Trump’s ‘largest deregulatory action ever’ in the power sector will keep old coal plants online longer to fuel the AI boom

The biggest immediate impact of the Trump administration rolling back Biden-era emissions standards on power plants is it will keep more old coal and gas-fired plants viable for longer to help provide additional energy for data centers and the AI boom, experts said.

The U.S.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said Monday it finalized the repeal of emission-reduction mandates for power plants that were intended to combat climate change .

The announcement came shortly after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the 2026 summer was the warmest in U.S. history—about 3 degrees Fahrenheit above average.

Trump’s EPA said Monday that “emissions from power plants have no material impact on global climate change.” Environmental critics called that assertion a lie, arguing the rollback will cause thousands of unnecessary deaths from pollution and trigger many billions of dollars in additional health care costs.

But there is an argument that this strikes a balance between climate and the economy—“step back in order to take two steps forward,” said Dan Romito, managing director at Opportune overseeing sustainability.

While renewable power can continue to expand, the energy sector is on the verge of leaps in cleaner, next-gen nuclear power and geothermal energy.

“It’s a Band-Aid for a lot of these data centers to figure out how to get replacement or complementary power,” Romito told Fortune.

“We need a little bit of a stopgap here.

It’s not an ideal choice.

But coal can fill that bill for three, four, maybe five years.

And that will allow the market to efficiently incorporate geothermal and nuclear solutions into the mix.” In the meantime, the AI race is continuing, power projects are being announced without many getting off the starting line, and congressional permitting reform to expedite power—both clean and fossil fuel—appears unlikely to come to fruition this year.

So something had to give, Romito argued.

“This power is not going to magically come out of nowhere.