Electric cooperatives on Wednesday continued urging the Environmental Protection Agency to fully repeal a 2024 rule regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, pointing to the harm it would inflict on electric affordability and reliability as demand climbs.
The Biden administration rule remains the law of the land today and restricts operations at existing coal-fired plants and new natural gas facilities unless they install carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology that is not commercially available or technically feasible, co-op leaders say.
The 2024 rule “puts utilities in an untenable position where they invest significant dollars into new power plants that they are then restricted from running at full capacity,” NRECA CEO Jim Matheson said during an Aug. 19 media teleconference. “That doesn’t make sense.”
The Trump administration issued a proposal in June 2025 to roll back the requirements but has yet to finalize it. Matheson urged the agency to finalize a complete repeal of the 2024 rule immediately.
“We need a full and complete repeal,” he said.
Under the Biden rule, if new combined-cycle gas plants do not install CCS by 2032, they would be forced to shut down.
Between now and 2032, new combined-cycle gas plants must meet emissions limits that cannot be achieved by the majority of new plants, which means they will be limited to running at 40% of their potential output. Simple-cycle plants similarly must meet emissions limits that cannot be achieved by most new units or be limited to running 20% of the time.
Consequently, the rule could force the construction of duplicative gas plants to equal the output of a single plant that is allowed to run near full capacity, co-ops say.
Generation and transmission co-op leaders on the call pointed to projects already under development, emphasizing that the rule increases costs and complicates long-term planning just as demand rises from residential and industrial growth and new data centers.
Oglethorpe Power Corp., based in Tucker, Georgia, is building two combined-cycle gas facilities and two gas peaking units over the next seven years, with the first combined-cycle facility totaling $3.3 billion. Together, these new generation investments will represent the most efficient gas generation in Oglethorpe’s fleet.
But unless the 2024 rule is repealed, that highly efficient capacity would be forced to sit idle 60% of the time, requiring Oglethorpe’s members to spend an additional $150 million to $300 million per year on replacement power, President and CEO Annalisa Bloodworth said.
“Georgia’s cooperatives and Oglethorpe care deeply about our communities and their success,” she said. “For more than 50 years, we’ve taken care of our environment, we’ve significantly reduced our emissions, and we have kept the lights on. But we cannot do that at a price consumers can afford with the deeply flawed mandates of this rule.”
“A full repeal of the power plant rule is what we need. It is critical to be able to plan, to invest with confidence and to protect Georgians from senseless costs that they can’t bear,” Bloodworth said.
David Tudor, CEO and general manager of Associated Electric Cooperative, which serves member-consumers in Oklahoma, Missouri and Iowa, said his G&T is building five combustion turbine peaking units to meet rising demand from households and in anticipation of higher demand from manufacturing and data centers.
But average earnings for the co-op’s consumer-members is $50,000 a year, which “puts a lot of pressure on us to keep electric rates affordable.”
“We’ve got to keep our existing fleet to keep the lights on … and then we’re having to build a new generation to meet the load growth,” Tudor said. “To be told at the last minute, while we’re already under construction, that we can only operate these plants at 20%-40% is just silly.”
“There are so many flaws in the rule; it needs to go away,” he concluded.
Todd Brickhouse, CEO and general manager of Basin Electric Power Cooperative in North Dakota, said the country’s energy independence hinges on the cost and availability of energy.
But the 2024 power plant rule “adversely impacts both of these.”
Basin Electric is building the $4 billion, 1,490-megawatt combined-cycle Bison Generation Station and recently completed a 580 MW natural gas generating facility consisting of simple-cycle generators and reciprocating engines. Although renewable energy makes up 30% of the co-op’s portfolio, “to bring electrons onto the grid rapidly, it’s all a natural gas game right now,” Brickhouse said.
Earlier this week, the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nation’s grid watchdog, predicted the U.S. will need around 200 gigawatts of additional power within seven years, equal to the demand of about 200 San Franciscos.
Co-ops are making thoughtful investments and long-term plans for new generation, and “the sooner we can take away this major uncertainty and absurd restriction on our ability to run these plants, the better,” Matheson emphasized.
“There’s such a focus on affordability these days,” he continued. “Electric cooperatives serve 92% of all the persistent poverty counties in America—affordability is front of mind for every co-op across the nation. The best policy action we can take today to address affordability is repeal this rule.”
Molly Christian is a staff writer for NRECA.