Utility Transition Hub^TM

RMI’s Economic Dispatch Dashboard helps utility industry policymakers and stakeholders track uneconomic operation of coal plants and impacts on affordability and emissions.

Power plants are ideally operated in an order going from least cost to highest cost — their “merit-order.” This practice, which we refer to as “economic dispatch,” ensures that consumer costs for electricity are as low as possible by using the cheapest generation whenever available.

The Economic Dispatch Dashboard empowers users to identify when uneconomic dispatch practices are occurring, or when coal plants skip the queue, and to quantify the impact on customers’ bills.

The following graphs show an illustrative electricity market supply curve with and without economic dispatch. When utilities run their coal plants uneconomically and allow them to be to used before other cheaper forms of generation, the difference in costs is directly passed on to ratepayers.

Since 2015, utilities could have driven $1–$2 billion in savings per year to customers by turning down coal and relying on lower-cost, less polluting resources. Instead, the US coal fleet transferred these losses to ratepayers.

This problem is most pronounced in the Southeast and West. Between 2015 and 2022, utilities in the Southeast uneconomically committed coal at a $5.3 billion price tag for customers; those losses account for over one-third of all losses associated with this practice nationally. The graphic below shows the annual gross losses and potential savings from coal plants running economically by region.

Because these coal plants were run unnecessarily, in favor of utilizing cheaper market energy, their collective emissions were also unnecessary. These point-source emissions have been linked to multiple health issues for surrounding communities.

Because of the highly uneconomic operations, some utility customers also suffer from the largest bill impacts, reaching over $100 per household annually. Prioritizing economic dispatch can save customers money and reduce the energy burden for low income customers.

The Dispatch Dashboard is updated aproximatly every 3 months with the latest data from public sources. Prelminary data is subject to change.

Related Resources

• How Utilities Can Save Customers Billions of Dollars - RMI
• How the Second-Largest US Utility Can Cut Both Costs and Carbon - RMI