Research · The Register
Datacenter boom keeps dirty coal plants alive in the US
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Datacenter growth in the US is helping keep aging fossil-fuel plants online longer, slowing the shift to a cleaner grid and worsening air pollution, according to new research from a group of environmental nonprofits.
Key facts
- As of December 2025, 13.2 GW of gas generator capacity is scheduled to retire by 2030, while 41.8 GW of gas plants are set to be added to the grid
- The groups
- US PIRG Education Fund, Environment America Research & Policy Center, and Frontier Group
- published two research papers outlining their findings
- It claims that if coal retirement had continued at the rate seen during 2022, the whole lot would have been shut down by 2040
- Data in the report shows that roughly 40 percent of the coal retirements or fuel switches scheduled to happen by the end of 2025 had not taken place
Summary
The reports, published to coincide with Earth Day, point to a sharp slowdown in coal-plant retirements and detail the toxic pollutants still emitted by older coal-fired generators that remain in service. The groups - US PIRG Education Fund, Environment America Research & Policy Center, and Frontier Group - published two research papers outlining their findings. While renewables have grown quickly across the US over the past decade, the recent datacenter construction boom, driven largely by AI and other power-hungry computing workloads, has also pushed electricity demand sharply upward after years of relatively flat growth. This growth in energy requirements is forcing utilities to keep some fossil-fuel plants online longer instead of retiring them.