In partially repealing a Biden-era regulation that limited carbon emissions from power plants, Trump administration officials have misleadingly cast the prior administration’s policy as a threat to grid reliability. Experts say that’s unfounded.
The administration has also emphasized that repealing much of the rule, along with other Trump policies, will save Americans money. There will likely be a small reduction in electricity prices as a result of the rollback, but other Trump energy policies are expected to increase prices.
“The overbearing and often-unlawful rules that were sought by prior administrations to destroy reliable baseload power made energy prices skyrocket and threatened many communities and states throughout our country,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said at a Sept. 14 event in Houston announcing the revocation of the power plant regulations.
“American families must always have the ability to heat their homes in the winter, and cool them in the summer,” Zeldin posted on X two days later. “Under the Obama and Biden Admins, their suffocating power plant regulations purposefully targeted for extinction reliable, durable, and affordable baseload power.”
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright similarly stated in a press release for the power plant rule repeal that the action “will help ensure reliable electricity generation regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining by allowing coal and natural gas plants to keep generating power when Americans need it most.”
The 2024 power plant rule might have led some coal plants to retire earlier than they would have otherwise. But coal plants, many of which are old and have become increasingly costly to operate, were already facing unfavorable economic headwinds. Rescinding the regulations is “not going to tip the general trajectory of coal plants,” Nikhil Kumar, a program director at the nonprofit GridLab, told us.
Nor do experts think that the power plant regulations posed a threat to the reliability of the electrical grid.
“Obviously, a gas plant can, on occasion, run at times when a solar cell is not running,” Martin Ross, a senior research economist at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability at Duke University, told us. “However, the system reliability has not had a problem adapting to renewables in the past, and there’s really no particular reason to think it will in the future.”
Increasingly, batteries can store energy so the grid can use it later, complementing intermittent resources like wind or solar. And experts emphasized that a mixture of different energy sources contribute to a reliable grid.
What was repealed?
The 2024 power plant rule finalized under the Biden administration called for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas plants. At the time, the EPA estimated that the rule offered up to $370 billion in long-term net climate and health benefits, with a “negligible (0-1%)” impact on electricity prices.
For coal plants, the requirements varied based on how long they intended to operate. Coal plants retiring before 2032 did not have any new requirements, but those intending to operate long-term would need to prevent 90% of their carbon emissions starting in 2032, requiring carbon capture and storage. This same standard was set for the most heavily used new gas plants. Coal plants retiring by 2039 were required to cut emissions by partially running on natural gas starting in 2030.
The Trump administration is now undoing that, while also proposing that the entire rule — which included some efficiency standards for new gas-fired plants — should be scrapped. The EPA’s legal argument for the full repeal is that greenhouse gas emissions do not count as pollution under the Clean Air Act and that the EPA therefore does not have the authority to regulate them.
Similar arguments have been used to justify rescinding regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and the EPA’s underlying 2009 endangerment finding, which concluded that greenhouse gas emissions “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
The EPA has also argued that power plants do not contribute enough to global climate change to justify regulating their carbon emissions, claiming in its Sept. 14 press release that the emissions “have no material impact on global climate change.”
Any single country’s power plant emissions might appear small, but emissions from generating electricity and heat across the world make up around one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, and 30% of its emissions were from power plants as of 2023.
Did the power plant regulations threaten the reliability of the grid?
Often referring to “reliable baseload” power, Zeldin has repeatedly implied that his agency needed to relax greenhouse gas emissions rules for Americans to have dependable access to electricity.
Experts, however, disputed this notion.
Deregulation of power plants “is not something that the grid operators are asking for because they’ve been planning for the energy transition,” Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, told us.
The greenhouse gas regulations did not require “an abrupt transition in how the grid operates,” Ross said. “So there’s no reason to think that we would be in a position where reliability would be impacted by these changes on the margins in how many fossil plants are around because … none of the policies have them going away in a quick, near-term fashion that would cause those issues.”
Officials often refer to “baseload” power – seemingly as a shorthand for fossil fuels or nuclear – but some experts object to the use of the word to imply that it is inherently reliable or cost-effective.
In the past, grid operators did tend to rely on continuously running so-called “baseload” resources, a 2025 report co-authored by Danis explains. But today, grid operators have more options.
“Reducing the complex idea of grid reliability down to the term ‘baseload’ resources, while a convenient shortcut in nomenclature, does not reflect current planning or operational realities,” the researchers wrote.
What about grid reliability during storms?
Johannes Pfeifenberger, an economist and principal at the consulting firm the Brattle Group, told us that the main factor governing the reliability of consumers’ access to electricity is not a lack of power generation. “The customer outages are mostly driven by distribution wires, particularly in the suburbs where those wires are overhead and exposed to storms,” he said.
A grid is considered to have met reliability goals if there is insufficient generation once in 10 years, Pfeifenberger said. He noted that the two grid operators in much of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic — ISO New England and PJM — have never had an outage due to insufficient electricity generation.
