12/06/2026
For the first time in American history, the sun has out-produced coal! It happened seven days after Donald Trump wrote the coal industry a $700 million check.
The June 4th ceremony had everything. Cabinet secretaries lined up behind the Resolute Desk. A plan to prop up 13 dying coal plants, restart a shuttered one in Maryland, and build the first new American coal plants since 2013.
To pay for it, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law written to mobilize factories against the Soviet Union.
"Coal's a great business," Trump told the room. "In terms of power, there's really nothing like it."
He's right. There's really nothing like it. Nothing else loses to sunlight.
On Wednesday, the energy think tank Ember released the May electricity data. Solar generated 12.8 percent of America's power. Coal generated 12.2 percent. For the first time in the history of the United States, the sun out-produced coal.
It gets worse for the coal barons.
April was coal's lowest month ever recorded. May was its fourth lowest. Solar is now the third largest power source in the country, behind only gas and nuclear, and it has been the number one source of new power for five years running.
Here's the mechanism nobody at that Oval Office event wanted to say: coal lost because it can't do math.
Lazard, the Wall Street investment bank, prices new coal power at roughly double the cost of utility-scale solar per megawatt-hour. That's why solar and batteries made up 91 percent of all new generating capacity built in the first quarter of this year. Not because of mandates. Because investors can read a spreadsheet.
Martin Pochtaruk, who runs the solar manufacturer Heliene, put it plainly: Trump can declare coal is back all he wants. Money goes where the returns are, and the returns are in solar.
So the scoreboard reads like this. Trump canceled $7 billion in funding for affordable solar in working class communities. He killed projects, strangled permits, and wrote a $700 million check to coal billionaires with your money. And the sun beat his fuel of choice anyway.
Asked to respond, the White House sent a statement boasting that Trump has "saved the American coal industry." That statement went out the same week coal lost to the sun for the first time in American history.
The sun, for its part, did not request a bailout.
