Foundation News

With the recent announcement that the Brayton Point Power Station in Massachusetts would retire by 2017, the Sierra Club and a growing coalition of local, regional, and national allies reached a significant milestone in the ongoing campaign to move the country beyond coal by 2030. In the past three years, 150 coal-fired power plants have been retired or have announced a retirement date.

According to the Clean Air Task Force, retiring these 150 coal plants will help to save 4,000 lives, prevent 6,200 heart attacks, and prevent 66,300 asthma attacks every year. Retiring these plants will avoid $1.9 billion in health costs.

“The closure of the Brayton Point Power Station is a powerful example of how local action can have a global impact," said Michael R. Bloomberg, philanthropist and Mayor of New York City. "Over the last three years, action by individual communities - in partnership with the Sierra Club and Bloomberg Philanthropies - has led to the closure of 150 coal plants, one at a time. We will continue to support those who are on the ground working to close the nation's dirty coal plants, which kill 13,000 Americans every year and threaten the future of our planet."

The coal industry is facing multiple threats, including rising coal costs, falling clean energy prices, a motivated grassroots coalition of organizers working to move the nation off coal, and the growing national demand to tackle climate-disrupting carbon pollution from coal plants, which was the centerpiece of the climate strategy President Obama announced in June. With strong carbon pollution standards in place, these coal plants must either clean up their pollution through modern pollution controls, or transition away from burning dirty coal.

Indeed, as utilities and energy companies realize that coal is an increasingly bad investment, they are transitioning their resources to cleaner, renewable sources of energy like wind and solar. Today, the United States has more than 60,000 megawatts of installed wind capacity, enough to power the equivalent of 15 million American homes.

What’s more, this year the U.S. joined three other countries with more than 10,000 megawatts of installed solar capacity.  Solar is the fastest growing energy option in the US, and in states like New Jersey, North Carolina, California, and Illinois, solar power is both creating local jobs and providing clean, affordable electricity. This growth in clean energy has helped to create more jobs across the country. Clean energy industries now employ nearly 200,000 Americans.

The Sierra Club Foundation, a major funder of the Beyond Coal Campaign, is ramping up clean energy funding so we are not simply replacing one fossil fuel with another. Over the next four years, we aim to help bring 100,000 megawatts of clean energy online, making progress towards our goal of transitioning to a clean, green, renewable energy economy.