Still, the grid is often most stressed during extreme weather events. When asked about Wright’s comments, the Department of Energy directed us to an agency fact sheet about blackouts during winter storms and said that by rescinding the power plant rule, “more reliable power would become available to use as needed.”
“As has been demonstrated during numerous peak power demand incidents in the past where wind and solar underperformed due to weather, reliable power generation from sources such as coal and natural gas-powered plants can prevent blackouts and save lives,” DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told us.
It’s true that in certain storms, renewables have not always fared well. But coal and natural gas don’t have perfect track records, either.
During a 2021 winter storm in Texas, for example, some coal and natural gas plants stopped working when sensors, valves or other equipment froze or failed. Natural gas production dropped and there were issues transporting and supplying gas to plants.
In that storm, known as Winter Storm Uri, wind turbines also failed when the blades iced over. But it was not exclusively or even primarily a wind failure, contrary to the DOE fact sheet’s suggestion that the outages were solely due to “renewable generation.” By far the largest contributor to outages during that storm was natural gas, followed by wind then coal.
“The extent to which the Event was caused by the failure of all types of generating units to prepare for extreme cold weather or associated freezing precipitation, cannot be overstated,” a report jointly produced by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found.
“I think folks are fond of saying, ‘Well, solar doesn’t work if the sun’s not shining,’” Danis said. “Well, coal doesn’t work when the coal pile’s freezing.”
For all types of energy, many of these problems can be avoided by winterizing the physical infrastructure.
The J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan has been kept open by emergency orders from the Department of Energy. Photo by Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
The fact sheet also argues, as Wright frequently has, that 2025 emergency orders to force some coal plants to remain open saved lives during last year’s big winter storm, unofficially called Winter Storm Fern.
The administration claims in the fact sheet that three such plants “provided essential power during the storm” and notes that during Fern, electricity generation from coal and natural gas increased.
Kumar, however, said that the fact that a particular coal plant open under emergency orders was used does not mean “that unit was absolutely required for reliability.”
The coal plants – the youngest of which dates to the 1980s – had previously decided to close on their own. When the coal plants were slated to close, “grid operators had already analyzed what the risks were and had done enough analysis to basically give the go ahead and had already taken into account the loss of that generation for these winter storms,” Kumar said.
For one of the plants in Indiana, the utility said in a February letter to DOE that the plant’s “performance” during Fern “underscores a pattern of unreliability.” Although the plant was dispatched for two days during the storm, it ran at less than half its capacity, the letter noted, and a day later, “systemic equipment failures forced another outage, further demonstrating the unit’s ongoing inability to provide dependable service.”
In the letter, the utility asked the agency not to issue another emergency order to keep the plant open, saying that the coal unit “accounts for less than 1% of the total installed capacity” for that part of the grid and that maintaining it “will require substantial investment to support an inefficient and increasingly unreliable asset, rather than advancing affordable and reliable service for customers in southwestern Indiana.”
How can the grid meet growing demand?
Electricity demand is forecast to significantly increase in the coming years, due to the growth of data centers, the rise of electric vehicles and other electrification efforts. This will require the addition of new electricity generation capacity, including some natural gas.
“There are regions in the U.S. where we are energy short, which is to say that we don’t have enough energy” in the next five years, according to forecasts from utilities and regulators, Kumar said. “In those places, having some kind of new capacity — whether that be gas or … solar, wind and batteries — is needed.”
The current administration has leaned into the narrative that renewable energy such as wind or solar power is unreliable because it is intermittent, producing energy only when it is windy or there is sunlight.
“Traditionally, it is true that we’ve relied on fossil fuel resources for some of our key reliability services on the grid because they’re dispatchable and they can be turned on at any time,” McKenna Peplinski, a senior research associate at the nonprofit Resources for the Future, told us. “But that isn’t the only answer anymore.”
An increasingly important factor in grid reliability is battery storage. U.S. capacity to store energy using batteries has grown by 70% each year from 2023 through 2025, according to the Energy Information Agency, with continued growth in 2026.
Peplinski said that renewables combined with storage “become a key answer here in meeting the demands on the grid.” Pfeifenberger called solar plus storage “very reliable.”
Long term, other power sources could help ensure a robust grid while further lowering carbon emissions. Nuclear power is firm, meaning it is theoretically available at any time, although Pfeifenberger pointed out that it can take five to 10 years to build a new nuclear plant. Geothermal, which relies on heat from the Earth, can be built more quickly, he said, but only in certain locations. Hydropower is also a form of clean energy that can be firm.
Researchers also noted that Zeldin’s claims about the importance of deregulation for reliability come amid some other policies that have slowed clean energy projects.
“If we really do need every megawatt” in the face of growing demand, Danis said, it makes sense to let projects move forward that are “about to serve the grid,” such as offshore wind — a class of renewable energy the Trump administration has blocked in federal waters, including by paying companies to terminate their leases.
