On the campaign trail last year, Donald Trump frequently criticized the Biden administration for new regulations targeting what he called “clean, beautiful coal.” In April, he signed executive orders directing federal agencies to undo any regulations that “discriminate” against coal. Coal-fired power plants produce a significant but shrinking share of U.S. electricity — about 16 percent in 2023 — and are by far the most polluting and planet-warming component of the power sector on a per-kilowatt basis.
So it was no surprise when, on Wednesday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin gathered more than a half dozen Republican lawmakers at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to announce the planned repeal of two rules, finalized under the Biden administration, that established limits on carbon and mercury emissions from U.S. power plants. Once finalized, the Trump administration’s proposals will eliminate all caps on greenhouse gases from the plants and revert the mercury limit to a less strict standard from 2012, respectively.
The Biden-era rules, Zeldin said Wednesday, were “expensive, unreasonable, and burdensome” attempts “to make all sorts of industries, including coal and more, disappear.” With demand for electricity poised to surge in the coming years, especially as tech companies make massive investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure, Zeldin said that the EPA’s new proposals will boost electricity generation and “make America the AI capital of the world.”
His argument was echoed by the slate of Republican lawmakers who followed him at the podium. The old rules “would have forced our most efficient and reliable power generation into early retirement, just as Ohio and the rest of the nation are seeing a historic rise in demand due to the AI revolution, new data centers, and a manufacturing resurgence,” said Representative Troy Balderson. “Between data centers, AI, and the growing domestic manufacturing base, the simple fact is we need more electrons on the grid to power all of this,” added Representative Robert Bresnahan of Pennsylvania.
But despite their vigorous agreement that as many energy sources as possible are needed to power America’s future and keep utility bills affordable, every single representative who spoke on Wednesday had, just weeks earlier, cast a vote for a major bill in Congress that will almost certainly have the opposite effect. Analysts say that the pending legislation, which has the Trump-inspired title “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” will slow the country’s buildout of new electricity sources and eventually lead the average U.S. household to incur hundreds of dollars in additional annual energy costs.
That’s because the new GOP legislation essentially repeals the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark 2022 law that has resulted in roughly $800 billion in investments in clean energy technologies. By rolling back regulations on coal-fired power, the GOP’s hope seems to be that some of those lost energy investments can be compensated by fossil fuels. However, analysts agree that this is highly unlikely, due largely to the sheer cost of new coal-fired power, as well as supply bottlenecks that have sharply limited the feasibility of new natural gas plants. Instead, the result will likely just be more expensive electricity.
“The economics of coal plants are the worst they’ve ever been,” said Robbie Orvis, a senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “Even just keeping existing coal plants online compared to building new renewables is more expensive.”
To justify its repeal of the greenhouse gas emissions rule for power plants, the EPA is arguing that the U.S. power sector is responsible for just 3 percent of global emissions, and as a result is not a “significant” contributor to air pollution, which is the threshold the Clean Air Act sets for when the government can regulate a stationary source of emissions. While the 3 percent figure is factually accurate, experts say the argument is misleading, especially given that the power sector is responsible for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions within the country.
“You’re dealing with something that has lots and lots and lots of sources, and you can’t just throw up your hands and say, ‘Well, this won’t achieve anything,’” said David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by former EPA enforcement attorneys.
If the U.S. power industry relies more on coal and natural gas relative to renewables, as Republicans appear to hope, those emissions could remain stubbornly high, especially as demand for power grows. What’s even more certain is that costs will continue to go up. The latest government inflation data shows that consumer electricity prices are already rising much more dramatically than overall consumer prices. In this environment, the technology companies building massive data centers to power cloud computing and AI have struggled to find adequate, cheap electricity. In fact, so many power-guzzling facilities are being built that lawmakers in Virginia, which is at the heart of the data center belt, have enacted legislation to prevent them from overwhelming the grid.
Since utilities have been unable to meet the power needs of tech players like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services, some of these companies have begun directly contracting with renewables developers and striking deals with nuclear power plant operators. A trade group representing these companies recently asked the Senate to revise the pending legislation so it restores some of the clean energy provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act, saying the U.S. needs “affordable and reliable power” in order to “maintain its leadership in AI.” Analysts say such leadership is threatened if the Trump administration continues to try to tip the scales toward fossil fuel sources that are not competitive with newer sources of energy.
“The current administration is picking technology winners and losers and making trade-offs,” said Orvis. “And the trade-off they want to make is: get rid of the clean energy tax incentives that are driving all of this new clean electricity onto the grid, which puts downward pressure on prices and will lower people’s rates.”
Orvis added that higher electricity costs raise the cost of doing business for manufacturers, including those at the leading edge of AI, making it more difficult to compete with China.
“We’re at a pivotal crossroads,” said Orvis. “We can either lean in and support the domestic growth of these industries by creating a policy environment with certainty, incentives, and support. Or we can do what the current administration is trying to do, and pull back on all of those things and allow China to step in.”
