5 Countries Where Coal Has Declined the Most

The biggest energy story in the world is the astonishing growth in solar power. According to the energy consultancy Ember, electricity generated by solar power has grown from less than 4 TWh in 2005 to 2,129 TWh in 2024, the most recent year in its dataset. That’s the equivalent of a constant 243 GW.
 
Based on the effort the Trump Administration is putting into hampering the solar power industry in the United States and supporting the coal power industry, one might easily believe that solar’s growth is counterbalanced by the decline in coal, but that’s not the story at the global level. In fact, worldwide electric generation from coal increased from 7,167 TWh in 2005 to 10,585 TWh in 2024.
 
However, that aggregate increase—3,418 TWh—is actually less than the increase in China alone, let alone the combined increase in China and India, which was 4,933 TWh. In fact, while coal power and its resultant carbon emissions has increased over the past 20 years, there are dozens of countries where coal power has declined.
 
Here’s a look at the five counties with the largest decline in electricity generation from coal power from 2005 to 2024.
 

5: Spain

Famous for being both sunny and windy, Spain is able to rely on renewables more readily than most counties its size. Consequently, Spain’s coal power sector is getting squeezed: Coal power dropped from 79 TWh in 2005 to just 2.6 TWh in 2024, a drop of 76.4 TWh, or the equivalent of 8.7 GW of continuous, 24/7 power. The transition to renewables hasn’t been without its hiccups, as some experts blamed an overreliance on renewables for the widespread blackout the country faced in April. Shortly before the power went out, more than 70 percent of the grid was powered by wind and solar.
 

4: Canada

Between 2005 and 2024, annual coal power electric generation in Canada dropped by 77 TWh. Canada doesn’t get a lot of solar power, but the country’s wind turbines contributed 45 TWh of electricity in 2024. Together with a large hydroelectric and nuclear sector, the addition of wind and gas power helped Canada remove many of its coal plants from the electric grid.
 

3: United Kingdom

The industrial revolution started in the United Kingdom and its large supply of coal was a contributing factor to that. There is so much coal in England that “bringing coal to Newcastle” became a way of describing an act that was entirely redundant. Fast forward to today, and coal’s importance to the U.K. has vanished. In September 2024, the last coal-fired power plant in England, at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, closed. The loss of 134.6 TWh in coal-powered electricity since 2005 was made up in part by adding more than 80 TWh in wind and some 30 TWh in biofuel power plants. But the U.K. also reduced its total electric generation by more than 100 TWh, which is another approach to ditching fossil fuels. 
 

2: Germany 

Coal has as long a history in Germany as it does in the United Kingdom, which makes it notable that the Germans reduced its coal consumption even more, though it didn’t zero it out the way the British did. But Germany did something harder: It shrank electricity generation from coal power by 184 TWh between 2005 and 2024, while simultaneously eliminating its large nuclear sector in reaction to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. Like the U.K., Germany has reduced its electric consumption, but it also added more than 170 TWh of wind- and solar-powered electric generation. Some experts believe the nuclear closures were a mistake: Had Germany kept its nuclear power plants, it might have been close to zeroing out both coal and gas power by now.
 

1: United States

It’s true: Since 2005, annual electricity generation from coal power plants has dropped by 1,360 TWh, or the equivalent of 155 GW of continuous, 24/7 power. Wind and solar power have played a part in supplanting coal. Solar power generated 303 TWh in 2024, and wind power generated 453 TWh. But the biggest factor was the sharp increase in gas-fueled power plants, which generated more than 1,800 TWh in 2024, an increase of about 1,100 TWh from the level of 20 years ago. The Trump Administration has its work cut out for itself if it wants to prop up the coal industry since, if coal power follows its current rate of decline, it will completely disappear in about 10 years. 

Jeffrey Winters is editor in chief of Mechanical Engineering magazine.