Impacts of EPA’s Finalized Power Plant Greenhouse Gas Standards | Science

The Environmental Protection Agency finalized the latest chapter in the long saga of regulating greenhouse gases from electric power plants in May 2024. The rules require existing coal plants to meet an emissions threshold aligned with 90% carbon capture by 2032 in order to continue running after 2038.

In an article published in Science, Rhodium Group and 11 other organizations find, through a collaborative modeling effort, that the rules could reduce US power sector carbon emissions 73- 86% below 2005 levels by 2040, compared with 60-83% percent without the rules. The nine models used by the research team not only found notable emissions reductions, but a change in power generation: coal-fired power plants retire at quicker rates under the rules while the use of natural gas, renewables, and nuclear either increases or holds steady relative to trends without the rules. In a range of scenarios with and without the rules, the authors find that the US falls short of the emissions reductions needed to meet its 2030 economy-wide emissions target and its 2050 net-zero goal.