The retirement wave
The coal and gas plants scheduled to close by 2030, and what is rising in their place. A story in 7 stops on the Wattlas map of the North American grid.
Scheduled to retire
Most of the great steam plants on this map rose in two waves. Gas and oil boilers went up along the coasts in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1970s and 1980s the utilities turned to coal, raising plants of a thousand megawatts and more beside the rivers and rail lines of the interior. Those machines were built to run for decades, and a whole generation of them is reaching the end of its planned life at once. Each month the Energy Information Administration gathers what plant owners report about every generator in the country in its monthly inventory, including the year they plan to shut it down, and when those dates are laid on a map they read less like a scattering of closures than a single tide rolling across the middle of the continent. Subbituminous coal, the low sulfur fuel that long trains haul out of the Powder River Basin of Wyoming, leads the list, and the old gas boilers of the coasts follow. Behind the plans lie cheaper gas, cheaper wind and sunlight, and the cost of keeping old boilers clean and running. Ahead of them lies a question no utility faced when it drew them up. After two decades of nearly flat demand the grid is being asked to grow again, for data centers and new factories, and every stop in this story is a place where the people who run it are deciding what should take a retiring giant's place, or whether it should retire at all.
On the map: Every plant lit here holds a generator that EIA-860M for August 2026 schedules to retire from 2026 through 2030, drawn at the plant's full size. The report lists 252 such generators and 47.5 GW of nameplate capacity, led by subbituminous coal at 24.5 GW, gas at 14.1 GW and bituminous coal at 6.8 GW.
Sources: EIA-860M, U.S. DOE, 2026 202(c) orders
Monroe
Where the River Raisin meets Lake Erie, DTE's Monroe plant has burned coal since 1971, four units of more than 800 megawatts each that make it the largest power station in Michigan. For half a century it has helped carry Detroit, its factories and its suburbs, through winters and summers alike, sending its power out over a web of 120 kV and 345 kV lines. DTE once meant to run it until 2040. Its 2022 plan pulled that date forward, and now two units are set to close in 2028 and the last two by 2032. Eighteen miles to the north, on the Detroit River, the company has already shown what can follow a coal plant. The Trenton Channel plant first fired its boilers in 1924, the first Detroit Edison plant to burn pulverized coal, and its striped stacks stood over Slocum's Island for decades. It closed at the end of 2022, the stacks came down in less than a minute on a March morning in 2024, and that June crews began building a battery on the same ground, 220 megawatts that can run for four hours. A battery that size cannot stand in for Monroe alone, yet it shows how the change will come. The land, the wires and the place on the grid outlast the boilers, and every retirement leaves behind a site already built to send power to a city.
On the map: Monroe (MI) is 3,080 MW of coal, the largest plant in Michigan on the map. EIA's August 2026 inventory schedules two of its four units for the end of 2028 and the other two for the end of 2032. About 29 km to the north the map lists Trenton Channel Energy Center, a 220 MW battery under construction.
Sources: Wikipedia, Monroe Power Plant, Wikipedia, Trenton Channel Power Plant, EIA-860M
Rockport
The two units at Rockport, on the Indiana bank of the Ohio River, are among the largest coal machines ever built, 1,300 megawatts apiece. The first went into service in December 1984 and the second in December 1989, and together they burn more than seven million tons of coal a year, brought by barge and, since 2018, almost all of it shipped from the West. Their chimney rises 1,038 feet, the tallest in Indiana, and their power leaves on 765 kV lines, the highest voltage on the American grid, bound for the cities of Indiana and Michigan. Rockport's end was settled in a legal agreement. In July 2019 its owner, American Electric Power, agreed with the Environmental Protection Agency, several northeastern states and the Sierra Club to retire the first unit by the end of 2028 rather than fit it with costly new pollution controls, and in April 2021 it said the second unit would close by then as well. When both go, the largest single retirement of the wave will be done. Yet only fifteen miles downstream the current is running the other way. Since December 2025 a string of emergency orders from the Department of Energy, each lasting about ninety days, has required that a coal unit at the F. B. Culley station stay ready to run, and similar orders now reach coal units in Michigan, Colorado, Washington and elsewhere in Indiana.
On the map: Rockport is 2,600 MW of coal in two 1,300 MW units, both scheduled to retire at the end of 2028. 765 kV lines run from ROCKPORT STATION beside it north to SULLIVAN and east-northeast to JEFFERSON. F B Culley, 360 MW of coal about 25 km to the west, has a unit held open by a federal emergency order.
Sources: Wikipedia, Rockport Generating Station, POWER Magazine, Top Plants, Rockport, U.S. DOE, 2025 202(c) orders, U.S. DOE, 2026 202(c) orders
Campbell
The three units of J. H. Campbell rose near the Lake Michigan shore at West Olive between 1962 and 1980, and Consumers Energy planned to close them all in May 2025, fifteen years before the end of their design life, saying the closure would save its customers $600 million by 2040. In June 2023 it bought the Covert gas plant farther down the shore, and the map now lists its 250 megawatts of Muskegon Solar, from 2026. Then, eight days before the closing date, the Department of Energy ordered the plant to stay available, citing the risk of shortfalls across the middle of the country. The grid operator, MISO, had said it expected enough power to meet the summer peak without Campbell. The order ran for ninety days and was then renewed again and again, six orders in all by August 2026, with the costs of keeping the old units ready spread across customers in Michigan and neighboring states. Michigan's attorney general challenged the orders, and in September 2026 the federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the first of them went beyond what the law allows. Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote that the department's reading would let it pick its preferred power sources in Michigan or any other state. The latest order still runs into November, and so one of the most closely watched retirements in the country has become a test of who decides when a power plant's working life is over.
