Coal was supposed to be fading quietly into the background. Instead it is still doing the heavy lifting, and 2025 proved it again.
Global coal demand hit about 8.85 billion tonnes this year, the highest level on record. Not because anyone forgot about renewables, but because electricity demand keeps growing faster than grids can adapt.
The IEA’s own numbers show coal has basically plateaued, not collapsed, and that plateau is enormous. China alone burns more coal than the rest of the world combined, sitting at roughly 5 billion tonnes a year.
Even with record wind and solar installs, coal remains the system’s shock absorber when weather turns, demand spikes, or reliability matters more than optics
The US story is even more telling, after 15 years of steady decline, coal demand jumped around 8% in 2025. Higher gas prices, slower plant retirements and quiet policy support brought coal back into the dispatch stack.
Retirements that were meant to happen just didn't. Utilities extended plant lives. Coal plants ran harder when wind underperformed and gas got expensive.
Coal is no longer baseload king in most places, but it is becoming the backbone of system reliability. In China it is shifting into a flexibility role. In India it is still growing, driven by steel, cement and coal-to-chemicals. In Southeast Asia it is expanding alongside industrialisation. Even in Europe, wind droughts and gas volatility forced coal to hang around longer than planned.
The idea that coal just disappears because targets say so keeps colliding with reality.
The uncomfortable truth is this, until storage, transmission and firm low-carbon power scale fast enough, coal stays in the mix. Not because it is loved, but because it works at scale.
Every time analysts call peak coal, weather, geopolitics or demand growth make them look early. Again.
