The Environmental Protection Agency announced it will scrap the Biden administration’s unworkable greenhouse gas emissions standards for coal and natural gas-fired power plants and all other greenhouse gas regulations for new and existing fossil-fueled power plants. In doing so, the Trump EPA will save American families hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary costs and prevent the Biden rules from causing massive rolling blackouts in America’s heartland.
Under the Biden administration’s rule, finalized in May 2024, reliable coal plants would be forced to install expensive and unproven carbon capture and sequestration technology by 2032 or retire, removing them from service at a time of surging power demand. The Biden rules would also make it harder to build the new natural gas plants needed to replace them. As a result, the grid would become increasingly dependent on expensive and unreliable wind, solar, and battery storage technologies.
In March, the Trump administration announced it would reconsider the Biden rule, citing legal concerns given the Supreme Court’s rejection of the original Clean Power Plan in West Virginia v. EPA in 2022. The court decided that the EPA didn’t have “clear congressional authorization” to regulate how Americans get their energy.
The Trump administration’s EPA went beyond simply repealing the Biden rules. It argued the agency does not need to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants because they are a small and decreasing share of global emissions, there are no cost-effective control measures to mitigate them, and the Trump administration’s goal is to promote the public health and welfare by promoting energy dominance and independence secured by using fossil fuels to generate power.
This is indisputably true. Carbon dioxide emissions from American power plants constitute just 3 percent of global emissions, and this number is falling every year as China, India, and Indonesia build new coal plants every week. Furthermore, an analysis from the Texas Public Policy Foundation concludes that even if the United States were to eliminate all of its carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, it would avert just 0.015 degrees C by 2050, which is an amount so small it can’t be accurately measured, let alone significantly harm to human welfare.
Trump’s deregulatory actions are a boon to electric grid reliability because the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has warned of an “elevated” risk of blackouts under extreme peak conditions in the Midwest and Texas this summer.
NERC doesn’t mince words: the Midwest’s elevated risk of blackouts is due to “less dispatchable generation” due to accelerating coal and natural gas retirements and “the increasing share that solar and wind resources have in meeting demand.” Over the 10-year horizon, NERC expects shortfalls to occur during “normal peak conditions” in the Midwest.
Consumers depend on reliable, affordable electricity to keep them cool and keep the lights on — and the cost of blackouts, or averting them, lands on the ratepayer. Our organization’s research found that the Biden EPA’s requirement would have led to an additional $381.9 billion in costs across the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) region to replace the retired coal and natural gas plants with enough wind and solar to ensure reliability. The Biden EPA estimated that compliance costs would only total $19 billion through 2047 for the entire U.S., which will now be averted.
The Biden EPA’s regulations would have harmed the reliability of the electric grid by shutting down reliable, dispatchable sources of generation. In MISO, our model predicted a massive eight-hour blackout with as much as 19 percent of the region without power.
President Trump and Administrator Zeldin were right to reprioritize grid reliability while correctly noting that reliable, affordable energy is more important to the health and well-being of the American people than greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Isaac Orr is vice president of research, and Mitch Rolling is the director of research at Always On Energy Research, a nonprofit energy modeling firm.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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