For all the talk about saving coal, the precious Trump precidency can not be detected in the data. Since then it has only continue to fall (as per data from EIA)
Recently the UK closed it's last coal plant, and Europe in general has been reducing it's usage of coal closer and closer to zero. UK has a long history of using coal from the industrial age that is now comming to it's end (per UK govs data)
That leaves the elephant in the roam, isn't China using a shit ton of coal and still building new ones?
China
Locking at Chinas energy generation from fossile fuels from Our World in Data. It does look like it
But his hides & simplifies a number of things
Coal plants are slow to ramp up and down, due to their big thermal mass. This places it squirly in the energy generation group refered to as "baseload". Where you want to continuily generate as close to max as you can. As a rule of thumb, you don't build a new one unless you think you can get 90%+ utilisation rate
By 2022, the average utilization rate of coal plants in China has dropped to 53%
China is not an open market. It has heavy state controll. When most others have choosen natural gas as their prefered fuel to balance renewables, China has choosen coal. Most likely due to self reliance reasons (they got lots of coal, little gas)
This also means that they are building coal plants when no one else would
And I look at the utilization factor for coal plants last year and it was 48% or 49% and I go, I don’t think we can make money building and operating this coal plant anymore, so we’d better just cancel it.
Look again at the graph, from 2011 to 2023 coal power has increased by a paltry 13%. While at the same time using much more energy. Despite all the building coal as a percentage of total power is falling
Summary
Coal use is being phased out almost all across the globe. In the few places it isn't its been holding steady for a decade while total energy usage is increasing
It's not dead yet, and China will continue to burn for quite a bit longer, but it's getting closer every year. And no one, not forced to by a state, want's to build more coal power today