What if Coal-retirement wave outpaces firm replacement, margins thin?
Accelerated coal-plant retirements remove dependable capacity faster than gas, nuclear or firmed renewables replace it, thinning reserve margins across MISO and the Southeast and raising shortfall risk in peak seasons.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Accelerated coal-plant retirements remove dependable capacity faster than gas, nuclear or firmed renewables replace it, thinning reserve margins across MISO and the Southeast and raising shortfall risk in peak seasons. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Natural gas ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.