How Trump’s coal policies will impact CT, a state with no coal power plants

There is one operating coal-fired power plant left in New England, a far cry from the widespread use of coal that began nearly a century-and-a-half ago. That plant — the Merrimack Power Station in Bow, N.H., just south of Concord — is slated to close in June 2028.

So it stands to reason that President Donald J. Trump’s recent series of executive orders, designed to make greater use of coal for electricity and fire up a rapidly dying industry in the U.S., would elicit a collective shrug from the region.

Not from Connecticut.

Connecticut, more than any state east of the Mississippi, has faced persistent poor air quality. It is caused in large part by emissions from power plants in the central part of the country — especially the more than 200 that are coal-fired, the most polluting form of energy generation.

Paul Farrell, director of planning and standards in the Air Division of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, DEEP, is certainly not shrugging.

Modeling from the Environmental Protection Agency, he said, has shown that on days Connecticut has its worst ozone pollution — the notorious smog and dirty air that occurs in the heat of summer — 90% to 95% of the air that flows into the state is already above the federal standard for pollution levels when it gets here.

“We get that long range transport from the Midwest and Western states and even Texas,” he said. “Then that combines with vehicular pollution coming up the I-95 corridor, and it all comes to a head right over New York City, that adds that pollution load into it. And then it just wafts into our state.”

Indeed, the just-released 2025 State of the Air report by the American Lung Association, ranks Southwestern Connecticut as having the 16^th worst ozone pollution in the country. Four of Connecticut’s eight counties receive F grades for ozone, three receive D grades and one manages a C.

The state had 23 days last year with ozone levels above allowable federal standards. That’s the highest number recorded in recent years. Only the northern and eastern parts of the state meets 2008 ozone standards. No part of the state meets the tighter 2015 standards.

The Trump administration has given exemptions to about 70 coal plants to continue operating under the current emissions standards for at least another couple of years beyond 2027, when tighter emissions regulations put in place by the Biden administration are slated to take effect. Among the plants that are exempt are many of the midwestern and mid-Atlantic plants directly upwind from Connecticut, as well as several plants that are the most polluting plants in the country.

New Hampshire’s Merrimack is also on the list — a head-scratcher even to its owner, Granite Shore Power; they never requested an exemption because they already have one. With closure slated for 2028, the government didn’t require expensive pollution upgrades for that short time period.

“Without this [earlier] exemption, Merrimack Station would have been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for monitoring equipment for a plant that will be closing months later,” a spokesman for Granite Shore said in an email statement.

The spokesman said there is no plan to delay Merrimack’s closing, which the Trump actions would also allow. Plans to transition the plant to a solar and storage operation remain on schedule, and the coal operation will continue to comply with emissions requirements.

In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin issued a series of 31 environmental regulations the administration wanted to revisit and/or rollback. Included among them was one that set stricter limits on mercury and air toxics standards, or MATS, for coal- and oil-fired power plants. The standards he targeted were finalized a year ago by the Biden administration and would have cut emissions of mercury, which is known to cause several human health problems, carbon dioxide — a key climate change contributor — nitrogen oxide, fine particulate matter and a number of metals.

“What I foresee is that this two-year extension is but a first step of a two-step process that Lee Zeldin is orchestrating with the result being that these plants don’t have to make a single more ton or pound of pollution reductions,” said Joseph Goffman, assistant administrator of the EPA Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration. He said Zeldin’s plan to “reconsider” the MATS rule “was his way of telegraphing very, very, very unsubtly that his intention was to have the reconsideration process result in the rules being repealed altogether.”

The extension of lifelines to coal is just one of the rule rollbacks and reconsiderations proposed by the Trump EPA that could have an impact on air quality in Connecticut.

Among the most concerning is reconsideration of the Good Neighbor Plan, which would have forced 23 states upwind from Connecticut to reduce interstate transport of air pollution from power plants and other polluting industries. It is currently under a stay the Supreme Court issued last June when the justices sent it back down to lower courts. The federal Clean Air Act itself, now more than 55 years old, contains a good neighbor provision to limit interstate transport of air pollutants.

Another would reconsider the standards for motor vehicle tailpipe emissions the Biden administration tightened for cars, light and heavy-duty trucks. That has DEEP’s Farrell even more concerned than the specter of prolonged coal plant emissions.

