AUSTIN — Although EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said this week that with the planned roll back of the 2015 Clean Power Plan, “the war on coal is over,” casualties continue. 

And word that yet another coal-burning Texas power plant will soon retire from service is a reminder that losses will keep mounting.

“It doesn’t mean that the Texas coal plants are going to be saved,” said Chrissy Mann, senior campaign representative for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, responding to Pruitt’s remarks. “Coal is not going to be around forever. It’s not even going to be around long.”

Monticello will be the nation’s 259th coal plant to retire or announce retirement since 2010, “meaning the U.S. is just three plants away from retiring or announcing to retire, half of the coal plants that were operating just seven years ago,” according to a Sierra Club statement.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s staff reported in August that, “Coal energy production peaked in 2007 and has been declining since. 

“No new coal plants have been built for domestic utility electricity production since 2014 because new coal plants are more expensive to build and operate than natural gas-fired plants.”

In a Utility Dive blog post, energy consultant Alison Silverstein said that “most of the plants that have retired were old, smaller, inefficient, and high-cost,” lacking “the flexibility and cost profiles to compete in a fast-moving grid.

“Renewable generation was an exacerbating factor, but in most cases not a causal factor behind power plant retirements … In many cases, the plants that retired were already less economically competitive and were being dispatched … before … they would have to make new regulatory compliance investments.”

Company officials said that operating the Monticello plant in the Titus County city of Mount Pleasant, about 120 miles northeast of Dallas, no longer made economic sense.

The plant’s three units began operating during the 1970s.

Curt Morgan, president and CEO of Vistra Energy, which through its Luminant subsidiary owns the plant, said in a statement that “the market’s unprecedented low power price environment has profoundly impacted its operating revenues and no longer supports continued investment.” 

The Monticello plant, which is the subject of a federal clean air act lawsuit and is considered “one of the largest and dirtiest coal plants remaining anywhere in the United States,” according to a Sierra Club statement, is slated to close in January, Luminant announced last week.

With the Monticello plant’s closing, Texas will have 19 remaining coal-fired plants, according to a list Mann provided.

The Deely plant, owned by San Antonio’s CPS Energy, is slated to retire in 2018.

The coal-fired Gibbons Creek Steam Station near Carlos, 20 miles southeast of Bryan, recently reported that, “due to competition from lower-cost renewables and gas, the plant would only run during the hot summer months,” according to sourcewatch.org. “Texas Municipal Power Agency has been looking to sell the coal plant for nearly a year.

“The deadline to sell is September 2018, at which point the TMPA board will have to decide whether to shut down operations at Gibbons Creek completely.”

In addition to natural gas, renewables increasingly figure in the Texas power portfolios.

The city of Georgetown in 2015 signed a solar-power agreement, which, coupled with a wind-power deal, would provide customers with 100 percent solar and wind energy.

The combination made it one of largest municipally-owned utilities in the nation to rely exclusively on wind and solar, and would “allow Georgetown to provide competitive electric rates and hedge against price volatility for energy produced by fossil-fuels,” according to the city.

“Texas leads the nation in wind-powered generation capacity,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. “In 2014 and 2015, Texas wind turbines produced more electricity than the state’s two nuclear plants.”

Mann compared Texas surviving coal-powered plants to aging autos.

“Like old junker cars, they cost more,” Mann said. “It’s best all around to replace that junker.”

John Austin covers the Texas Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jaustin@cnhi.com.