California's Coal Exit Is Done, but Utah's Idle Plant Is Not Gone

Updated on October 3, 2026

Intermountain went offline in late 2025 and Los Angeles is coal-free, yet the Utah coal units were kept operable and buyers were still sought.

When we first looked at this in October 2025, California's coal exit was a date on the calendar. It has since happened. According to Electrek's report from 8 December 2025, the Intermountain Power Project in Utah went offline just before Thanksgiving, and city officials say none of Los Angeles' power now comes from coal.

Some background on how small the remaining share already was. The California Energy Commission put coal at 2.2% of the state's electricity in 2024, or 6,162 GWh, nearly all of it from Intermountain. The same release projected that the share would drop below 0.2% once the plant stopped burning coal. For context, the US as a whole went from nearly half its electricity from coal in 2007 to 16.2% in 2023.

The Intermountain site in Delta, Utah, supplied Southern California for decades.

One correction to our earlier framing: the cutoff came in November, not October. Electrek reports the two coal units had a combined capacity of about 1,800 MW and supplied roughly 11% of LA's electricity as recently as 2024. What the sources describe is a switch-off at the point of use, with the physical plant still in place.

That is where the story gets less tidy. Reporting by Deseret News in January 2026 says the coal units are shut down but kept in operable condition. The Utah Legislature formed an Energy Council to find new buyers; 14 parties were initially interested as of early December, but no sales had materialized by mid-January. Electrek adds that the Republican-controlled legislature ordered the units not be disconnected or decommissioned.

Meanwhile the site itself is changing fuel. Newer hydrogen-capable units, part of a project called IPP Renewed, currently run on natural gas. Electrek says LADWP plans to start adding green hydrogen to the fuel mix in 2026. Deseret News notes that Southern California municipalities bought 98% of the old plant's coal-generated power, which explains why this Utah plant mattered so much to California's numbers.

Our read: California's accounting of its own supply is clean, and the milestone is real. But a coal plant that is idle and not dismantled is a different thing from a coal plant that is gone. Whether those units ever burn again depends on a buyer appearing, and the sources we have stop at mid-January 2026 without one.

Opinion · Open question

Fourteen parties showed interest by early December, yet no sale had materialized by mid-January.

Who benefits if one of them buys? California's coal share would stay near zero on paper while the same coal keeps burning elsewhere. The sources do not say what happened after January, and that gap is the story I would watch.

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Original source: California Energy Commission

Produced with AI support and reviewed by the newsroom

Falcon · Signals analyst · Riyadh

“Switching off a power plant is not the same as ending coal, and the Utah units show the difference.”