As America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, our country is spending the year reflecting on the people, industries and innovations that built our nation. The American coal industry certainly deserves its due.
For more than two centuries, coal and American miners have powered nearly every chapter of American progress. Since the early 1800s, coal has fueled the railroads that united a continent, and fired the furnaces and helped produce the steel for bridges, skyscrapers and factories.
Coal was also central to the birth of modern electricity. Long before Americans became accustomed to power at the flick of a switch, coal was helping transform the idea of electricity into a public utility. In September 1879, a small coal-fired generating station operated by the California Electric Light Company was already supplying electricity to multiple customers from a central plant in San Francisco. This was three years before Thomas Edison’s famous Pearl Street Station became the model for the modern electric utility.
By the middle of the twentieth century, coal produced more than half of America’s electricity and would continue to do so for decades, providing the reliable and affordable power that helped make the United States the world’s largest economy. Coal – and the countless men and women and coal communities that produced it – didn’t simply support American growth. It made growth possible.
As America enters its next 250 years, the question is not whether our energy system will evolve. It certainly will. The question is whether we will carry forward the qualities that have always underpinned economic growth: reliability, affordability and abundance.
America’s Next Energy Challenge
Today, as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, we face another pivotal moment. For the first time in a generation, electricity demand is rising rapidly. Artificial intelligence, data centers, advanced manufacturing, semiconductor production and industrial reshoring are driving the fastest sustained growth in electricity demand in decades. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation now projects significant load growth across much of the country while warning that maintaining reliability will become increasingly challenging.
History offers an important lesson in this moment that we ignore at our own peril. Every major period of American economic expansion has depended on abundant, reliable and affordable energy. That was true when steam engines sent the first trains down the B&O rail line and throughout the 20th century when American factories produced more goods than any other country in the world, creating the industrial might that led us to victories in two World Wars. And it remains true today as America competes to lead the 21st century and win the race to pioneer and deploy the technologies and industries of tomorrow.
Meeting these challenges will require an honest assessment of our energy needs, not wishful thinking. And coal will once again be an essential part of the solution. So too will the more than 300,000 Americans that make up the coal mining industry.
Coal remains the nation’s largest source of fuel-secure electricity and coal exports are an economic engine for countless communities. U.S. coal goes to more than 70 nations helping meet rising energy demand, lift millions out of energy poverty and produce the steel and cement irreplaceable to the world’s infrastructure needs. As the conflict with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrated, energy security underpinned by secure, reliable energy supplies are as important today as they have ever been. U.S. coal – for our energy needs and those of our trade partners – provides the security of supply the world can count on.
America’s next 250 years won’t look like its first 250.The technologies will change. The industries will evolve. But one truth has remained constant throughout our history: great nations require abundant, secure energy.
As we celebrate the people, resources and innovations that built the United States, we should give pause to appreciate America’s vast coal resources and her remarkable coal communities that played such a critical role in making those achievements possible