Coal-fired power plants are retreating from the market in at least two big ways. One is hard to miss: Many plants are closing. The other is more subtle: Remaining plants are running much less often than before. Newly released figures from the Energy Information Administration show that coal plants in the United States had a “capacity factor” of 47.5 percent in 2019, the first time it’s been below 50 percent in decades of available records. This means that the total electricity production from the country’s roughly 310 remaining coal plants was less than half of what it would have been, had every plant operated every hour at full capacity. The percentage is remarkably low considering that […]