Let’s say it plainly: The United States needs its fleet of coal-fired power plants.

Consider, for starters, the rising demands for electricity driven by the expansion of data centers, electrification, and industrial growth. A year ago, public utilities and grid operators nearly doubled their forecasts of the additional electricity needed to power the U.S. economy over the next five years. That unanticipated increase threatens to overwhelm the nation’s already strained power supplies.

The elephant in the room is the remarkable growth of artificial intelligence and the data centers needed to support it. The newest and largest data centers, such as the Quantum Loophole project in Frederick County, Maryland; the Citadel in Reno, Nevada; the Bumblehive project south of Salt Lake City; and the Microsoft Data Center in West Des Moines, Iowa, are so massive that their power demands are equivalent to those of a city the size of Seattle. Dozens of such facilities are under construction or on the drawing board.

Despite the rapidly increasing demand for power, many regions of the country are losing existing power-generating capacity faster than it can be replaced. The troubling situation can be attributed to state-level energy mandates and a barrage of Environmental Protection Agency regulations issued during the Biden administration to force the decommissioning of coal-fired power plants and make it nearly impossible to construct new natural gas plants to take their place.

The Biden administration miscalculated colossally, believing it could offset its regulatory blitzkrieg with a massive, subsidy-driven expansion of wind and solar power, along with the transmission infrastructure needed to move such “renewable” energy around the country. What we got instead were renewable energy mandates and only a fraction of the promised new transmission capacity. In short, an electricity crisis.

Just how poorly has President Joe Biden’s green dream played out?

Consider high-voltage transmission, which renewable energy proponents claim is the key to unlocking a wind- and solar-powered future. Nationally, we’re supposed to build thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines yearly to move solar and wind power from where it’s produced, mostly offshore and on wind and solar “farms” in the middle of nowhere, to urban and industrial centers where it’s needed. In 2023, just 55 miles of new high-voltage lines were completed, and that number improved only slightly last year.

Building and connecting new renewable projects to regional grids is not progressing any faster. The situation facing the Midcontinent System Operator, which runs the grid for much of the Midwest, illustrates that point. Dealing with numerous financial, supply chain, and permitting challenges, renewable projects that were expected to come online simply are not doing so. In February 2024, the MISO warned that if its member utilities do not postpone plans to retire coal power plants or expedite the addition of more generation resources, a possible 2.7-gigawatt shortfall in the 2025 power supply could balloon to 14 gigawatts by 2029, enough to power 10 million homes.

The MISO isn’t the only grid operator that sees a troubling imbalance between the power we need and what will be available. The North American Electricity Regulatory Corporation, which oversees the nation’s power supply, already is warning of possible blackouts affecting most of the country within the next decade. Many regions could face them even sooner.

Objectively, avoiding an energy Armageddon shouldn’t be hard. But meeting the growing electricity demand requires using every tool at our disposal.

On Day One in office, the Trump administration should put the wheels in motion to reverse Biden’s renewable energy mandates and return sanity to the nation’s energy policy. We need to build more coal, gas, and nuclear baseload power plants to meet soaring demand, and we should also work to ensure that today’s existing plants stay online as long as needed.

The nation’s fleet of coal-fueled power plants is a vital asset that can help maintain grid reliability, address rising power demands, and guide us toward our energy future. Protecting it should be a top priority for the new administration.