“Without a doubt, the biggest public health/air quality impact would come from EPA significantly rolling back the mobile source standards on cars and trucks,” he said. The transportation sector accounts for the bulk of Connecticut’s pollution and ozone problems — about 67%. That’s partly because the region has eliminated coal.

“To address transport, we need a serious federal partner,” Farrell said. “Without the federal government controlling federal sources that are beyond any state’s jurisdiction, we don’t have a hope for meeting our air quality standards for ozone.”

The Trump executive action also opens the door to new coal plants. But the notion that the region would use coal again — even as a backup or in one of the existing power plants that can use more than one fuel — isn’t getting much traction here.

“Absolutely not,” said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association. “No. And I can underline that and an exclamation point. No. The dual fuel facilities that do exist are now gas and oil.”

The only exception in the region is the Merrimack Plant and its sister plant – the Schiller Station in Portsmouth, N.H., which no longer operates and will be redeveloped as a battery energy storage system.

“I see no future for coal in New England once those facilities permanently retire in the next few years,” Dolan said.

New England began its large-scale pullback from coal in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The last of the plants save Merrimack — the Bridgeport Harbor Station along with Salem, Brayton Point and Mt. Tom stations in Massachusetts — closed more recently.

Coal broadly is on the decline. Its use in the U.S. for power generation has fallen by about 67% since 2007, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Its use fell below gas 10 years ago and is now only about one-third of gas.

In the last couple of years coal usage has also fallen below nuclear power, with wind closing in and hydro and solar not far behind. Wind and solar combined overtook coal usage last year for the first time, according to the energy think tank, Ember.

The biggest reason for coal’s decline in the U.S. is widely ascribed to one factor — it’s been priced out by cheap natural gas brought on by the fracking revolution which started around 2005.

“This was not the U.S. government saying ‘shut down these coal plants,’” said Michael Oristaglio, an energy expert at Yale University who founded the Energy Studies Multidisciplinary program and more recently is with the Carbon Containment Lab at Yale. “This was utility, power company owners basically looking at it and saying, ‘does it make sense to build coal or even to use coal anymore? You can convert a coal plant to natural gas.’”

Multiple analyses show coal plants to be among the more expensive forms of power. They are also slower to start up than gas, making them less suitable than gas for emergency — so-called peaker — power. 

“I can see the ones that own these old plants … saying, ‘all right, we have a little more leeway to run them.’ But I don’t see anyone building new coal,” Oristaglio said.

The U.S. does have the largest coal reserves, but China continues to use and build the most coal power, some of it in other nations. Oristaglio also said China recently has been adding carbon capture and other filter equipment to its newer plants, something that may be less worthwhile on the much older plants in the U.S. Ironically, China also has more utility-scale solar than any other country.

But with the economic and environmental focus, the issue that often gets overlooked is the outsized health impacts of pollution from coal plants. Research presented in the publication Science determined the number of U.S. deaths from 1999 to 2020 attributable to particulate matter from coal represented a more-than two times greater mortality risk than exposure to the same fine particulates from all sources.

But there are many more pollutants in coal and the effect is cumulative, said Goffman, the former EPA official.

“What’s at stake for public health is the fact that cumulatively, and so simultaneously, people are exposed to multiple pollutants, whether they’re part of fine particles or mercury or other air toxics or ozone,” he said.

“What we’re driving towards is improved public health outcomes. So I think that often gets lost. I think in the air quality story — it’s really about public health,” said Emma Cimino, DEEP’s deputy commissioner of environmental quality.

While DEEP points out that air pollution in Connecticut is vastly diminished from what it was decades ago, with so many rule rollbacks under consideration, the concern is that the strains on health might become more noticeable.

“As you start to see those tools disappear or be pulled back or even threatened, I think it’s possible that the progress slows,” Cimino said. “Hopefully it doesn’t reverse, but certainly it puts the region on a much slower track to meeting our air quality standards.”

Farrell at DEEP agreed. “At the end of the day, really we want to just remind people that this is about public health,” he said. “It’s really an all-the-above sort of solution. We can’t pick just power plants. We can’t pick just cars. You can’t just pick industrials. Everyone needs to contribute to the solution.

“I think people may have taken the environment and public health a little bit for granted, and we really shouldn’t be in a position where we need to wait for rivers to catch on fire again before we wake up and say, ‘wait a minute – this has to stop.’”