Trump's EPA decimated climate rules for power plants. What now?

The Environmental Protection Agency this week repealed the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, a set of Biden-era rules that would have forced fossil fuel power plants to cut or capture their emissions, or shut down. The move, announced by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, wipes out the last major federal climate rule covering power plants from both the Obama and Biden years.

This doesn't mean the shift away from coal power stops. A similar pattern played out after Obama's 2015 Clean Power Plan was repealed under the first Trump administration: the U.S. still hit that plan's pollution-reduction target a decade early, because utilities kept retiring old coal plants in favor of natural gas and renewables. That kept happening largely because it's cheaper. Renewables remain the lowest-cost power option in the country, and keeping old coal plants running under federal orders has already added millions of dollars in extra costs for utility customers over the past year.

For homeowners, this doesn't change anything directly about your electric bill or your house today. It does mean the pace of the shift toward cleaner power will likely depend more on economics and state-level decisions than on federal rules going forward. Separately, if you're in California, Gov. Newsom has bills on his desk that could affect utility rates and virtual power plant programs, and Massachusetts has expanded winter bill discounts for homes with heat pumps.