President Trump’s “Achieving American Energy Dominance” order directs coal to be used to “power new AI data” and classify the fuel source as a strategically “critical material”.
The order also instructs federal agencies to rescind any policies that “seek to transition the nation away from coal production” as Trump looks to honour the GOP manifesto pledge to return to fossil fuels.
But Trump looked to tout coal-fired electricity generation as being “cleaner than ever”.
“I call it beautiful clean coal,” the President said. “I tell my people: ‘Never use the word coal unless you put beautiful clean before it.’ “We are ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful clean coal once and for all… we’re going to put the miners back to work.”
Trump’s executive order states that coal will be “critical” to meeting the rising electricity demand for AI data centres.
“We need to do the AI, all of this new technology that’s coming online. We need more than double the electricity that we currently have,” the President said. “You take all of the electricity in the country right now for hours, for buildings, for everything. We need to more than double it to be number one.
“We’re now way ahead of everybody at AI. China is in second place but way behind, and they’re going to be producing a lot of energy and a lot of electricity for this. And so are we.”
Day one of his return to office, President Trump declared a ‘National Energy Emergency’, claiming that policies from the prior administration were the cause of the nation’s high energy prices.
Trump, a known climate sceptic, did reference options beyond coal in his order, however, saying: “We will also embrace nuclear, clean coal, hydropower, which is fantastic, and every other form of affordable energy to get it done.”
Chris Wright, the US Secretary of Energy, said during his confirmation hearing back in January that his top priority would be expanding the nation’s nuclear power production.
Last week, the Department of Energy picked out 16 possible federal sites that could house new energy production facilities or AI data centres — a project that comes from one of former President Biden's final executive orders, which directed federal agencies to identify suitable government land for new AI data centres.
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