Rising electricity prices and uncertain electric supplies emerging as issues created by Obama's War on Coal. The Government Accountability Office has increased its estimate of the amount of coal-fired power going offline in the coming years because of environmental regulations, competition from natural gas and other causes. GAO said yesterday in a report requested by Sen. Lisa Murkowski that that 13 percent of U.S. coal capacity (just over 42 gigawatts) has either been retired since 2012 or will go offline by 2025, up from GAO's 2012 estimate that between 2 percent and 12 percent of capacity would go offline. The bulk of those planed retirements will come in 2015 as EPA's Mercury and Air Toxics Standards start shuttering older plants, GAO said. That's more significant than recent coal retirements; by comparison, 13.7 gigawatts of coal capacity went offline from 2000 to 2011. The resulting market disruptions will result in rising prices during peak usage periods and brown outs during peak usage periods.