Environmental and public health groups are challenging the Trump administration’s proposal to repeal greenhouse gas standards for power plants — a change that’s likely to increase Georgia’s emissions, according to advocates. In their lawsuit, groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and American Public Health Association argue the proposed change threatens public health and the environment.
“Clean air is a basic human right. Power plant pollution threatens the health of millions of Americans and fuels climate change, worsening extreme heat, poor air quality, and other serious health risks,” said Georges C. Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, in a statement.
The rule that the Environmental Protection Agency wants to repeal gives coal plants the option to either use technology designed to capture carbon emissions or to close entirely, with a deadline of 2032 to comply. For new natural gas plants, utilities would need to either install carbon capture or simply run the plants less often.
In Georgia, the Biden-era rule, which most experts agree was geared toward phasing out coal, was starting to work. In its 2022 long-term plan, Georgia Power, the state’s largest electricity utility, determined that it was too expensive to keep its coal plants running with carbon capture systems and decided to retire them. When Trump came back into office, though, the company’s calculus changed. According to Maggie Shober of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, utilities have been planning for the repeal of the Biden rule since President Trump was elected to a second term.
Indeed, more than a year ago, Georgia Power got approval from the Georgia Public Service Commission to put off retiring two coal plants, extending one unit at Plant Scherer and three at Plant Gaston. In 2024, the most recent year for which the Energy Information Administration has published data, Plant Scherer, near Macon, emitted more than 8 million tons of carbon dioxide. Plant Gaston, in Alabama, emitted more than 2 million tons that year.
When the company did this, Shober said, “technically the regulation would have been still in effect, but everybody understood it was not going to stay in effect. So they could roll back those coal retirements without planning to put carbon capture on them.”
During resource planning hearings in 2025 — the process that resulted in the delay of the coal retirements — Georgia Power officials said that in order to account for the regulatory uncertainty, the company ran nine planning scenarios, three of which included compliance with this rule and six of which did not.
“These scenarios provide a flexible framework for the company to evaluate its options among differing plausible future scenarios, positioning it to make informed resource planning decisions,” said Jeff Grubb, the utility’s director of resource policy and planning.
The planning agreement approved in 2025 called for Georgia Power to pursue compliance with the Biden-era EPA rule for plants Bowen and Scherer and report updates regularly to the commission, including “the Company’s assessment of the current legal status” of the rule.
Currently, Georgia Power is still running several coal plants and, as a result of the rising demand from data centers, is building a lot of new generation from methane gas, also known as natural gas. Without the EPA restrictions, Shober said emissions from those new gas turbines could more than double.
Under the Biden-era EPA rules, the utility would only have been able to run the new gas turbines about 40 percent of a year, producing about 4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to Shober. Running 85 percent of a year, as they’d be allowed to do if the EPA’s proposed changes go through, she estimated the turbines would produce 8.5 million tons.
The EPA’s rule change isn’t final yet. There will still be a public comment period, and several groups have sued to block it. But as we have seen with the Trump administration, the existence of a given rule doesn’t necessarily translate to how utility companies operate.
Georgia Power’s parent company, Southern Company, did not grant an interview or answer specific questions. Instead, a spokesperson sent a statement saying the company “supports regulatory certainty with a durable framework that leads to reliable and affordable electricity for our customers.” The statement made no mention of the company’s greenhouse gas reduction goal of net zero by 2050.
