Waterkeeper Alliance, Partners Sue to Stop Coal Plants from Poisoning Our Water
By: Waterkeeper Alliance
On January 20, Waterkeeper Alliance and several partners filed legal challenges to U.S. EPA’s Steam Electric ELG Deadline Extensions Rule. This harmful rollback, issued by the agency in late December, delays the implementation of new pollution reduction requirements for coal plants. These limits were mandated by the Biden EPA in 2024 in response to an earlier lawsuit, which also involved Waterkeeper Alliance. The Deadline Extensions Rule gives power plants five more years on top of the several years they already have to clean up their discharges.
Waterkeeper Alliance and our partners have been advocating for modernization of dangerously outdated wastewater treatment standards for power plants for more than 15 years. Coal power plants have historically been one of the largest dischargers of toxic pollutants such as mercury, arsenic, and selenium. Industry has treated our waterways like open sewers, causing thousands of river miles across the U.S. to be unsafe for use for drinking water or recreational fishing. In 2024, the U.S. EPA estimated that toxic pollutants in power plant wastewater negatively impacted the drinking water supplied by public water systems to over 30 million people and the habitats for over 100 high-vulnerability threatened and endangered species.
The Trump EPA promulgated the Deadline Extensions Rule to prevent the 2024 rule from taking effect as intended. The rule is a key component of the administration’s “Beautiful Clean Coal” agenda, and is designed to promote utilization of coal power plants and delay plant retirements and the clean energy transition. It is also designed to buy time for the agency to conduct a second rulemaking to substantively reconsider (as opposed to merely delay) the 2024 rule’s zero-discharge requirements and potentially other ELG pollution limits. We intend to argue in court that the rule is arbitrary and capricious and contrary to the U.S. Clean Water Act.
Waterkeeper Alliance and partners are represented by EarthJustice.