Coal Roars Back

The Iron Law Of Electricity prevails yet again as global coal use soars.

This 1916 photo shows miners riding an electric hauling engine at the Renton Coal Mine in Renton, Washington. The electric engines were a vast improvement over mules for hauling coal and far safer than gasoline-powered engines. Credit: Wikimedia.

In 2016, I interviewed Sanjay Kar Chowdury, a manager at the Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation. Chowdury explained that his company was founded in 1879 and that Kolkata was the second city in the British Empire, after London, to be electrified. He was particularly proud that CESC had drastically reduced the number of blackouts affecting residents of the sprawling city of 4.5 million people. When I asked him about the importance of coal to the Indian electric grid, he did not hesitate.

Coal, Chowdury said, “is a lifeline. It is a lifeline of all the thermal power stations. Without coal, you cannot survive...It’s not possible to keep the lights on without coal.”

Nothing has changed since I did that interview. (Chowdury was featured in our 2019 documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains The World, which is available for free on YouTube.)

Detail from our 2019 documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains The World. Credit: Tyson Culver.

Over the past decade, India’s coal use has surged by more than 40%. Last month, during a heat wave, India’s thermal power stations, nearly all of them coal-fired, provided 62% of the country’s juice. Furthermore, according to the latest figures from Global Energy Monitor, India (population 1.4 billion) is building more than 23 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity.

Alas, these facts don’t matter to the richest anti-energy NGOs in the US.

Last month, the Sierra Club (2024 revenue: $169 million) and Earthjustice (2025 revenue: $207 million) issued a press release about their lawfare campaign to shutter coal plants in Michigan and Indiana. The release quoted a “beyond coal campaign organizer” as saying that the Trump administration is “propping up the coal industry” while consumers are “stuck shouldering the costs.” It also quoted a Sierra Club attorney who said that the administration was trying to throw “archaic coal plants” a lifeline.

Those statements show, yet again, that the anti-industry industry’s campaigners know nothing about the realities of the global energy market. Far from being “archaic,” coal plants around the world, including ones in India, Japan, South Korea, and Europe, are running full tilt.

Why? The Iron Law of Electricity.

Five years ago, I coined the Iron Law of Electricity, which says, “People, businesses, and countries will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.” I have seen the Iron Law at work with my own eyes. I’ve watched as people steal electricity (in India), pay the “generator mafia” in Lebanon) and run their own small generators (in Puerto Rico and Louisiana) to ensure they have the electricity they need to refrigerate their food, cook dinner, and heat (or cool) their homes.

Among the many impacts that the Iran War has had on the global economy -- including price spikes for everything from diesel fuel to fertilizer -- is its effect on power generation. Due to the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, global LNG prices have soared, leading electricity generators to reduce their natural gas consumption and increase their coal burn. My friend, John Hanekamp, who writes the excellent International Coal & Energy Summary here on Substack, recently told me he estimates global coal use is up about 6% from a year ago due to the war in Iran and other factors.

Here’s a fresh look at what’s happening in the global coal market. It includes seven new charts, one of which shows coal’s total dominance of China’s energy sector, as well as some remarkable new numbers on coal investment from the International Energy Agency.