, [electricity] prices could have soared to over $400– $650/MWh—potentially adding between $500 million and $1.4 billion in extra costs for consumers.”

The fuel security and reliability afforded by the coal fleet is all but worth its weight in gold. With rising power demand and rising natural gas prices, the capacity factor of the existing coal fleet has already jumped this year. The fleet has been running at a capacity factor above 50% through August after running at an average of 43% last year.

With bitter cold approaching, the fleet’s capacity factor is likely to only continue to rise. And that rise could be a sign of an even greater jump in plant utilization in the years to come.

With power demand soaring and the challenges of adding new capacity immense – from backorders for gas turbines to opposition to pipelines and industrial-scale wind and solar projects – the existing coal fleet will be critical to bringing gigawatts of additional generating capacity onto the grid. For now, it’s the winter grid reliability backstop we simply can’t afford to lose.