THE EDITOR – The Trump administration is allowing coal plants to release more pollution at a time when utilities across the country are opting to save their aging coal facilities from retirement so they can power artificial intelligence.
Those twin trends — weaker pollution safeguards and accelerated coal use — could have dramatic implications for rising temperatures and the health of people living near coal plants whose emissions are linked to heart disease, respiratory illness and lower IQs.
The data center building boom threatens to halt a 15-year decline in U.S. coal use as the power industry races to meet the skyrocketing energy demands of AI supercomputers. That’s because the breakneck construction of AI hubs is pushing utilities to increase their reliance on coal plants that had been headed toward retirement, while outracing efforts to build cleaner sources of power such as nuclear, natural gas or renewables.
President Donald Trump has amplified those effects by lowering hurdles for fossil fuel development, obstructing renewable energy projects and seeking to erase or weaken regulations that constrained the release of soot, mercury and climate pollution from coal plants.
The turnaround is stark: More than 500 coal-fired power plants retired between 2010 and 2019, according to federal data. At the same time, federal regulations reduced the amount of pollution released from the plants.
But in the past two years, utilities have delayed the retirements of more than 30 generating units at 15 coal plants across the country to provide power to data centers, according to an analysis from the sustainability think tank Frontier Group. The Trump administration ordered two power plants — a coal facility in Michigan and an oil and gas plant in Pennsylvania — to remain open past their closure dates.
Some delays are expected to last a few years, but others could be much longer. Dominion Energy has postponed the retirement of its Virginia Clover Power Station southeast of Lynchburg by 20 years, to 2045. Two oil-burning power plants have also delayed retirements due to the energy demands of data centers, according to the Frontier Group.
Altogether, the 15 fossil fuel plants emitted almost 65 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2023 — more than was released by all pollution sources in Massachusetts. That stands to impede efforts to lessen the nation’s carbon pollution. Coal plants accounted for about 15 percent of U.S. power generation last year, down from roughly 50 percent in 2001. Yet climate pollution is rising this year in the U.S., in part because of increased coal use.
EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch said the administration’s rollbacks of Biden-era regulations will not harm public health because pollution limits from more than a decade ago will remain in effect.
“We’re bound by actual laws passed by Congress, not wishful thinking from climate zealots who want to shut down reliable power keeping American AI dominance online,” she said. “Reliable coal plants supporting America’s technological leadership isn’t the crisis activists claim, it’s commonsense energy policy.”
But the side-by-side trends of scrapping pollution rules and prolonging the lives of coal plants could endanger people. Scientists have found dangerous health effects from coal pollution.
Two Georgia coal plants being kept online for AI were responsible for thousands of deaths over the past 20 years, according to a 2023 peer-reviewed study published in Science and funded by the National Institutes of Health. One of the facilities, Plant Bowen northwest of Atlanta, was ranked as the second-deadliest coal plant in the country, contributing to the deaths of 7,500 people, the study said.
Bowen and Plant Scherer near Macon, one of the largest coal facilities in the world, were supposed to be converted to burn gas by the end of this decade. Then in January, Georgia Power said both plants would keep burning coal through 2039 to keep up with demand from AI. In April, Trump gave both plants a two-year reprieve from requirements to reduce mercury and soot pollution beginning in 2027.
The decision to keep the Bowen and Scherer plants running was “primarily driven by the anticipated capacity demands” through 2031, Georgia Power spokesperson Matthew Kent said.
But he said the utility’s request for exemptions from mercury pollution rules stemmed from concerns about the accuracy of monitoring technology, and was “not in any way related to concerns about powering data centers.”
Those plants are not the only ones getting reprieves.
Nearly 70 power plants have been allowed to ignore the 2027 requirement to reduce mercury and soot pollution, while the Environmental Protection Agency rewrites those rules to permanently allow more emissions. The agency is also weakening rules aimed at limiting mercury and other cancer-causing pollutants in waterways, and it’s scrapping or delaying power plant rules that would limit soot and planet-warming emissions.
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence data centers” means “America’s coal power plants must remain in operation,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin co-wrote in a Fox News op-ed in September.
Many of the coal plant retirements were delayed before Trump took office. But utilities have cited the administration — and its expected rollbacks — in decisions to postpone at least two retirements.
Five of the 15 coal plants with delayed retirements have received pollution passes from the administration. Those include Bowen, Scherer and plants in Illinois, Mississippi and West Virginia. Together, they emitted nearly 190 pounds of mercury in 2023, according to an analysis of EPA pollution data by POLITICO’s E&E News.
“You are seeing utilities and grid operators emboldened by these changes in the regulatory landscape,” said Quentin Good, a policy analyst with Frontier Group. “These are power plants that were scheduled to close this year or next year, and they would not be polluting and burning coal if not for AI.”
Environmental and public health groups have filed legal challenges against the administration for waiving the pollution requirements, noting that the action relies on a never-before-used provision that allows exemptions for national security reasons.
The Trump administration’s use of the exemption, their lawsuit says, “jeopardizes the realization of … public health benefits without any proper basis.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
AI’s pollution ‘cost’
Generative AI is expanding the amount of space and power that data centers need for computing and communication. AI chatbots use more electricity when responding to user queries than regular internet searches. So-called hyperscale data centers can sprawl more than 200,000 square feet, and use as much power as 50,000 homes.
That has strained utilities, many of which have proposed building natural gas plants and pipelines to keep up. But building infrastructure doesn’t happen overnight, so utilities are turning to aging coal plants.
That comes with health costs.
Researchers at the University of California found that training one large language AI model can create more pollution than 10,000 round-trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City. The 2024 study also estimated that the pollution from powering all U.S. data centers could impose $20 billion in annual health costs by 2030.
