The Department of Energy (DOE) has released a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) providing up to $100 million in federal backing for projects focused on restoring and modernizing the nation’s existing coal plant fleet.
The announcement follows DOE’s Sept. 29 declaration of a $625 million broader investment across multiple coal-related initiatives, including plant recommissioning, rural electrification projects, and related infrastructure support. The October NOFO represents a subset of that funding stream, with specific technical deliverables and performance milestones tied to demonstration-scale projects.
Louis-Vincent Gave last month presented a paper analyzing the trade-offs of energy-policy decisions, touching on the US, China and coal stocks.
If access to cheap electricity becomes the main constraint to the AI rollout, then Western policymakers will have several options:
Give up the AI race to China.
Raise electricity prices.
To avoid 2, move AI centers to places with cheap energy such as the Middle East. This raises stability issues.
Reduce domestic energy prices. Regime change in Venezuela is risky. Re-embrace coal, a cheap source of electricity. Coal is relatively easy to mine, transport and burn, and coal plants can be built quickly.
The article fails to provide any justification for claiming that coal is the “cheapest source of electricity” in the USA. The article ignores renewables totally, and it ignores the capital cost and O&M for a for all the electrical generation types. This is a worthless article from an investment company researcher who does not know the electrical generation industry.
The price of coal is not at all a good backup for Federal government coal investments.
Renewables are not intermittent when paired with batteries. The AI companies know this and they are investing in solar + batteries and wind + batteries because they know these are the cheapest and fastest types of power generation. AI companies are also investing in renewables with gas turbine (CCGT) and batteries as backup. You may be concerned about intermittent, but you have not produced and references the AI companies can not live with solar + backup or wind + backup.
Not really. They provide, as I wrote, “background for the Federal backing of coal”. You may disagree, but it is good to know what is going on (such as AI conferences in Saudi Arabia).