I just don't believe that. This is a recent aerial photo of the Edgewater power station on the West coast of Lake Michigan in Sheboyban, Wisconsin. This is now an Alliant Energy Center, although it was originally constructed by another company.
This former coal plant has completed a six year natural gas conversion which mainly involved the construction of a large diameter gas main, an expense shared with the nearby city of Sheboygan's taxpayers, because the city's residences are now also primarily heated by natural gas, thanks to the fracking boom.
Note the large heaps of coal. The green "hills" are coal heaps that have been there long enough to grow a cover of vegetation. The black coal heaps are more recent. There are no coal trains in the above photo, because in actual fact they have been burning mainly gas for years, although they retain the coal pulverizers and the large "vortex" blowers that enable relatively efficient combustion of coal dust. The coal heaps above represent several weeks of standby fuel, ready to be consumed via the large conveyers you see to feed the coal pulverizers.
As originally built seven decades ago, the Edgewater facility burned Eastern "hard" coals, delivered by barge from Pennsylvania. In more recent years, the railroad tracks you see were added and the softer "brown" coals of Wyoming have been burned. This power plant is being renewed on a regular capital replacement cycle, but it remains a large facility whose primary fuel source is powdered coal, which can still be delivered by docks and railroad tracks. It was not designed to burn natural gas, and it is very definately not being converted to a natural gas "co-generation" power plant that would use gas more efficiently, it remains a classic high pressure steam turbine facility.
The reason that the very expensive gas main was constructed at all was the pending deadline that POTUS Obama imposed by Executive Order when he set in place his famous "Clean Power Plan". This in fact is the reason that US carbon dioxide production dipped in 2017, as utilities prepared to transition coal plants to cleaner fuels.
In fact tomorrow, March 28, 2018, represents the one year anniversary of Trump's repeal of the Clean Power Plan. I expect that as a consequence the EIA figures for 2018 will not show a continuing reduction in the USA's carbon emissions. I also want to express the opinion that Trump's repeal of the Clean Power Plan will have effectively slowed the USA's conversion to renewable energy sources.
Furthermore, should market conditions dictate a natural gas shortage (or if such a shortage occurs for any reason, for example a Middle Eastern war) the USA's consumption of coal and carbon emissions will spike upwards again. One of the things that makes coal a good standby fuel is that you can just leave it lying on the ground in a heap - such as the years-old coal heaps above at Edgewater - and then burn it, even if it's wet and covered with green grass.
Believe me, it is painful for me to point these things out. I HATE coal power plants because of the toxics they emit. Not only do they make active emissions while in use (which have to be "scrubbed" from the stacks with a spray of limestone slurry) but decades of coal consumption also leave a long term toxic legacy of radioactive emissions and heavy metals, which serve to poison the areas around the plants, and introduce these same toxics to the human food chain via crops and animal feed grains.
So expect that US coal consumption is poised to resume at higher rates than ever, reversing recent trends and ending the good news about renewables. I really do wish this were not so, I'm a huge fan of renewable energy sources.