Coal Is Losing the Battle for the U.S. Market — Badly

So much has changed since September. Just five months ago, coal and gas were neck and neck for their share of U.S. power generation. Now, coal generation has fallen so fast that some days even nuclear power sees more action.

Since the beginning of the year, coal-fired generation has fallen below nuclear generation three times — on Feb. 20, Feb. 28 and March 6 — as cheap natural gas prices entice power generators to switch away from coal, said Michael Lawn, gas and power market specialist at Bloomberg, citing Genscape data. Before that, coal generation had only fallen below nuclear once ever, according to EIA data going back to 2003 — for five days that began on Dec. 23, 2015.