Coal to drop to 8% of US electricity by 2030

Source: EIA
2/3rds of new capacity is renewables, 1/3rd gas.  But coal and gas are being retired. 
The ratio of renewables in electricity generation will just keep on rising. 

From IEEFA:

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC forecast that about 70,000 MW to as much as 190,000 MW of coal-fired generation is “economically at risk” from the deployment of a “second wave of renewables” in the U.S. under three of the more likely scenarios in a recent analysis. The research firm said these projections exclude about 24,000 MW of coal generation already set to shut down.

“Driven by the surprisingly low cost of renewables, we believe that carbon-heavy utilities that have not historically led the pack in clean energy deployment will accelerate their earnings growth by pursuing a ‘virtuous cycle’: shutting down expensive coal plants and investing in cheap renewables,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in the Dec. 10 research report.

Morgan Stanley sees American Electric Power Co. Inc., Dominion Energy Inc., Southern Co., Pinnacle West Capital Corp., PPL Corp. and Duke Energy Corp. as the utilities with the “largest opportunity” to achieve a valuation rerating under this approach.

“What we’ve found is, now there is a much greater opportunity to achieve kind of a triple-bottom-line benefit in the sense of customers [through lower bills], the environment and shareholders,” Morgan Stanley analyst Stephen Byrd said in a Dec. 18 interview. “There is an opportunity now that we think some utilities will seize on. We don’t know for sure, but we see that opportunity, and we see the benefit that other utilities have achieved with their share price performance that have embraced that opportunity.”

The base-case scenario in Morgan Stanley’s research shows about 70,000 MW of coal capacity at risk by 2030, while a scenario that includes a $40/ton price on carbon shows 192,000 MW of total coal capacity at risk.

Under the base-case scenario, coal-fired electricity declines from 27% of the total U.S. power mix in 2018 to just 8% by 2030. The firm predicted that wind and solar will grow from 9% to 30% of the generation mix over the same time frame.