Those calculations are “very conservative,” said co-author Shaolei Ren, a professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. The estimates were made before the Trump administration began rolling back pollution limits and before many coal plants delayed their retirements.
“I generally agree that we need AI, but the air pollution, the climate pollution, we can measure that, and I think we need to think about that cost,” he said.
Pollution from coal plants is already “more toxic than from other sources,” said Francesca Dominici, a population and data scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
When EPA finalized its mercury and air toxics rules last year, months before President Joe Biden left office, it predicted that by 2028 the regulations would prevent the release of 1,000 pounds of mercury and 770 tons of fine particulate matter into the air.
Around the same time, the Biden administration finalized a greenhouse gas regulation for power plants that put new limits on planet-warming emissions while also reducing soot and other pollution. EPA is now working to repeal the climate rule and weaken the mercury regulation to revert pollution limits to those established in 2012.
The agency is also trying to delay another Biden-era coal plant rule that limited the release of a carcinogen called bromide into wastewater for the first time. The rule was projected to avoid 100 cases of bladder cancer annually. If that delay and others are successful, coal plants would still have to comply with rules written during the previous Trump administration that had less-stringent mercury limits but none on bromide.
Hirsch, the EPA spokesperson, noted that the 2012 mercury air rules have been “highly effective,” citing agency data showing that the regulation had reduced mercury emissions 90 percent by 2021.
“Communities have robust federal protections that have already delivered dramatic results,” Hirsch said. “The Trump EPA will ensure ALL Americans have clean air, land and water while Powering the Great American Comeback and making America the AI capital of the world.”
Powering AI
One-third of the coal plants being kept online to power AI are in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States and will be used to power so-called Data Center Alley, a three-county swath in Virginia that could soon be home to 400 or more data centers.
That has made future electricity demand skyrocket in Dominion Energy’s Virginia service territory, where the need for power is expected to increase 85 percent over the next 15 years, according to projections from PJM Interconnection, the region’s grid operator.
Virginia can’t provide enough power itself, so PJM has asked two Maryland coal plants to delay retirements.
A third fossil fuel plant in PJM’s network, Eddystone Generating Station in Pennsylvania, had been scheduled to retire in May 2025. But the Department of Energy ordered it to stay online — and keep burning oil — because closing it “would exacerbate … resource adequacy issues.” The order was extended through February.
The department has issued similar orders for coal plants, including J.H. Campbell in Michigan. The order came days before the plant was set to stop operating in May. That order has been extended twice, and the plant must now stay online through February.
A DOE spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said the orders were meant to prevent “unnecessary power outages” due to “premature retirement of reliable power plants, which have included coal, oil and natural gas plants.”
The projected power needs of Georgia’s data centers are delaying the retirement of three coal plants — including one in Mississippi.
The data center boom could triple Georgia’s electricity demand over the next decade, according to Georgia Power. A recent filing by the utility estimates that “large load” projects will require more than 51,000 megawatts of power through the mid-2030s.
Microsoft, which is constructing data centers in three Georgia locations, supported Georgia Power’s decision to delay coal retirements. The tech company, which projects it will be carbon neutral by 2030, sided with Georgia Power when environmental groups legally challenged the utility’s integrated resource plan this summer.
“Microsoft submits that it has a substantial interest in these proceedings as a large consumer of electricity from Georgia Power with particularized needs for electric service,” the company wrote in its motion to intervene.
To help it meet data center demand, Georgia Power is already purchasing 600 megawatts of power from a Mississippi coal plant, the Victor J. Daniel Electric Generating Plant, which had been set to retire by 2027 before its operations were extended.
When the Georgia Public Utilities Commission met to approve the deal in 2024, Commissioner Tim Echols said buying out-of-state energy had a benefit: “The pollution’s not in Georgia, right?”
“It’s in Mississippi. It’s in other places,” he said. Echols lost his reelection bid earlier this month.
‘Going back in time’
Georgia environmental groups have questioned whether the energy demand from data centers is illusory. When Georgia Power announced its plans in January to keep Bowen and Scherer open, roughly half the hyperscale projects included in its planning documents had not committed to coming to the state.
“They are trying to make it possible for data centers to come here, but in the meantime the people who are going to pay the price with their health are regular Georgians,” said Jennifer Whitfield, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Pollution from Bowen and Scherer blows across the state, raising unhealthy levels of soot and smog as far away as Atlanta, said Stan Meiburg, who spent 18 years as EPA’s deputy regional administrator for the Southeast.
The coal plants also create pollution problems for people whose homes surround the megafacilities. Last year, Georgia Power settled a lawsuit with dozens of people who alleged that Scherer improperly dumped coal ash into local groundwater. They argued that it had contaminated their wells and caused health problems, including cancer.
Andrea Goolsby, who grew up in Juliette, Georgia, under the billowing pollution of Scherer, considers herself luckier than most because her family did not rely on well water. Still, she remembers the white siding of her grandmother’s house being colored by black soot and learning at an early age not to eat fish caught nearby because they were laden with mercury.
She and her neighbors breathed a sigh of relief in 2022 when Georgia Power announced it would retire the plant. Then the utility changed plans this year.
“We thought this would be done by now, but it feels like we’re going back in time,” said Goolsby, a conservative Republican who voted for Trump.
She expected the administration to roll back some environmental protections but said she was shocked when EPA exempted Scherer from mercury limits.
“I don’t understand why they are giving pollution passes that affect people’s health,” Goolsby said. “Everyone should have to follow the rules, even if you are AI. We live here, this is our life, but our interests are not in the forefront.”
