New rules will slash air, water and climate pollution from U.S. power plants
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday finalized an ambitious set of rules aimed at slashing air pollution, water pollution and planet-warming emissions spewing from the nation’s power plants.
If fully implemented, the rules will have enormous consequences for U.S. climate goals, the air Americans breathe and the ways they get their electricity. The power sector ranks as the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change, and it is a major source of toxic air pollutants tied to various health problems.
Before the restrictions take effect, however, they will have to survive near-certain legal challenges from Republican attorneys general, who have been emboldened by the Supreme Court’s skepticism of expansive environmental regulations.
Another wild card is the November election, which could hand the White House back to former president Donald Trump, who has pledged to scrap dozens of President Biden’s green policies if he returns to office.
One of the most significant rules will limit greenhouse gas emissions from new natural gas-fired power plants and existing coal-fired power plants. It will push all existing coal plants by 2039 to either close or capture 90 percent of their carbon dioxide emissions at the smokestack.
A second regulation will reduce releases of mercury and other toxic air pollutants from the smokestacks of coal plants nationwide. Exposure to mercury, a powerful neurotoxin, can cause serious health effects, especially for developing fetuses and children.
A third rule will expand federal oversight of coal ash, the waste from coal plants that often contains a mix of chemicals linked to increased cancer risk. A fourth will limit the levels of toxic metals in the wastewater that coal plants can discharge into rivers, lakes, streams and other waterways.
Each rule will yield huge benefits for public health and the planet, according to the EPA. The greenhouse gas standards alone will prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital visits and 1,900 asthma cases in 2035, the agency said. They will also reduce carbon emissions through 2047 by 1.38 billion tons - equivalent to the annual emissions of 328 million gasoline-powered cars.
Together, the rules represent the culmination of an aggressive plan that EPA Administrator Michael Regan first outlined in 2022. Speaking to an energy industry conference in Houston that year, Regan promised an array of regulatory actions to tackle pollution from power plants, which he said often hits poor and minority neighborhoods the hardest.
On Thursday, Regan announced the final rules during an event at Howard University, a historically Black college.
“More than 70 percent of the nation’s coal and natural gas plants are located in communities of color or low-income communities, making their health impacts and outcomes disproportionately worse,” he said. “Folks, this is simply unacceptable.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) has already promised to sue over the EPA’S greenhouse gas limits for power plants. He has argued that the limits violate the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA, in which the conservative majority found that the agency lacks the authority to force utilities to shutter coal plants and switch to renewable energy generation.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.VA.) on Thursday said she plans to introduce a resolution to repeal the greenhouse gas standards. “The administration has chosen to press ahead with its unrealistic climate agenda that threatens access to affordable, reliable energy for households and employers across the country,” she said in a statement.
Jeff Holmstead, a partner at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell LLP and a former top EPA official under President George W. Bush, said legal or political challenges could scuttle the regulation.
“I have a hard time believing this will be upheld in court,” he said. “And if there is to be a Republican administration in 2025, it would be pretty easy for them to just undo the rule.”
Jody Freeman, who directs the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School, said she thinks the rule is on solid legal ground, because EPA lawyers crafted it to comply with the 2022 decision and the Clean Air Act. But it is difficult to predict what the conservative justices will decide, she said.
“The Supreme Court will do what it wants, and it’s shown a particular hostility to EPA rules,” Freeman said.
Putting guardrails on gas
If fully implemented, the greenhouse gas standards could have the greatest impact in the Southeastern United States, where many utilities are planning for a boom in gas plants to meet explosive power demand fueled by electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories. for In North Carolina, instance, Duke Energy has argued that a new gas plant is necessary to meet “unprecedented” energy needs. Duke spokeswoman Kaitlin Kirshner said in a statement that “the final rule presents significant challenges to customer reliability and affordability.”
Yet a recent report by Energy Innovation, a climate think tank, found that utilities can reliably meet surging energy demand without new gas generation. The report warned that new gas plants could become “stranded assets” as the country transitions to cleaner energy, and the costs could be passed down to utility customers.
Charles Harper, power sector senior policy lead at Evergreen Action, an environmental group, said utilities are fomenting fear about power demand to justify plans that jeopardize the climate and consumers.
“These gas plants are a potential carbon bomb that could make U.S. climate goals unattainable,” Harper said. “They’re one of the most expensive technologies that they can charge their customers for, but there are so many low-cost alternatives available with clean energy.”
EPA officials strengthened the emissions limits for new gas plants compared with the proposed rule released last year. The final rule will apply to new large gas plants that operate more than 40 percent of the time, rather than those that operate 50 percent of the time, which The Washington Post first reported earlier this month.
In another notable change, the final rule will no longer assume that new gas plants can switch to low-emissions hydrogen to comply. The EPA will still specify that utilities can use carbon capture technology, which sucks carbon dioxide
from power plant smokestacks and stores it deep underground. Some environmentalists worry the technology, which has failed to deliver in several prominent trials, could prolong the life of fossil fuel infrastructure for decades.
EPA officials announced in February that the rule would only apply to new gas plants, not existing ones. The agency probably won’t finalize emissions standards for existing gas plants until after November, so their fate may rest on the outcome of the 2024 election.
Cracking down on coal
The other three rules will marshal the full powers of the federal government to clamp down on pollution billowing from coal plants’ smokestacks, waste dumps and wastewater discharges.
The United States is already moving away from coal, which has struggled to compete economically with cheaper gas and renewable energy. U.S. coal output tumbled 36 percent from 2015 to 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign contends that 382 coal-fired power plants have closed down or proposed to retire, with 148 remaining.
Yet these remaining coal plants rank as the country’s largest source of mercury pollution, affecting hundreds of families and communities downwind. On Thursday, the EPA finalized the most stringent update to mercury limits for these plants since the Obama administration first issued Mercury and Air Toxics Standards in 2012. The agency estimated the rule will reduce by more than two-thirds the mercury emissions from plants that burn lignite, also known as brown coal.
Rich Nolan, president and chief executive of the National Mining Association, said in a statement that the Biden administration seems bent on shuttering coal plants before the end of their useful life. “For the last three years, the administration has methodically developed and executed a comprehensive strategy to force the closure of well-operating coal plants,” he said.
But Patrice Tomcik, national field director for the advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force, cheered the updated mercury limits as long overdue. Tomcik grew up two miles downwind from the Cheswick Generating Station, a coal plant in southwestern Pennsylvania that shuttered in 2022. As a child, she watched plumes from the smokestack float over the river toward her school playground, and she missed many school days because of chronic bronchitis. As an adult, she still lives in the area and worries about the health of her son, a cancer survivor.
“I recognize I can’t control the air my son breathes, and I really rely on EPA to do their job,” Tomcik said.
Tomcik and other advocates also hailed a separate regulation that will boost federal oversight of hundreds of coal ash dumps. Research suggests that the vast majority of these sites have leaked toxic chemicals such as arsenic and chromium into nearby groundwater.
Lisa Evans, an attorney specializing in hazardous waste litigation at the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said the rule will require monitoring and cleanup at about 700 additional coal ash dump sites that were exempted from the Obama administration’s 2015 regulation.
“This is a watershed moment,” Evans said on a call with reporters. “Industry fought long and hard to avoid spending a dime to clean up their toxic pollution. That ends today.”