The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, in partnership with Beyond Carbon, announced that with the retirement of New Hampshire’s last two remaining coal plants, New England’s six states will be coal-free by June 1, 2028. With this announcement, Beyond Carbon and the Beyond Coal campaign successfully secured the retirement of over 70% of coal-fired power plants in the U.S.

Sierra Club and RMI have been focused on CenterPoint Energy in Indiana for a long time. After years of working with Beyond Coal and Beyond Carbon, CenterPoint will be coal-free by 2028, while adding a significant amount of wind and solar capacity and reducing its carbon emissions by 95 percent.

In a years-long campaign, a broad coalition of organizations including the League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club, dozens of the Climate Equity Action Fund’s local partners, and numerous local groups helped  pass legislation requiring Minnesota to operate with 100% clean energy by 2040. Years of powerful grassroots pressure to close coal plants and carbon-polluting incinerators, sophisticated advocacy to ensure diverse support for a 100% clean energy policy, and voter mobilization to secure a political trifecta in 2022 led to one of the best examples yet of the Beyond Carbon program’s success.

Along with supporting the passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act, our partners in Virginia, led by the League of Conservation Voters, Sierra Club, Climate Equity Action Fund, and Advanced Energy United, were part of a successful effort to block plans for a gas-fired plant in Charles City County. Thanks to their work, Chickahominy Power canceled plans for a natural gas plant.

Since becoming a Bloomberg partner in 2015, Coalfield Development has trained 2,300 workers, created over 800 new permanent jobs, helped kickstart and grow 68 new businesses, brought over $100 million of investment to the Appalachian region, and revitalized over 250,000 square feet of former brownfields and mine land. Coalfield and other partners have also advocated for more resources from the federal government to help transition and revitalize communities that once depended on fossil fuel extraction in West Virginia, Appalachia, and beyond. These efforts have paid off with billions in new investments from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, marking some of the most significant federal investments in rural America in generations.