When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, South America had eighteen coal-fired plants on the drawing board, reflecting global uncertainty about the role coal would play in powering emerging economies. Today, that uncertainty has vanished. Coal, once perceived as a staple of industrialization and economic stability, has essentially vanished from the continent’s energy future.
According to a report by Forum Energii, an energy think tank, electricity produced from coal in April 2025 amounted to 6.5 terawatt-hours (TWh), accounting for 49.4% of the total energy mix. This represents an 18.9% decrease from March and a 9.6% drop compared to the same month in 2024. Forum Energii described recent changes in the electricity mix as “unprecedented”, noting that the use of coal had fallen by 29.9 percentage points between April 2015 and April 2025.
The closure of a coal power plant in Finland today brings the country to the brink of a full coal phase-out – four years ahead of schedule. Power utility company Helen officially decommissioned its Salmisaari plant in Helsinki on 1 April, dropping coal to a less than 1% share of the country’s energy mix. Since 2020, coal generation has dropped by 73% from 2.44 terawatt hours to 0.67. Over the same span, wind power has more than doubled since 2020 to supply a quarter of the country’s energy.
New York state will fine fossil fuel companies a total of $75 billion over the next 25 years to pay for damage caused to the climate under a bill Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law at the end of 2024.
New York state will fine fossil fuel companies $75 billion over the next 25 years to pay for damage caused to the climate. The new law is intended to shift some of the recovery and adaptation costs of climate change from individual taxpayers to oil, gas, and coal companies. The money raised will be spent on mitigating the impacts of climate change, including adapting roads, transit, water and sewage systems, buildings and other infrastructure. Fossil fuel companies will be fined based on the amount of greenhouse gases they emitted between 2000 and 2018.
Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto has announced his country will seek to phase out all coal-fired and fossil fuel power plants by 2040, pairing the goal with a target to build over 75 GW of renewable energy capacity over the same period. This brings forward Indonesia’s goal of retiring coal-fired power plants from 2056 to 2040. As the world’s fifth-largest operator of coal-fired power capacity at 52.3 GW, Indonesia’s promise to transition completely away from coal could serve as a pivotal step towards global decarbonization if implemented as planned.
The U.K. was home to the world’s first coal-fired power station, opened in London in 1882. Now, it is the world’s first major economy to stop using coal to generate electricity, after closing the lone remaining coal-fired plant in the country, a station known as Ratcliffe, near the city of Nottingham.
The share of coal has remained stubbornly high over the past decade, and still remains at more than 56% over the last 12 months, though down from its peaks of nearly 90% in the early 2000s. But over the past week, in the midst of strong winds across the south of Australia and the continuing growth of rooftop solar, the average share of coal generation in serving native demand on the main grid fell to 49.9%, according to industry observer Geoff Eldridge, of GPE NEMLog.
Capital Power’s Genesee 2 facility — the last dedicated coal plant in the Canadian province — has officially gone offline. According to the latest forecast from the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), it’s not expected to come back online ever. As recently as 2001, coal accounted for as much as 80% of the electricity on the province’s grid.
India is rapidly emerging as a renewable energy powerhouse on the world stage with a surge in both capacity addition and tendering to add more plants, according to new research. Renewable energy accounted for 71.5% of the record 13,669 MW power generation capacity added by India in the first quarter of 2024, while coal’s share of total power capacity dropped below 50% for the first time since the 1960s.
Energy ministers from the G7 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union — agreed at a meeting in Turin, Italy, to close all coal-fired generating stations in their countries by 2035 if not sooner. Putting an end date on coal — the most polluting of all fossil fuels — has been highly controversial at international climate talks. Until this point, Japan, which derived 32% of its electricity from coal in 2023 according to the climate advocate Ember, has blocked progress on the issue at past G7 meetings.
