In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out power across Texas. ERCOT's grid buckled. The Southwest Power Pool strained to breaking. Over 200 people died — not from the storm itself, but because the electricity wasn't there when they needed it.
The EPA under the previous administration responded by passing regulations that would have made it worse.
EPA Deputy Administrator David Fatouhi laid out the numbers: by repealing Biden-era green energy mandates and keeping traditional power infrastructure online, the Trump EPA projects $310 billion in savings for American ratepayers through 2047. Direct compliance savings alone hit $370 million. Coal production, strangled for years by regulatory fiat, could rise more than tenfold.
"Costs will go down for consumers on their electric bills, and it will also mean that electric generators can invest money into the electric grid, into ensuring grid stability, so that when folks need the lights to stay on, that they will stay on, and that electricity will be there when it's needed most for businesses, for hospitals, for families across the country," Fatouhi said.
The rollback targets a specific stack of Obama-and-Biden-era rules. The 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards — repealed. The 2023-24 Methane Rule — gone. The Inflation Reduction Act's waste emissions charge — sidelined. Mercury and Air Toxics Standards — under review. Each one added cost to generation, discouraged investment in reliable baseload power, and pushed the grid toward intermittent sources that perform beautifully on a lobbyist's spreadsheet and less beautifully during a polar vortex.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp's 2025-26 winter assessment flagged a 20-gigawatt rise in peak demand. That's the gap between what Americans need and what a green-mandate grid can deliver. NERC didn't editorialize about it. They just published the number. Twenty gigawatts is not a policy debate. It's a blackout waiting for a cold snap.
The Supreme Court had already signaled where this was heading. West Virginia v. EPA in 2022 told the agency it couldn't reshape the entire energy sector through regulatory creativity. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin took the hint. The current EPA is unwinding rules the Court essentially told the previous EPA it didn't have the authority to write.
Fatouhi emphasized the interconnected nature of the grid: "When we can get more generation online in one part of the country, it helps everyone." That's the part the state-by-state green mandates ignore. California's decision to shut down natural gas plants doesn't stay in California when the Western Interconnection needs electrons and California is importing them from Nevada.
The Biden EPA's theory was straightforward: make fossil fuel generation expensive enough and renewables win by default. The theory required ignoring that grid reliability isn't a market preference — it's a physics constraint. You cannot will a battery into existence at 2 a.m. during an ice storm because your solar panels are under three inches of snow. The 2014 polar vortex proved it. Winter Storm Uri proved it with a body count.
Three hundred ten billion dollars through 2047. That's not a projection from an industry lobby. That's the EPA's own estimate of what Americans save when the government stops trying to engineer the energy market from Washington.
The lights stayed on in Texas last winter. The EPA would like to keep it that way.