Pfeifenberger also said offshore wind can be an attractive component of a reliable grid in the Northeast because “offshore wind generation is very high during the winter, particularly during more stormy conditions.”
“Making the permitting of renewables more difficult is not helping reliability, and it’s not helping affordability either,” Pfeifenberger said. The administration has also slowed permits for onshore renewable energy projects.
Apart from assembling a diverse array of power sources, the experts said that there are other changes that could improve reliability, including linking different regional grids together to share power during extreme weather events and incentivizing people or businesses to use less electricity at peak times.
An important factor in the grid going forward is also how data centers are planned and regulated, Peplinski said. For example, they can be built in locations that have unused capacity, and they can be asked to be flexible in when they are pulling electricity from the grid.
How will policies affect future electricity prices?
Administration officials have frequently promoted the cost savings of repealing Biden’s power plant rule, while also implying that Trump’s energy policies overall are lowering costs for Americans.
“For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy. The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on,” Zeldin said in a press release for the power plant rule repeal. “Americans will see a decrease in electricity prices.”
“The Trump administration is saving Americans hundreds of millions of dollars through common sense energy solutions,” Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in the same press release.
The deregulation of power plant emissions would lead to a small rise in retail electricity prices in the very short term, followed by a slightly larger drop over the long term, according to the EPA’s estimates.
The EPA’s latest regulatory impact analysis of the changes found that retail electricity prices would be 0.7% higher nationally by 2030 as a result of the deregulation, but that they would be 5.8% lower in 2035, with the savings declining in the following decade. Overall, between 2030 and 2045, the agency found the walkback would lower retail rates by a total of 2.2%.
“Reducing environmental compliance costs will reduce some costs,” Pfeifenberger said.
Peplinski’s organization, Resources for the Future, estimated in an Oct. 13 blog post that the rollback would lower U.S. average wholesale electricity prices by around 3% to 7%, depending on whether modeling prices in the years 2032, 2040 or 2050.
Peplinski said that the “effect on a household’s bill would be smaller than the percentage drop in wholesale prices,” since wholesale prices are only one component of a bill. She called the projected price drop “relatively modest” in the context of other changes affecting the grid. It’s “much smaller” than the impact of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 and the projected impact of data center growth, she said, acknowledging that there is still a lot of uncertainty.
Peplinksi added that OBBBA “increases prices more significantly” than the power plant rule repeal reduces prices, consistent with a prior analysis that found the two policies together would lead to a net increase in average retail electricity prices between 2025 and 2050.
As we’ve explained before, multiple groups have projected that OBBBA will increase electricity prices, since without incentives for clean energy projects, less electricity capacity is built, lowering supply and raising prices.
“By scaling back federal support for certain types of energy, less supply may enter the market when capacity is already tight,” a November 2025 post by the energy company NRG explains. “Consumers will feel the shift as power costs increasingly reflect true market conditions not softened by federal incentives.”
An August report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental group, estimated that the Trump administration’s energy policies overall — such as OBBBA, the power plant regulation repeal, tariffs, emergency orders to keep coal plants open, and slowdowns or blockages of renewable energy project permitting — would lead to an increase of 4.2% to 5.5% in the price U.S. households pay for each kilowatt-hour of electricity by 2035, with much greater increases in certain regions. On top of that, because the OBBBA prematurely ends energy efficiency tax credits for homeowners, household electricity bills are expected to be higher because homes will use more electricity.
In its larger calculations on savings to Americans and the power sector, the EPA found repealing the power plant regulations would save $310 billion, a figure an EPA spokesperson highlighted in the agency’s response to our questions. “The power sector will save billions of dollars in compliance costs, and society will save billions of dollars more in lower electricity bills and by not having to fund tax credits for CO2 sequestration,” a spokesperson said.
However, Peplinski said the EPA “really departed from best practices” in not also calculating economic harms from emissions. Allowing coal plants to stay open longer will lead to billions of tons of extra CO2 emissions, she said. Her group’s new analysis estimated $1.7 trillion in damages from the increased greenhouse gas emissions. She also noted that resulting coal plant emissions would lead to other air pollution as well, leading to more immediate health effects to those nearby.
“Painting the cost savings as the whole picture is really misrepresenting what the outcome of this rollback will be,” Peplinski said.
Danis noted that climate change could make it more expensive to build and maintain a reliable electric grid. “Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing the severity, strength, unpredictability and frequency of large-scale weather events, and it is precisely large-scale weather events that make our grid more costly to have to plan around and plan for,” she said.
If in the future the government does try again to reduce carbon emissions, a Sept. 15 analysis from Ross and colleagues at Duke found that system cost savings from rolling back regulations will be more than canceled out by increased costs of reaching emissions goals on a tighter timeframe.
“Basically, any time you have a sudden transition, it’s going to be more expensive than a gradual transition,” Ross said.
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