Chapter 2 · the schedule · 2020 → 2035

The cliff is lumpy

The atlas shows which plants are retiring. This page shows when that capacity is scheduled to come offline — and where it's concentrated. Retirements don't arrive on a smooth curve: two or three years carry most of the decade, and a handful of counties carry most of those years.

When the cliff hits · MW retiring by year and fuel

Click a year to scrub the map below to it.
National retirements by fuel and year

Where does each year's wave land?

2028
Scroll to zoom · drag to pan
U.S. counties shaded by generating capacity retiring in the selected year
Source: EIA-860 annual + EIA-860M monthly. "Retired" includes any generator with a published retirement date — operating, scheduled, or already decommissioned.

Pick a county on the map

…to see which plants retire (or already have) in the selected year.

Top 10 counties · 2020–2035 cumulative

Click for plant detail · ↗ opens the same state in the atlas.

CountyMW retiring

But what's coming back online?

Forward capacity balance

Confirmed adds up · retirements down · queue derated to its 20% historical completion rate
Forward capacity balance by year

The solid black line is the running cumulative net (confirmed-only); the dashed line is the same calculation if you believe 20% of the LBNL queue actually connects. Pre-2026 is excluded because EIA-860 only carries confirmed additions for upcoming years — pairing historical retirements with zero adds would be a data artifact, not the real picture. Click any column to scrub the map above to that year.

Note: all values are nameplate MW. The retiring coal and gas plants typically ran at 40–60% capacity factor; replacement solar and wind run at 20–35%. A nameplate-neutral swap can deliver noticeably less energy.

How to read this. The fuel chart at the top shows the timing — which years have the most retirements. Click a bar to send the map below to that year, then look for the dark counties: that's where retirements concentrate. The detail panel lists the specific plants and links into the atlas for site-level data. The balance chart at the bottom shows that by 2035, confirmed additions exceed retirements — but a significant share of planned additions sits in interconnection queues, which historically have completion rates around 15–20%. Methodology & sources: here.
What this doesn't show
  • Retirement dates change. A plant listed for 2029 today may be extended in next year's IRP, or pulled in. The list is a snapshot of what utilities have filed, not a guarantee.
  • "Canceled" and "indefinitely postponed" construction is excluded from the totals — those units never operated, so they don't free interconnect rights.
  • Historical snapshots of how this cliff looked in prior years live on the Time Machine page.