Trump's Carbon Standards Repeal Gives America Room to Build

Zeldin Ends the EPA Mandate That Shut Reliable Plants Before Replacements Arrived

President Biden and the Democrats’ climate hysteria forced consumers to pay electric utility companies across the nation to shut down their coal- or gas-fired electric power plants that would not meet new emission rules by 2032. This perverse policy let utility companies cut costs while raising electricity rates. Thankfully, President Trump has ended this madness.

Here is how it worked. Six years ago, the Michigan Public Service Commission allowed Consumers Energy to place up to $688 million in early-retirement costs for D.E. Karn Units 1 and 2 on customer bills. The commission found the arrangement about $124 million cheaper than ordinary recovery. Cheaper still leaves a bill. The charge for the twelve months through September 2026 is about $112 million, and the units went cold in 2023. Public Service of New Mexico received authority to issue about $360 million in bonds so it could abandon the San Juan Generating Station and still be paid through a charge customers cannot avoid. Customers kept paying for plants that no longer produced electricity.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has finalized the repeal of the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards. President Trump deserves the credit. The 2024 rule told long-lived coal and gas plants they could stay open only if they captured 90% of their CO2 by 2032. That capture required interstate pipelines and underground storage wells that the plant owner does not control and cannot force anyone to build. The easier path was to promise an earlier shutdown and meet a lighter standard by co-firing natural gas. Shutdown became the practical way to comply. In this business, shutdown is rarely unpaid. Ratepayers were left covering the undepreciated cost of plants that closed before replacement generation was ready. That arrangement is over.

A coal unit built to run deep into the next decade had to hit 90% capture by 2032 or take the retirement path. New baseload gas turbines faced the same 90% target in what the rule called Phase 2. Staying open depended on pipes and wells the owner could not order. Closing the plant did not. Carbon capture begins with equipment at the smokestack. The compressed CO2 must then travel through interstate pipelines into permitted underground wells. The owner can buy the capture equipment. He cannot order the pipeline or the permit. NRG tested the equipment at Petra Nova, a 240-megawatt slipstream on W.A. Parish Unit 8 south of Houston, and recorded 92.4% capture on the gas it processed before oil prices idled the project. SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit 3 in Saskatchewan remains the only commercial full-unit coal capture plant on the continent. EPA’s record treats its annual capture as well below the 90% figure written into the 2024 rule. Summit Carbon Solutions has spent years in South Dakota and Iowa fighting over routes and eminent domain. That line was built around ethanol plants, not a national fleet of coal and gas units.

EPA now finds that 90% capture has not been adequately demonstrated for these requirements, that the costs are unreasonable, and that the capture, pipeline, and storage network is significantly unlikely to be in place across the affected fleet by 2032. A utility that wants a capture unit may still build one. Plants from West Virginia to Wyoming are no longer held to a fleetwide path the agency itself has stopped defending. The repeal withdraws the emission guidelines for existing coal, oil, and gas steam units, the capture standards that applied when a coal unit made a large modification, and the Phase 2 standards that would have bound new baseload combustion turbines. A companion proposal would erase the remaining greenhouse-gas findings for the power sector. That proposal rests on a wider theory and needs its own defense.

A standard a plant cannot meet does not sit unused. Operators with no workable path cut hours or name a retirement date. Later accounts treat the retirement as a market decision. When government makes survival depend on a network that does not arrive, the closure is a regulatory choice dressed as a commercial one. Section 111 of the Clean Air Act requires an emission-reduction system that has been adequately demonstrated and accounts for cost. West Virginia v. EPA already told the agency it may not use that section to force a shift away from coal. EPA now says the 90% mandate, paired with the retire-or-capture choice, left long-term units one practical option, closure, and that this is generation shifting by another route. Daren Bakst of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has made the point for years. An emissions standard that decides which generators stay commercially alive puts EPA in the role of grid manager. That choice belongs to Congress.

