Duke Energy Considers Making Coal Power Great Again Under Trump

In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Duke Energy Chief Financial Officer Brian Savoy explained how a Trump victory could roll back climate regulations on power generation at utility plants, just as electricity demand soars due to newly built artificial intelligence data centers. Meanwhile, Democrats, wearing climate crisis blinders, have pushed disastrous de-growth ‘green’ policies removing fossil fuel generation from the grid, resulting in shockingly high power prices for some customers – and even causing power crisis in some parts of the Mid-Atlantic.

CFO Savoy told Bloomberg that he would reexamine plans to convert some coal-fired power generation units in Indiana to natural gas. He said that in a deregulated environment under Trump, dual conversion, known as switching power plants or industrial boilers from coal to NatGas, would “make sense” in Indiana, adding there’s even a chance some power generation units would remain coal-burning. 

Trump is expected to reverse Biden-Harris’ far-left climate policies, which have acted as an economic muzzle on the US economy. At the same time, China built a record number of coal plants that fed cheap power to factories, essentially making US companies unable to compete with Chinese ones in international markets. Trump may focus on rolling back greenhouse gas emission controls on the gas, oil, coal, power, and auto sectors.

Following the victory on Wednseday, American Energy Alliance congratulated the former President and said it was excited to “unwind the Biden-Harris administration’s regulatory onslaught on American energy producers.”

“Throughout his campaign, President Trump expressed his unabashed support for American energy,” IER and AEA President Thomas Pyle told Utility Dive in a statement.

Pyle continued, “He promised to embrace domestic oil and gas production, lower energy and electricity prices, and undo the inflationary Biden-Harris Green New Deal policies, especially the wasteful taxpayer-funded subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.”

There’s no denying that another Trump presidency will slow the energy transition to a more sensible speed, as the current trajectory puts the nation on a crash course with power inflation amid all the new power demand from AI data centers.

Donald Trump says to be dominant in AI, America requires twice the electricity of current capacity and he pledges to meet that demand, partly through nuclear power pic.twitter.com/HooPgk4Qpa

— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) July 27, 2024

With Republicans in charge of the Senate, the White House, and potentially the House, Trump will move quickly to deregulate the power industry and lower energy costs for Americans by restarting fossil fuel power generators. Trump must also continue the revival of America’s nuclear power plants.