"The clean energy industry should enjoy this moment while it lasts. One of the main reasons coal-fired power plants produced so little in April was because some were down for routine, springtime maintenance. Coal is forecast to return to its perch as the second-biggest source of electricity -- after natural gas -- as those units return to service and demand peaks this summer."
What's your point then? The point of the article is that the renewable share of the energy production budget is growing (and coal isn't), and the notable data point is that "for the first time ever, renewables surpass coal". That's the way news works. It wants a fact to hang the trend on. And both the fact and the trend are correctly reported.
The fact that this is a local maximum doesn't say anything about the shape of the function on either side.
We don't need to speculate. We have the data on US coal use. The trend is aggressive and consistent in the downward direction.
Dec 4 2018: "EIA expects total U.S. coal consumption in 2018 to fall to 691 million short tons (MMst), a 4% decline from 2017 and the lowest level since 1979. U.S. coal consumption has been falling since its peak in 2007, and EIA forecasts that 2018 coal consumption will be 437 MMst (44%) lower than 2007 levels, mainly driven by declines in coal use in the electric power sector."
Simultaneously the US is bringing effectively zero new coal-based production online:
"In 2007, coal-fired capacity in the United States totaled 313 gigawatts (GW) across 1,470 generators. By the end of 2017, 529 of those generators, with a total capacity of 55 GW, had retired. ... Only one, relatively small, new coal-fired generator with a capacity of 17 megawatts is expected to come online by the end of 2019."
If, as implied, this maintenance is done on a regular yearly basis, and this is the first time that that's been enough to change coal's placement in the mix, it would still seem to indicate that the larger trend is starting to outweigh the fluctuations.
> But the trend is clear: Renewable energy will continue to eclipse coal in future months as more wind and solar farms are deployed, EIA’s forecasts show.
