What Happens To Fossil Fuels When US Electricity Demand Craters?

Donald Trump could end up being a great president for the climate, accidentally.

CleanTechnica reader BigWu recently brought an interesting thought experiment to my mind. He brought up the ramifications for fossil fuel power sources if the economy crashes and electricity demand drops more or less commensurately.

"We’re about to see US electricity demand crater due to the malignant and willful ignorance of our 'leaders' tanking the US economy," he postulated. "The upside is that this nearly guarantees a collapse in fossil fueled generation as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear can easily out-bid fossil generators."

It's a great point, but let's just explain why. With electricity demand growing, of course, we simply rely on built power plants and gradually add to them — with 92.5% of those new ones coming from renewables, mostly solar power, now. That will transition the grid to clean, renewable energy over time, but you sort of have to wait for old, polluting, fossil fueled power plants to age out and retire.

However, if electricity demand drops, then some existing power plants obviously have to be shot off, or their electricity not used. To get down to the basics, with power plants, you have fixed costs (which includes the cost to build the power plant) and marginal costs (which Investopedia defines as "the costs associated with producing an additional unit of output"). What are the marginal costs for solar and wind power plants? Almost nothing. There's no fuel cost, since sunshine and the wind are free. What are the costs for a coal or gas power plant? Considerable, since those fuels are not free.

So, if a power plant needs to be shut down because there just isn't as much demand as before, it's almost definitely going to be a fossil fuel power plant, and it definitely should not be a solar or wind power plant.

As such, even better than having renewable energy power plants provide 100% of new capacity each year is having electricity demand shrink, which immediately leads to the fossil fuel power fleet shrinking.

Of course, there are "good" and "bad" ways to achieve declining electricity demand. Greater energy efficiency can bring down electricity demand, but the cause BigWu is referencing is a strong economic downturn from Donald Trump and his corrupt, brainless crew screwing up the US economy via extreme tariffs, DOGE cuts, extremist immigration policies, and overall mismanagement of the federal government. No one really wants their economic of financial situation to get worse, and that's what would happen for most of us if the US economy crashed, but the silver lining of that situation could be accelerated retirement of fossil fuel power plants. Moreover, it would likely be some of the oldest, most polluting, most inefficient power plants that would be shut down first.

No one would accuse Donald Trump of being a pro-environment, pro-climate, pro-human health president, but if he truly sent the US into an economic collapse — the likes of which we've never seen — he could end up being one of the presidents most helpful for slowing global heating and climate catastrophe. Who knows? We shall see.