The biggest immediate impact of the Trump administration rolling back Biden-era emissions standards on power plants is it will keep more old coal and gas-fired plants viable for longer to help provide additional energy for data centers and the AI boom, experts said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said Monday it finalized the repeal of emission-reduction mandates for power plants that were intended to combat climate change. The announcement came shortly after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the 2026 summer was the warmest in U.S. history—about 3 degrees Fahrenheit above average.
Trump’s EPA said Monday that “emissions from power plants have no material impact on global climate change.” Environmental critics called that assertion a lie, arguing the rollback will cause thousands of unnecessary deaths from pollution and trigger many billions of dollars in additional health care costs.
But there is an argument that this strikes a balance between climate and the economy—“step back in order to take two steps forward,” said Dan Romito, managing director at Opportune overseeing sustainability. While renewable power can continue to expand, the energy sector is on the verge of leaps in cleaner, next-gen nuclear power and geothermal energy.
“It’s a Band-Aid for a lot of these data centers to figure out how to get replacement or complementary power,” Romito told Fortune. “We need a little bit of a stopgap here. It’s not an ideal choice. But coal can fill that bill for three, four, maybe five years. And that will allow the market to efficiently incorporate geothermal and nuclear solutions into the mix.”
In the meantime, the AI race is continuing, power projects are being announced without many getting off the starting line, and congressional permitting reform to expedite power—both clean and fossil fuel—appears unlikely to come to fruition this year. So something had to give, Romito argued. “This power is not going to magically come out of nowhere. You’re going to have to keep coal-fired power plants and gas-fired power plants online longer, not necessarily to fulfill the anticipated demand, but to meet what demand is currently today,” he said. “And you just can’t throw affordability and reliability out the window.”
The idea is this also will provide more certainty to hyperscalers that they can move forward. “It relieves a lot of the anxiety and the investor apprehension to invest in new modernized plants that are probably much more efficient as it relates to emissions,” Romito said, arguing that new gas-fired coal plants would be much cleaner than old coal plants.
The fight ahead
The 2024 Biden carbon standards for power plants aimed to require plants to either cut or use emissions technology to capture 90% of their climate pollution. In addition to undoing those standards, Trump’s EPA also is proposing to roll back its authority to regulate climate pollution from power plants, arguing that the EPA is not legally allowed to combat climate change. If successful, this could prevent future administrations from being able to regulate these emissions.
“We are cutting the red tape to deliver the largest power sector deregulatory action ever,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on Monday at the G20 energy ministerial in Houston.
“But we aren’t just stopping with the Biden administration’s overreach,” he added. “We also are proposing to rescind all remaining greenhouse gas emissions standards for power plants—all of them.”
Environmentalists called the Trump administration’s actions incredibly damaging.
“While wildfires rage, floods devastate communities, and families struggle to afford skyrocketing electricity bills and insurance premiums, the Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” said Sierra Club chief program officer Holly Bender. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”
Fossil fuel power plants are responsible for almost 25% of the nation’s total climate pollution, second only to the transportation sector. Early this year, the EPA overturned its own so-called endangerment finding from 2009, which determined that that carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases are a threat to public health. The EPA also repealed ruled regulating emissions from motor vehicles.
The Trump administration contends the federal Clean Air Act does not specifically mention climate change and that the EPA should have no authority to regulate it, arguing that the “climate radicalism” of the Biden and Obama administrations were bad for business and energy affordability. Legal challenges are inevitable, just as with the earlier vehicle rollback.
“If you have a problem with the law, change the law,” Zeldin said.
“Will more data centers be using coal? That’s not something the EPA is going to dictate,” Zeldin added. “What we are going to make sure is that we’re following the law, that we are empowering that choice, and that we’re making sure the smartest decisions are made to unleash energy dominance in this country in every form.”