On the map: J H Campbell, 1,331 MW of coal on the shore of Lake Michigan, was to close on May 31, 2025. Emergency orders from the Department of Energy have kept it ready to run ever since, the latest through November 14, 2026. Consumers Energy's Muskegon Solar, 250 MW listed from 2026, lies about 40 km to the north-northeast.
Sources: Wikipedia, J. H. Campbell Generating Plant, Wikipedia, Consumers Energy, U.S. DOE, 2025 202(c) orders, U.S. DOE, 2026 202(c) orders, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, September 17, 2026
Brandon Shores and Eddystone
Two tools keep old plants running past their dates, and both are at work between Baltimore and Philadelphia. In April 2023 Talen Energy told PJM, the grid operator, that it would close the Brandon Shores coal plant on June 1, 2025. PJM found that Baltimore could not do without it, because the transmission lines that would bring in power from elsewhere had not yet been built. In January 2025 Talen, PJM, Maryland's regulators and the utilities agreed that Brandon Shores and its neighbor Wagner would stay on under a reliability must run contract until May 31, 2029, paid to stay ready until the new lines are finished. Since July 2025 federal emergency orders have also let PJM run one of Wagner's units beyond its environmental limit on running hours. Up the Delaware at Eddystone the story runs deeper. In 1960 the Philadelphia Electric Company built a unit there with steam hotter and at higher pressure than any before it, and the lessons it taught shaped power plants for the rest of the century. Its later oil and gas units, 3 and 4, were about to retire when, on May 30, 2025, the Department of Energy ordered them kept available. The order has been renewed every ninety days since, and the latest runs through November 20, 2026. Whether by a contract or by an order from Washington, the lights of two cities still lean on machines that were meant to be gone by now.
On the map: Brandon Shores, 1,273 MW of coal, and Herbert A Wagner, 702 MW of oil, share a site on the Patapsco River below Baltimore, held open under a reliability contract until May 31, 2029. Eddystone Generating Station, 820 MW of gas on the Delaware about 130 km to the northeast, has been kept available by emergency orders since May 2025.
Sources: Wikipedia, Brandon Shores Generating Station, ASME, Eddystone Station Unit 1, U.S. DOE, 2025 202(c) orders, U.S. DOE, 2026 202(c) orders
Cumberland
On the south bank of Lake Barkley, where the Cumberland River widens behind its dams, the Tennessee Valley Authority built the most powerful plant in the state. Its two units went into service in 1973, and in 2004 they made nearly an eighth of all the electricity TVA generated, burning some twenty thousand tons of coal a day brought up the river by barge. Twin chimneys a thousand feet tall were built for them in 1970, and they still rise over the lake, though the exhaust now leaves through shorter stacks behind the scrubbers. In January 2023 TVA announced that the first unit would retire by the end of 2026 and the second by the end of 2028, to be replaced by a combined cycle gas plant beside it. It is one of the ways the wave is being met, with a new machine built where the old one stands, fed by a pipeline instead of a barge. The timetable has since stretched. EIA's August 2026 inventory moves the first unit's retirement to the end of 2028 and the second's to 2034, with the new gas plant coming in two halves to match. For the valley that means the coal fires at Cumberland will burn a while longer, and a plant built for the age of the moon landings will hand its load to its successor one unit at a time.
On the map: Cumberland (TN) is 2,470 MW of coal, the largest plant in Tennessee on the map. Its first unit is scheduled to retire at the end of 2028 and its second in 2034, and on the same site the map lists a 1,339 MW gas plant under construction.
Sources: Wikipedia, Cumberland Fossil Plant, EIA-860M
Alamitos
Coal leads the wave, but gas makes up much of the rest, and most of that is old steam plants like the ones Southern California Edison built along the coast at Long Beach in the 1950s and 1960s. They drew in seawater to cool their condensers and poured it back warm into the sea, and in 2010 California adopted a rule to phase that practice out along its coast. AES, which had bought Alamitos in 1998, answered by rebuilding the site. A new combined cycle plant with air-cooled condensers began running in February 2020, and beside it rose a battery of 100 megawatts that can deliver for four hours, finished in early 2021 and the first battery to compete with gas peaking plants for the job. The old seawater units were meant to close at the end of 2020, but the state let them run on through 2023 and then to the end of 2026. Up the coast at Oxnard, Ormond Beach, another seawater-cooled plant, is set to follow early in 2027, according to EIA's August 2026 inventory. Here at Long Beach the future is already built beside the past, and the retirement wave shows its other face. When the last steam units fall silent, power will keep flowing from this shore, stored in batteries and made by a cleaner turbine, carried on the wires that were already there.
On the map: AES Alamitos LLC is 1,142 MW of seawater-cooled gas steam units from the early 1960s, scheduled to retire at the end of 2026. Beside them stand AES Alamitos Energy Center, 603 MW of gas from 2020, and two batteries of 100 and 82 MW. Gas steam units are 11.5 GW of the 47.5 GW in the wave.
Sources: Wikipedia, Alamitos Energy Center, EIA-860M