Close early and the undepreciated plant often stays in rates, or a commission authorizes bonds that customers repay so the company is made whole for quitting. The Karn charge is still being collected for stopped boilers. San Juan’s bonds paid an owner to abandon a station. The 2024 rule gave every other owner a federal reason to seek the same bargain: skip a capture system you cannot finish, promise to shut down, and leave the steel for the rate case. The repeal takes away that reason. Bonds a state has already sold will keep being paid, because those retirements already happened. The next plant can no longer be told that closure is how it complies with Washington.

Demand is moving the other direction. The Energy Information Administration’s latest Short-Term Energy Outlook projects U.S. generation up 2.2% this year, to a record 4,368 billion kilowatt-hours, and up another 1.7% next year. EIA ties the growth to data centers and manufacturing, strongest in the West South Central region. Coal’s share still slips in that forecast, from 16% this year to 14% the next. The numbers describe the system the repeal enters. They are not yet an effect the repeal has produced. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation found resource-adequacy trouble in 13 of 23 assessment areas over the next ten years, and more than 105 GW of announced potential retirements. It told planners to keep deactivation dates flexible while new projects catch up. Energy Secretary Chris Wright stated the operating fact in the EPA release. “During periods of peak electricity demand, coal and natural gas continue to play a critical role in keeping the lights on.” Wright has used emergency authority to keep TransAlta’s Centralia Unit 2 available in Washington, as he did earlier at J.H. Campbell in Michigan and at Schaffer in Indiana. An order of that kind covers a winter or a summer. It does not replace a standard.

NERC’s summer snapshot is closer in. Additions of more than 58 GW, solar, batteries, and some new gas, improved readiness this season. Elevated risk under abnormal conditions remains in New England, the Northwest, Saskatchewan, and far-west Texas. Every megawatt that arrives and actually runs is welcome. EPA’s regulatory impact analysis estimates a $310 billion present-value reduction in economy-wide social costs over two decades, in 2024 dollars, from the SAGE model. Power-sector compliance savings are smaller, at $160 billion in present value at a 3% discount rate. The analysis notes adverse health effects from the emissions changes and does not price them. Aaron Szabo, EPA’s assistant administrator for air, told Thomas Catenacci of the Washington Free Beacon that energy costs hit poorer customers hardest. A household already spending a large share of its income on the utility will feel the next compliance dollar when it reaches a rate case.

Opponents filed as soon as the Federal Register published the notice. The American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Clean Air Council, and Clean Wisconsin petitioned the DC Circuit in case 26-1238. Their argument is direct. The Clean Air Act obliges EPA to address climate pollution from power plants. They say the 2024 standards used controls at the individual facility, which the statute contemplates. The court may side with them.

What meets that case is the demonstration test in Section 111, a standard the source can meet with a system applied at its own plant. The repeal contains no finding that carbon dioxide is harmless. A control that works only if other people permit the pipelines and the wells asks the plant to answer for strangers. EPA’s further proposal to eliminate the remaining greenhouse-gas standards is a seperate proceeding on a broader theory of the agency’s power. The engineering record is what can be defended now, in public, with the health effects left where the analysis put them.

Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation drew the line in a recent essay on nuclear policy. “The government’s role should be to protect public health and safety,” he wrote, while private firms compete and carry their own business risk. He warned that political uncertainty compounds the financial and technological risks investors already bear. Spencer was writing about reactors. A coal or gas unit with decades of life ahead faces the same split. Nuclear power is the long-run answer, and flexible natural gas is the bridge until that fleet is actually built.

At the end of the day, the Democrat Party and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media will call every kept plant a step backward, yet the rule they defended forced closures before replacements were ready and left ratepayers paying for the plants that no longer ran. President Trump and Administrator Zeldin ended that arrangement. Customers should no longer be billed for power plants that government rules told utilities to shut down early.

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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes political analysis at amuseonx.com. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact me directly. Each op-ed is edited for grammar and clarity using AI in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.