If virtue signaling has a Trump-era corollary, we might call it vice signaling. That’s what President Donald Trump’s most recent package of subsidies for the coal industry looks like: it infuriates the environmentalists he despises and thereby delivers a little dopamine hit to the president’s base, while accomplishing nothing meaningful for the industry or the nation’s energy supply. 

On the other hand, the administration’s policy moves on energy are definitely hurting the clean technologies that Virginia needs to reach its zero-carbon electricity goals and lower rates for residents. 

Browbeating Republicans in Congress to terminate wind and solar tax credits caused many renewable energy projects to get canceled across the U.S., wiping out $16 billion of clean energy investments; other projects have been blocked or lost grant funding.

Unable to stop offshore wind by any other means, the administration has even resorted to paying developers to abandon leases, with payments totaling more than $2.5 billion.

This mischief is hurting American consumers, and nowhere is that clearer than in Virginia.  Our need for massively more power to feed the data center industry makes us especially vulnerable to the effects of Trump’s monkeying around with the energy markets. With less low-cost wind and solar available to buy, our utilities have to burn more high-cost coal. Our rates go up, and so does pollution. 

The irony is that even Virginia Republicans don’t champion coal anymore, having thrown it over for cheaper and cleaner-burning fracked gas. Four years ago, then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s energy plan touted what he called an all-of-the-above strategy that was mainly focused on fossil gas. About the only time the plan mentioned coal was to note that it had fallen to only 4% of Virginia’s electricity generation.  

Republicans here still rise to the defense of one coal plant, Dominion Energy’s Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center (VCHEC) in Wise County. But that’s in spite of the cost, not because of it.

Last time we looked, VCHEC was losing millions of dollars annually – money that comes out of customer pockets. Legislators defend it only because the jobs it provides and the local taxes it pays keep Wise County afloat. 

This importance to Southwest Virginia earned VCHEC special treatment in the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which aimed to slash both carbon and costs quickly by forcing the closure of Dominion’s other coal and oil-fired generation. Legally, VCHEC is allowed to stick around until 2045, though few people expected it would survive market realities that long.

In spite of its poor economics, however, coal use has surged in Virginia and nationwide as demand from data centers makes utilities scramble to produce every possible electron. If you don’t have enough cheap renewable energy, you have to use whatever you’ve got, never mind the cost. 

Five years ago, Dominion expected to run VCHEC only 15.5% of the time in 2024, less than 11% of the time in 2025, and only a little more than 6% by 2030. Instead, the plant is generating more this year than it has at any time this decade. 

The only other large-scale coal plant still operational in Virginia, the Clover coal plant co-owned by Dominion and Old Dominion Electric Cooperative, puts out well under half the electricity it did ten years ago, generating mainly during summer heatwaves and winter cold spells.  But it too runs more often now than it did in the first few years of this decade.  

Dominion also operates the Mount Storm coal plant in West Virginia. It serves Virginia customers, but its location outside Virginia means the VCEA didn’t require its closure.

Appalachian Power operates coal plants in West Virginia, too, producing power for its residents in that state as well as Southwest Virginia. 

The lousy economics of coal mean all these plants generate significantly less power than they used to – but, again, more than they did just three or four years ago, thanks to the demand pressure of data centers. (Well, that and a Trump-style insistence by West Virginia regulators that utilities run their coal plants most of the time, no matter how much it hurts consumers). 

A similar dynamic is playing out across the country. Coal use jumped in 2025 nationwide as data centers demanded more energy, adding to air pollution and killing more people.

The Trump administration is determined to make matters even worse. 

Since resuming office last year, Trump has ordered the Department of Defense to buy power from coal plants for its military installations. His Department of Energy has ordered units to keep operating at five coal plants that were about to close because they lose money. His Environmental Protection Agency is loosening pollution standards for coal plants to save them money. 

In February the Energy Department announced it would spend $175 million on six projects to extend the life of coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina and Kentucky. The federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority announced it would keep coal units open at two power plants that were previously slated for closure. 

Then, in June, the Energy Department announced another $500 million in coal spending, including $425 million for a bunch more plant upgrades and a $75 million subsidy for a coal export terminal. 

Most recently, the department issued plans to throw $350 million at four more coal projects, including restarting a closed plant in Maryland and subsidizing construction of two new plants, one at Mt. Storm. 

Some of this spending will keep old plants limping along; some of it smells of grift. One of the proposed new coal plants getting an $18 million contribution from federal taxpayers is the project of a MAGA activist with no energy industry experience. 

Indeed, the idea of propping up last century’s technology to build an inefficient industrial plant that won’t ever make money has a distinctly retro vibe, reminiscent of the Soviet Union in its heyday. The problem with Trump‘s vision is that since these money-losing plants couldn’t be completed before his term expires, no self-respecting capitalist will build them. 

Trump’s vice signaling is having its intended effect in one respect, though: environmentalists hate it. So, for that matter, do economists and grid experts. 

One grid expert I spoke with, Mike Jacobs, a senior manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, noted that “if the goal was to mine more coal and send more of it up a smokestack, it would make more sense to subsidize coal purchases directly.” Building a coal plant, he said, is “a vanity project.”

What Trump isn’t accomplishing for coal, however, Big Tech is. 

Data centers’ demand for power, coupled with Trump’s stifling of the renewable energy sector, keeps coal plants belching along and drives up electricity costs for everyone. That these companies have a long history of virtue signaling with sustainability promises they haven’t met is just its own kind of irony.

This article was originally published in the Virginia Mercury on June 24, 2026.