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Updated April 27, 2026
The Trump administration has rolled back a major Biden-era climate rule for power plants with a blunt warning: without the rollback, Americans could lose access to dependable electricity. Energy economists, grid planners and legal experts who study the system closely say that warning does not hold up to evidence. The rule did push some old coal plants toward retirement, but those exits were already happening, and the coal and gas plants that administration officials now champion have their own well-documented record of failing in extreme weather.
The EPA rule at issue, finalized in 2024, targeted greenhouse gas emissions from existing coal-fired plants and newly built natural gas plants. Its requirements were phased and tied to each plant's intended lifespan. A coal plant that said it would retire before 2032 faced no new cleanup obligations. A plant closing by 2039 had to begin burning some natural gas alongside coal starting in 2030. Plants planning to operate past 2032, along with the most heavily used new gas plants, would have needed carbon capture systems to prevent 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032.
At the time, EPA estimated the package would produce up to $370 billion in net climate and health benefits while having only a negligible, 0-1% effect on electricity prices. Coal plants, many of them aging and increasingly costly to run, were already facing strong economic headwinds independent of federal regulation.
Officials went far beyond the technical details when selling the repeal. At a Sept. 14 event in Houston, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the earlier rules "overbearing and often-unlawful" and said previous administrations had used them to "destroy reliable baseload power." Energy Secretary Chris Wright echoed that message, saying the repeal would keep coal and gas plants available "when Americans need it most."
Experts who watch grid operations see no emergency. Jennifer Danis, federal energy policy director at New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, said grid operators are not asking for deregulation. They have been planning for years around changing generation mixes. Duke University economist Martin Ross made the same point more directly: the system has adapted to renewables without reliability problems, and there is no reason to expect the future to be different.
The word "baseload" itself has become a political shortcut. In the past, grid operators relied on continuously running coal, gas or nuclear plants. Today, they have more tools, including batteries, demand response and regional transmission links. A 2025 report co-authored by Danis put it plainly: reducing grid reliability to the term "baseload" does not reflect current planning or operational realities.
The administration is not just undoing the carbon capture and co-firing requirements. It has also proposed scrapping the entire rule, including efficiency standards for new gas plants. The legal basis is a sweeping claim that greenhouse gases are not "air pollutants" under the Clean Air Act and that EPA lacks authority to regulate them.
The same reasoning underpins efforts to rescind vehicle emissions rules and the agency's 2009 endangerment finding, which declared greenhouse gases a threat to public health and welfare. The EPA has additionally suggested that U.S. power plant emissions "have no material impact on global climate change." That argument ignores basic accounting: electricity and heat production worldwide account for roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The United States is the second-largest emitter in the world, and about 30% of its domestic emissions come from power plants.
A key part of the administration's case is that wind and solar cannot be trusted in bad weather. It is true that turbines ice over and solar output drops in storms. But fossil plants have their own vulnerabilities.
During Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, freezing equipment knocked out coal and gas plants across Texas. Natural gas failures were the single largest source of generation outages, followed by wind and then coal. A joint report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said the extent to which the event was caused by all types of generating units failing to prepare for extreme cold "cannot be overstated."
As Danis put it, people like to say solar doesn't work when the sun isn't shining. Coal doesn't work when the coal pile is freezing.
Much of that damage was avoidable with winterization, a fact equally true for renewables and fossil plants. Yet the administration's framing tends to dwell on renewable failures while treating coal and gas as infallible.
The DOE has also pointed to emergency orders issued during the 2025 winter storm known informally as Fern. The agency says three coal plants kept online by those orders provided essential power as demand surged.
GridLab program director Nikhil Kumar cautions that using a plant during a storm is not the same as proving the grid would have collapsed without it. The plants in question, the youngest of which dates to the 1980s, had already announced plans to close. Grid operators had reviewed those retirements and accepted the loss of that generation before the emergency orders were issued.
One of the emergency-ordered plants in Indiana was a particularly poor poster child. The utility that owns it wrote to DOE in February saying the plant's performance during Fern "underscores a pattern of unreliability." The plant was dispatched for two days but ran at less than half its capacity. A day later, systemic equipment failures forced another outage.
Customer power losses are overwhelmingly caused by damaged distribution lines, not a shortage of generation. That is especially true in suburbs with overhead wires exposed to storms, said Johannes Pfeifenberger, an economist at the Brattle Group. The two big grid operators covering much of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, ISO New England and PJM, have never had an outage caused by insufficient electricity generation. By industry standards, a grid is considered reliable if a generation shortfall occurs only once in ten years.
That does not mean the grid faces no pressure. Extreme weather is stressing systems across the country, and demand is growing as homes and businesses electrify. But the evidence tying those stresses to a carbon rule is thin. The more concrete vulnerabilities are aging infrastructure, inadequate winterization and physical wires.
The administration says repealing the rule will save Americans money. There may be a modest downward effect on wholesale electricity prices because some coal plants will run longer than they otherwise would have. But other administration energy policies, including changes to fuel markets and the broader regulatory environment, are expected to push prices in the opposite direction.
The result is a net picture far more complicated than "Americans will save." Independent analysts warn that policy-induced price swings in natural gas and electricity capacity markets could more than offset the immediate benefit of keeping old coal plants alive.
Grid reliability is not a trivial issue. Cold snaps, heat waves, fuel supply interruptions and cyber threats all deserve serious attention. The problem with the administration's messaging is that it treats a relatively cautious EPA rule as the main enemy of reliable power.
That framing fails on two counts. First, the carbon rule did not force an abrupt shutdown of the fossil fleet. Second, the fossil fleet's own storm performance shows that reliability is not about fuel type; it is about preparation, investment and honest planning. Pretending otherwise only makes the next winter storm harder to navigate.
