EPA"s New Priorities Clear; Lots Of Coal-Fired Electricity To Power AI, Plus "Carbon Capture", Despite Utility Warnings
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Lee Zeldin announced this week that the Trump administration will “reconsider” federal rules that pushed power companies to start planning to reduce their climate-altering pollution over the next couple of decades. “[W]hen coal plants are open, viable and thriving,” the EPA wrote in a fact sheet accompanying the announcement, “we won’t have to rely on energy sources from adversaries.”
The U-turn throws open the doors for utilities to keep their coal plants running for decades without curbing their climate-altering emissions, part of a wider deregulatory surge the EPA announced this week. In justifying its retreat from climate action, the EPA said it sought to “Make the United States the Artificial Intelligence Capital of the World,” and cited Trump executive orders related to AI and energy. It also said that “[c]oncerns have been raised” over the costs and feasibility of the technology that power plants would need to hit federal standards on greenhouse gas pollution, and described objections that the technologies are “not adequately demonstrated or are too costly.”
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When utility giant PPL Corp. announced the Department of Energy planned to give the company $72 million for a carbon capture project at its natural gas power plant in Louisville, Kentucky, CEO Vincent Sorgi offered high praise for carbon capture. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) are “technologies that can be scaled safely, reliably, and affordably to meet our customers’ energy needs,” he said in a February 2024 press release. Less than a year later, PPL’s Kentucky subsidiaries struck a very different tone in the Jan. 15 letter to Zeldin, stating how expensive and difficult to implement the technology is.
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When companies like Duke talk to utilities regulators about carbon capture funding, for example, they tend to strike a more optimistic tone, Sturgis said. “They’re very cautious about it — but not so cautious that they won’t risk [millions] of other people’s money for it,” she said. “When they’re talking to investors, they’re much more cautious about it. But then in that letter, [to Zeldin] they’re like, no, it’s just not possible,” Sturgis added. And it’s not just federal taxpayer money on the line as utilities scramble to make carbon capture commercially viable (or at least viable enough to justify postponing coal power plant retirements). There’s also the question of whether state-level regulators will allow the company to pass CCS study costs along to customers in their power bills. “Duke got $8 million from the DOE. That’s not enough to do the study,” Sturgis said. “They need another $10 million from ratepayers to do the study.”
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https://www.desmog.com/2025/03/14/trump-plan-to-use-epa-to-promote-ai-could-harm-the-climate-and-drive-up-electric-bills/