The coal-fueled Oak Grove Power Plant in Robertson County, Texas on April 29, 2024. Brandon Bell / Getty Images
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Recent policies from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would lower emissions and force an early retirement of most U.S. coal plants, speeding up the transition away from fossil fuels with limited cost, a new study shows. However, whether those rules will stay intact during an upcoming Trump administration is doubtful.
The power plant rules, targeting coal-fired power plants specifically, were finalized in May 2024 as supplementary policy supporting the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act’s agenda to reduce carbon emissions.
The study, published in the journal science, used nine computer models to simulate “hypothetical future scenarios to understand impacts of the finalized power plant rules,” lead author John Bistline told EcoWatch in a video call.
“Specifically, we see 73 to 86% reductions by 2040 relative to 2005 levels, and that’s compared to something like 60 to 83% without the rules,” Bistline said.
He added that with and without the rules, the models also showed a future decrease in non-CO2 emissions, including sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx).
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In a blow to these policies, however, President-elect Donald Trump has previously promised to undo the new policies, calling them an “anti-American-energy crusade,” Cronkite News reported.
“Each of the nine models is independent, and some of the models are just looking at the power sector only, whereas others have broader scopes, where they look at the entire energy system and linkages with the power sector, or even broader, looking at the economy as a whole in the U.S.,” Bistline said.
“If there are areas that [the] models all seem to agree, that gives more confidence that what they’re saying is fairly robust, at least across models,” he added.
The modeling was conducted by multiple institutions, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and Resources for the Future, a press release said.
While the study showed a significant decline in carbon emissions and overall power generation from the power plants, other energy sources including natural gas, renewables and nuclear either showed an increase in output or stayed roughly even, relative to models without the rules.
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Even in scenarios with higher electricity usage like an increase in data center usage, the percentage of emissions reduced largely stays the same, but building the infrastructure to support such an increased load could be a challenge, Bistline said.
However, the authors found that in a range of scenarios both with and without the rules, the U.S. would still fall short of two of its critical goals: its 2030 goal to reduce net greenhouse gases 50-52 percent below 2005 levels and its 2050 net-zero goal.
“The implications of the rules for different technologies vary a lot by region and by scenario. There’s no one size fits all approach to decarbonization,” Bistline said. But even in the absence of EPA guidelines, we could still see evolving trends, he added.
While the fate of these policies is unclear, Bistline said that he and the other researchers intend on continuing collaborating with other organizations to analyze energy trends through their models.
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