The Trump administration just employed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Clean Air Act to discourage coal plant closures in Colorado — repurposing measures initially intended to safeguard public health and prevent pollution to reboot the dirtiest, deadliest fossil fuel. 

Michael Hiatt, deputy managing attorney at the environmental legal nonprofit Earthjustice, told DeSmog that the EPA’s action was not what the Clean Air Act intended. “In our view, it’s plainly illegal,” he said. 

Furthermore, Hiatt said the EPA’s move may have implications beyond Colorado, indicating that the agency could take similar actions that affect coal and gas plants elsewhere.

“It’s clearly EPA indicating a policy preference,” he said. “They are communicating that they’re not going to look favorably on future state plans that include coal or gas plant closures.”

As aging, inefficient coal plants barrel toward obsolescence across the U.S., the Trump administration seems dead-set on coming to their rescue. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy issued orders to keep five coal plants online past their planned retirement dates. The orders often came against their operators’ wishes and cost customers millions in the process. Federal officials, including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, frequently cited increasing energy demands, including for artificial intelligence. Now, the EPA has stepped in.

In late January, the EPA issued its final published rule rejecting Colorado’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan, filed as part of longstanding Clean Air Act rules intended to increase visibility in national parks and wilderness areas. As part of the plan, Colorado had outlined its goal of closing its six remaining coal plants by 2031. Coal plants release multiple smog-forming pollutants that threaten the state’s outdoor recreation industry and harm human health. The utilities involved had voluntarily agreed to this target over the past decade. 

It could have been a routine approval. But at some point in 2025,  Colorado Springs’ city-owned utility told the EPA it no longer wanted to shut down the lone coal-fired generator at the Ray D. Nixon Power Plant, as initially proposed.

The EPA used that development to justify throwing out the entire plan, jeopardizing pollution controls and retirement timelines for industrial sites across the state — from fossil fuel plants and the state’s only oil refinery to the Denver International Airport. In its final rule, the EPA argued the single “forced closure” of a coal-fired unit showed Colorado hadn’t been careful to make sure its plan respected the constitutionally enshrined private property rights of energy providers.

“The state did not properly consider and explain whether the nonconsensual closure of Colorado Springs Utilities’ Nixon Unit 1 power plant would be an act of taking private property without compensation,” the agency wrote in a press release explaining its decision. “EPA legally cannot approve Colorado’s [plan].

Critics took issue with that assessment.

“Colorado had done such a very thorough job working with utilities, and those retirements were voluntarily proposed,” said Ulla Britt-Reeves, clean air program director at the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association. “So for EPA to come in and essentially say that Colorado was forcing those retirements is simply not true.”

Earthjustice’s Hiatt told DeSmog that the EPA’s decision was “unreasonable, irrational, and illegal under the Clean Air Act.”

He added that, “What this EPA action shows is this Trump administration taking an ideologically motivated stance that it is not going to do anything that might prove or even allow a coal plant to retire under its watch.”

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Hiatt hopes the EPA’s broad disapproval in Colorado won’t impact the many other agreed-upon plant closures and pollution controls covered by the plan. But he expressed worry that the EPA’s action gives the state’s utilities and industrial operators an opportunity to “backtrack” on environmental commitments in the coming years.  

In a proposed rule issued in July, the EPA initially emphasized a different rationale for its pending decision: that closing the coal-fired unit at Nixon would threaten grid reliability — in large part due to a supposed surge in electricity demand, including from artificial intelligence. The agency accused Colorado of not taking grid reliability seriously. Under President Trump, the EPA has listed artificial intelligence (AI) development as one of the top priorities guiding its strategy, as well as restoring “American Energy Dominance,” which Trump has tied specifically to oil, coal, and natural gas.

“This Administration has found as a matter of national interest, national security, and energy policy that power generated from coal resources is critical to addressing this surging demand,” it wrote.

