Humanity shuts down its last coal-fired power plant

Story: 2040 C.E. ???  |  Last updated: January 16, 2026

Note: This is an imagined future story, written as if a projected milestone has occurred. It is based on current trends and evidence, not confirmed events.

The last coal-fired power plant on Earth went offline on a Tuesday morning in 2040 C.E. — a 74-year-old facility in Shanxi Province, China, that had been running at reduced capacity for nearly a decade. With its shutdown, humanity ended a roughly 300-year relationship with coal-fired electricity, a source that once generated more than a third of all power on the planet and remains the single largest contributor to historical carbon emissions in the atmosphere today.

Key projections

• Coal phase-out: Global coal power capacity peaked at approximately 2,100 gigawatts around 2022 C.E. and fell by more than 95% over the following 18 years, driven by collapsing costs for solar and wind energy.
• Renewable energy: By 2040 C.E., renewables supply an estimated 91% of global electricity, with solar alone accounting for more than 40% — a share that was under 4% just two decades earlier.
• Energy transition: The final coal retirements were concentrated in China, India, and Southeast Asia, regions that held the majority of operating capacity as recently as 2030 C.E. and where just transition programs proved most critical.

How the world got here

The coal phase-out did not happen through a single policy or a single agreement. It happened through accumulation — of cheaper alternatives, of climate commitments, of local air quality crises that made coal’s costs impossible to ignore.

In the early 2020s C.E., the International Energy Agency documented that coal demand had plateaued and that new solar and wind capacity was being added faster than any energy source in history. Retirements accelerated through the late 2020s as battery storage closed the intermittency gap that had kept older coal plants nominally “necessary” for grid reliability.

The European Union completed its coal exit in 2031 C.E. The United States followed in 2034 C.E., with the last American coal plant — a facility in West Virginia that had survived through political protection more than economic logic — closing after its operator declined to pursue a seventh life extension. India’s exit, completed in 2038 C.E., was the most consequential and the most complicated.

The role of just transition programs

The communities that mined and burned coal for generations did not benefit automatically from the energy transition. That has been the defining social challenge of this era.

International just transition funds, seeded by the Glasgow Climate Pact commitments of 2021 C.E. and expanded significantly through the 2030s C.E., directed more than $400 billion toward coal-dependent regions. World Bank programs helped retrain hundreds of thousands of workers across Poland, South Africa, the Philippines, and Indonesia — countries where coal had been both a livelihood and a cultural identity in mining communities for multiple generations.

Indigenous communities in coal regions, whose lands had often borne disproportionate environmental burdens from mining and combustion, played an increasingly central role in transition planning through the 2030s C.E. — a shift from earlier phases of the energy transition, when those communities were frequently sidelined.

Still, the transition was uneven. Some communities in the Appalachian region of the U.S., parts of inner Mongolia, and the Mpumalanga province of South Africa have struggled to attract replacement industries at the pace promised. Economic recovery has lagged the timeline of plant closures in these areas, and that gap remains a live policy failure, not a resolved one.

What the air and climate now look like

The health gains have been immediate and measurable. The World Health Organization estimates that the elimination of coal combustion alone will prevent roughly 800,000 premature deaths per year globally — deaths that had been occurring annually from particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides in air around coal plant clusters.

For the climate, the shutdown matters but arrives later than scientists had hoped. The carbon already in the atmosphere from two centuries of coal burning will continue driving warming for decades. The 2040 C.E. milestone does not end the climate crisis — it ends one of its primary ongoing causes.

Global average temperatures are currently tracking toward approximately 1.7 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. That is above the 1.5-degree threshold that scientists warned against, but meaningfully below the 2.5 to 3-degree trajectories that were plausible under high-emission scenarios as recently as 2020 C.E.

A door closes, work continues

The closure of the Shanxi plant drew muted ceremony — a brief acknowledgment from China’s National Energy Administration, a statement from the UN Secretary-General, and a wave of social media posts that trended for less than a day before the world moved on to other problems.

That underreaction is perhaps appropriate. Ending coal-fired power is not the end of decarbonization. Cement, steel, shipping, aviation, and agriculture still account for roughly a third of global emissions. Methane reduction efforts remain underfunded. Carbon dioxide removal at scale is still more promise than practice.

What the shutdown of the last coal plant represents is proof of concept — that an energy system the world built over three centuries can be rebuilt in a fraction of that time when economics, policy, and necessity align. You can read more about the renewable energy milestones that made this possible in the story of renewables reaching 49% of global power capacity, a turning point from just a few years earlier on this timeline.

The human costs of that speed — in displaced workers, in communities left behind, in the gap between announcement and delivery — are part of this story too. So is the fact that the communities most harmed by coal’s pollution were rarely the communities most consulted about its expansion. The International Renewable Energy Agency continues to track whether the benefits of the clean energy era are reaching those who needed it most from the coal era’s end. That accounting is ongoing.

The last coal plant is dark. The work is not done.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Carbon Brief — Mapped: The world’s coal power plants

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
• U.K. cancer death rates down to their lowest level on record
• The Good News for Humankind archive on energy

About this article

• 🤖 This article is AI-generated, based on a framework created by Peter Schulte.
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