Los Angeles says so long to coal

Los Angeles has officially broken up with coal.

City officials on Thursday announced that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has stopped receiving coal-powered electricity from its last remaining coal source, the Intermountain generating station in Utah.

“This is a defining moment for the City of Los Angeles,” Mayor Karen Bass said at a news conference. “L.A.’s coal divestment is not just about discontinuing the use of coal to power our city — it’s about building a clean energy economy that benefits every Angeleno. This milestone will further accelerate our transition to 100% clean energy by 2035.”

Electricity generation is one of biggest causes of climate change and burning coal is the most destructive way to generate power from a climate and environmental perspective. The city has committed to achieving carbon-free energy in the next decade through investments in cleaner technologies such as solar, wind, battery energy storage and hydrogen.

California has been gradually moving away from coal, which supplied just 2.2% of the state’s electricity in 2024, according to the California Energy Commission. Nearly all of that was from the Intermountain Power Project, which provided 11% of L.A.’s energy last year. The DWP divested from another large coal source, the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona, in 2016.

“This transition has been years in the making,” DWP chief executive Janisse Quiñones said in a statement. “It reflects the hard work of our employees, the support of our customers, and the leadership of our elected officials. Together, we are building a cleaner, more resilient energy future for Los Angeles.”

More than 60% of the city’s energy supply is now coming from renewable sources, Quiñones said, including the newly completed Eland solar-plus-storage center in Kern County, which began supplying L.A. and Glendale in August. The facility is one of the largest solar-plus-battery power plants in the nation.

It’s a stark change from 20 years ago, when the city’s energy composition was about 3% renewables and more than 50% coal, Bass said.

However, L.A. is not completely free of fossil fuels. The city will still draw from new natural gas-fired units at Intermountain. They can run on a fuel blend of natural gas and up to 30% green hydrogen, with plans to eventually transition to 100% green hydrogen in the future. (City officials said green hydrogen is expected to be added to the fuel mix next year.)

The board of the DWP also recently approved an $800-million plan to convert two units of its Scattergood Generating Station in Playa del Rey to run on a mixture of natural gas and green hydrogen, with a similar goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.

Some energy and environmental groups were critical of that plan, which they said prolongs the life of fossil fuel infrastructure at a time when the city should focus squarely on proven clean technologies like solar, wind and battery energy storage.

Still, many celebrated the end of coal power in the nation’s second-largest city as a major step forward — particularly at a moment when the federal government is working against clean energy and promoting coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

“It is a remarkable, remarkable day,” said Evan Gillespie, partner at the decarbonization nonprofit Industrious Labs, during the news conference. He noted that when he first moved to L.A. nearly 20 years ago, the charge to get the nation’s largest public utility off of coal was seen as audacious and even laughable.

“If every utility, if every city, had the courage and the leadership that this city has had, today the world would be a very different place,” he said. “I know that the model that we’ve built here is going to help the rest of this country and the rest of the world follow in L.A.’s footsteps over the next 20 years.”