President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that directs Federal agencies to identify regions where coal-fired power infrastructure is available to support the needs of new artificial intelligence data centers.
The coal industry – which has been in steady decline in the United States for more than a decade – will be supporting the White House’s accelerated innovation in AI by powering new data centers slated for construction by the end of this year, according to one of Trump’s latest orders.
“We’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all,” Trump said while signing the AI-centered order on April 8, among other coal-bolster orders. He said that all coal plants that have been closed will be reopened if they are “modern enough,” and added that “brand new ones will be built.”
The order directs the secretaries of the Interior, Commerce, and Energy to identify where coal infrastructure is located that can be used to support AI data centers and evaluate the potential to expand that infrastructure to meet the data center’s power demands. The secretaries would then report back with their findings.
In January, Trump signed two orders to accelerate AI innovation and declared a national energy emergency to harness natural energy resources to address what his administration has called a “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” amid an “increasingly unreliable grid.”
According to the Department of Energy, U.S. data centers’ total electricity consumption is expected to rise 6 to 12 percent by 2028, compared to 2023. That projection caused lawmakers including Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, to call the increasing power demands “astounding” with “concerning implications.”
Republicans and Democrats have clashed over how to power AI data centers, with those on the right side of the aisle calling for reliance on natural resources while those on the left champion renewable energy as the least harmful option.
Experts have generally agreed that current energy infrastructure isn’t sufficient to meet electricity demands but have also been split on whether to turn to natural resources such as coal and nuclear energy sources, or renewable sources.
Most recently, the Trump administration announced it had identified 16 sites on land owned by the Energy Department that would support the construction of AI data centers with plans to build energy infrastructure to support those centers on the same land. The decision to use Federal land was made in part to fast-track permitting for new energy generation, according to the administration, which had noted its interest in nuclear energy but had not at the time named other sources.