The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moved Thursday to repeal a cornerstone coal‑plant pollution rule, casting the three‑year‑old requirement as an outdated drag on the grid just as electricity consumption is swelling to power artificial intelligence data centers. The proposal, which still requires a public comment period and finalization, would lift a mandate that coal‑fired power plants capture and treat toxic heavy metals—mercury, arsenic, selenium and others—before they seep through unlined coal‑ash dumps into groundwater that eventually reaches rivers, lakes and streams.
The 2024 regulation, adopted under President Joe Biden, gave plant owners until Dec. 31, 2029, to pump out contaminated groundwater, filter it, and then release the treated water. The EPA had projected the rule would slash pollutant discharges by 660 to 672 million pounds a year, deliver $3.2 billion in annual public‑health benefits—concentrated in low‑income communities and communities of color—and raise the average household electric bill by less than $3.50.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Thursday that those gains came at an unacceptable cost to reliability and affordability. “The AI and data center revolution is creating an electricity and baseload power demand that cannot be met under the overly restrictive policies of past administrations,” Zeldin said in a statement. “The Trump EPA will continue doing its part to address these burdensome regulations on the coal‑fired power plant sector that hold American communities back from the new opportunities presented by this new 21st century energy reality.” The agency estimated the rollback would reduce power‑generation costs by as much as $1.1 billion a year.
Coal and power‑industry trade associations applauded the move. Environmental groups immediately denounced it as a public‑health giveaway. Thom Cmar, an attorney for Earthjustice, said the lakes and rivers that would absorb the additional pollution often serve as drinking‑water sources for tens of millions of people.
“This plan would eliminate safeguards on hundreds of millions of pounds of wastewater with neurotoxins and cancer‑causing contaminants,” Cmar said. “It would allow coal power plants to avoid cleaning up contamination that threatens our drinking water sources.”
Under the proposed change, the EPA would no longer require plants to treat contaminated groundwater that passively seeps into waterways. Only facilities that had already begun pumping water to the surface for treatment under the 2024 rule would be required to continue, Earthjustice said. The EPA itself found that dozens of coal plants—likely up to 104—are polluting groundwater through uncontrolled runoff, while only seven plants have complied with the pump‑and‑treat mandate.
States could still investigate and force cleanup under federal clean‑water laws, Cmar acknowledged, but he said many are reluctant to use that authority. “The problem is, at the state level, many states are reluctant to use that tool that they all have to hold up the permitting process and force the companies to do an adequate job of documenting and limiting the pollution,” he said.
The proposal is the latest in a series of Trump‑era rollbacks aimed at coal‑mining and coal‑burning regulations, all promoted as essential to sustaining domestic fossil‑fuel capacity as demand from data centers, manufacturing and electrification strains the grid. The EPA will accept public comments before finalizing the rule, a process expected to take months.