Coal power in the United States
 Coal mining in U.S., natural gas prices
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Coal power in the United States accounted for 39% of the country's electricity production at utility-scale facilities in 2014, 33% in 2015, and 30.4% in 2016 Coal supplied 16.5 quadrillion BTUs of primary energy to electric power plants in 2013, which made up nearly 92% of coal's contribution to energy supply. Utilities buy more than 90 percent of the coal consumed in the United States.
Coal has been used to generate electricity in the United States since an Edison plant was built in New York City in 1882. The first alternating current power station was opened by General Electric in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania in 1902, servicing the Webster Coal and Coke Company. By the mid-twentieth century, coal had become the leading fuel for generating electricity in the US. The long, steady rise of coal-fired generation of electricity shifted to a decline after 2007. The decline has been linked to the increased availability of natural gas, decreased consumption,renewable power, and more stringent environmental regulations. The Environmental Protection Administration has advanced restrictions on coal plants to counteract mercury pollution, smog, and global warming.
The average share of electricity generated from coal in the US has dropped from 52.8% in 1997 to 45.0% in 2009. In 2009, there were 1436 coal-powered units at the electrical utilities across the US, with a total nominal capacity of 338.732 GW (compared to 1024 units at nominal 278 GW in 2000). The actual average generated power from coal in 2006 was 227.1 GW (1.991 trillion kilowatt-hours per year), the highest in the world and still slightly ahead of China (1.95 trillion kilowatt-hours per year) at that time. In 2000, the US average production of electricity from coal was 224.3 GW (1.966 trillion kilowatt-hours for the year). In 2006, US electrical generation consumed 1,026,636,000 short tons (931,349,000 metric tons) or 92.3% of the coal mined in the US.
Due to emergence of shale gas, coal consumption declined from 2009. In the first quarter of 2012, the use of coal for electricity generation declined substantially more, 21% from 2011 levels. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 27 gigawatts of capacity from coal-fired generators is to be retired from 175 coal-fired power plants between 2012 and 2016. Natural gas showed a corresponding increase, increasing by a third over 2011. Coal's share of electricity generation dropped to just over 36%. Coal use continues to decline rapidly through November 2015 with its share around 33.6%.
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