Throughout 2025, Trump administration officials, including DOE Secretary Wright, used a purported rise in energy demand driven by AI to justify fossil fuel expansion, and prevent scheduled coal plant retirements. A December 2025 analysis by DeSmog found that at least 15 coal plants pushed back their retirement dates since Trump took office — with plants often remaining open voluntarily due to projected data center demands, but sometimes due to DOE executive orders. After DeSmog’s story published, the DOE issued a flurry of new executive orders forcing additional coal generators to remain online, including plants in Indiana and Washington that were targeted for the first time.

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In its public comments, the State of Colorado argued it had in fact assessed reliability, in conjunction with utilities statewide, and that planned closures weren’t projected to contribute to an energy shortfall. 

“EPA cites nothing in the record regarding this alleged ‘rise in electricity demand’ or ‘resurgence of domestic manufacturing’ or even the ‘construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers,” the state’s Air Pollution Control Division wrote.“ The record before EPA … provides no basis to conclude that these issues materially affect Colorado or are impacted by the specific units with Closure Dates.” 

The EPA backtracked slightly in its final rule in January, insisting that grid reliability was not part of its legal determination — only private property considerations. And yet it seemed to warn Colorado against including power plant closures in any future plan, citing the rise in domestic manufacturing and “the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”

“Power generated from coal resources is critical to addressing this surging demand and a matter of national interest, national security, and energy policy,” it wrote. “The EPA does not encourage electric generating facilities to close in the face of this energy demand.”

It added that “the EPA does not expect any state to encourage or force an electric generating facility to close in order to comply with the [Clean Air Act’s] regional haze second planning period requirements.” 

Earthjustice’s Hiatt said that statement shows EPA going beyond its disapproval of Colorado’s regional haze plan. “It’s difficult to say how this will play out,” he said, “but it does clearly indicate EPA’s policy preference —  they do not want to see coal or gas closures in regional haze plans.”

“There are a lot of still outstanding haze plans that this EPA needs to act on,” Britt-Reeves, of the National Parks Conservation Association, said. “Are they going to let good plans that actually reduce pollution be approved? That would a great place to go from here — but I don’t expect that that’s where this administration is heading.” She said the language in the final rule indicates that EPA may have “its sights on deregulating the rule itself, which is extremely concerning.”

An EPA spokesperson declined to provide comment or arrange an interview for this story. In a press release announcing its decision on Colorado’s haze plan, EPA cited “turning the United States into the Artificial Intelligence capital of the world” as part of its rationale.

But though EPA spoke of a “forced closure” of the Nixon plant, Colorado Springs Utilities had in fact voted to retire the plant voluntarily by December 31, 2029 — which Colorado had simply noted in its plan. In comments to DeSmog, Danielle Nieves, a spokesperson for Colorado Springs Utilities, confirmed that the utility had reversed course and asked EPA for “non-enforcement” at some point in 2025, years after the plan had been filed.

Matt Gerhart, a Sierra Club attorney, questioned whether it was appropriate for the EPA to disapprove an entire state plan based solely on an 11th-hour change of heart — a precedent that he said could give EPA an excuse to sit on plans it doesn’t like until it found some grounds for dismissal.  

“There’s nothing in EPA guidance that says what the state was supposed to do to guard against the hypothetical possibility that, five years later, a source might change its mind about a retirement,” he said. “I think EPA is really faulting the state for following the agency’s own guidelines here.” 

Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate for the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, expressed concern that the EPA’s actions would set a troubling precedent, undercutting the legality of environmental regulation itself. 

“What’s next? Is any kind of clean air regulation going to be deemed to infringe upon a private property right by virtue of making it more costly and potentially forcing a company to have to shut down?” he said. “I mean, it’s a very dangerous and scary slippery slope.”

In a statement to DeSmog, Colorado’s Senior Director of Air Quality Programs Michael Ogletree said the EPA’s ruling would damage environmental protections in Colorado, which already has some of the worst air quality problems in the nation, and that the state was exploring next steps. 

“Coal plant retirement dates remain in state regulation, and many facilities have already closed or are on track to retire voluntarily because cleaner energy is more affordable and makes economic sense for consumers,” he wrote. “Colorado has demonstrated that it is possible to protect public health, reduce pollution, and maintain a reliable energy system at the same time.”