For decades, Barbara Johnson has organized against coal pollution in North St. Louis, a largely Black neighborhood that has long borne a disproportionate share of the city’s industrial emissions. As an active member of Metropolitan Congregations United, Johnson had anticipated a near-term regulatory change that promised to cut pollution from local coal-fired plants and improve air quality for her community.
Those expectations rested on tougher federal soot limits adopted in 2024 under the prior administration that were scheduled to take effect in 2027. Under that timeline operators would have had to substantially reduce emissions or face closure. That outcome, Johnson and other local activists believed, would have forced Ameren’s Labadie Energy Center - one of the region’s largest polluters - to halve its soot emissions to remain operational.
But those regulatory gains were undone in February when the current administration rescinded the pending standards as part of policy moves aimed at ensuring the electric grid can meet soaring demand from artificial intelligence data centers. Johnson, 75, said the reversal undercut long-held hopes for sustained improvement. "You take two steps forward and four steps back," she said. "I am used to that backwards trend but how many generations will it take to make those positive changes stick?"
Policy shifts in the name of supporting AI have marked a significant pivot in federal environmental direction, activists and analysts say. After years of policies that incentivized retiring high-emitting coal plants, new measures have effectively nudged coal-fired generation back into the conversation as a way to provide large, stable blocks of power to meet the needs of massive data processing facilities.
Last year, the president issued an executive order titled "Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry" that framed coal as a crucial element of reliable baseload supply for the wave of AI-related demand. Since then, the administration has directed funding to prolong the life of older plants, issued orders to delay retirements, and rolled back environmental safeguards on mercury and other toxics to avoid forcing expensive equipment upgrades.
In responding to questions about those regulatory rollbacks, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in an emailed statement that ensuring affordable baseload power, including coal, is essential for keeping the lights on and heating American homes. The agency added that it remains committed to ensuring clean air for all Americans regardless of race, gender, creed, or background.
The Department of Energy projects that growth in artificial intelligence and data-center construction will drive 50 gigawatts of new electricity demand by 2030 - an increase of nearly 4% relative to the roughly 1,300 gigawatts produced by all U.S. power plants in 2025. That increment of load, concentrated geographically and in time, poses planning challenges for utilities and grid operators and has become the central justification for policies designed to keep existing thermal generation online.
Environmental advocates, public health experts and local organizers interviewed for this reporting flagged the AI industry’s power appetite - and the policies enabling it - as the single largest near-term threat to U.S. air quality because it can spur increased generation from dirty sources such as coal. Over the last decade, the count of U.S. coal plants supplying the grid and industry fell to roughly 200 from almost 400 in 2015, according to EPA data examined for this story. But that decline has slowed noticeably.
In 2025, only four coal-fired plants producing 2.6 gigawatts retired, compared with 94 generating 15 gigawatts that exited in 2015. The Department of Energy issued emergency orders during this period to keep some facilities online, according to the Energy Information Administration.
The expansion of data-center construction has also catalyzed organized resistance. A coalition made up of farmers, environmentalists and homeowners has pushed back against data-center projects over concerns that include higher electricity bills and reduced water supplies. That opposition carries political weight and could create vulnerabilities for policymakers ahead of midterm elections.
Administration officials say they have secured voluntary commitments from major technology firms to help cover their additional power costs and mitigate bill impacts on consumers, but critics note that the administration has not announced concrete measures to address the health impacts arising from more pollution driven by expanded electricity generation.
St. Louis, activists and researchers say, is likely to be one of the municipalities most affected by recent regulatory changes. The region already records poor air quality and sits in relatively close proximity to the sprawling Labadie Energy Center.
Last year, metro St. Louis residents experienced "good" air for only about one-third of the days in the year when judged by the EPA’s Air Quality Index. That performance put St. Louis 475th out of 501 U.S. metro areas assessed for air quality. EPA data and recent scientific research single out the Labadie facility as a substantial contributor to the region’s pollution burden.
The Labadie plant, located roughly 40 miles west of St. Louis, emits the largest combined total of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides among U.S. coal plants and discharges soot at rates two to three times higher than nearly every other U.S. coal station, based on EPA datasets. Researchers and EPA modeling attribute significant health and economic costs to that pollution.
A Reuters analysis using EPA’s Co-Benefits Risk Assessment (COBRA) tool estimated that the pollution from Labadie imposes an economic burden of up to $5.5 billion annually, with approximately $820 million of those costs borne by residents of the St. Louis area. COBRA quantifies health costs such as emergency room visits and calculates the collective amount people would be willing to pay for cleaner air because it lowers the risk of premature deaths.
Two external experts who reviewed the analysis - Bryan Hubbell, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, and John Graham, a senior scientist at Clean Air Task Force - agreed with the figures, according to interviews. Ameren, the St. Louis-based utility that owns Labadie, did not dispute the technical results derived from EPA data. The company said the plant operates within current federal pollution limits and that Labadie will remain in operation for at least another decade to ensure reliable power for customers.
"Our employees live here, raise families here and rely on the same energy as our neighbors," Craig Giesman, Ameren’s director of environmental services, said in a statement. "That is just one of many reasons we remain focused on operating responsibly, protecting public health and providing reliable energy, especially when it’s needed most."
The EPA declined to comment directly on the COBRA-based analysis but said the agency is working to update its cost-benefit modeling tools. A study led by University of Washington researchers and published last year in the Journal of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology found that St. Louis would be the city most harmed by a delay in implementing tougher soot standards on U.S. coal plants.
Biden-era soot limits would have required Labadie to cut its soot emissions by more than half to continue operations. The EPA’s own 2023 cost-benefit analysis projected that those soot limits would generate net public health benefits nationwide of up to $3 billion by 2037. The agency under the current administration has countered that the previous administration’s estimates were overstated and that existing standards provide an ample margin of safety to protect public health.
For local clean-air advocates, that reasoning falls short. "Our region continues to be a sacrifice zone," said Darnell Tingle, director of United Congregations of Metro-East. "We are trying to prepare for these data centers, and negate their harm to our communities."
North St. Louis neighborhoods endure some of the worst air in the metropolitan area. Tiny soot particles - small enough to penetrate into lungs and potentially reach the brain - routinely surpass federal safety thresholds there, according to EPA-tracked monitoring data analyzed for this story. Those levels reflect emissions from industrial facilities as well as pollution transported from highways and rail lines.
Data cited by advocacy groups show that 78% of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant, versus 56% of non-Hispanic whites. Studies on soot exposure also indicate higher mortality rates among African Americans, with one study noting soot-related deaths are 25% above the national average for that group.
Local campaigners argue the apparent price advantage of cheap electricity masks the true cost paid by communities in health care and reduced quality of life. "The logic is that we need cheap electricity in the U.S. But if you look at the rise in healthcare costs for residents in the St. Louis area, this isn’t cheap," said Patricia Schuba, who leads a regional environmental monitoring organization focused on Labadie and three other coal facilities.
Ameren has previously invested in emissions controls at Labadie to meet regulatory requirements. About a decade ago the utility fitted two of the plant’s four coal boilers with advanced soot pollution controls to comply with extant soot limits. Under the Biden-era proposals, older controls on the remaining boilers would have needed retrofitting to meet stricter standards, Ameren told the EPA in a March 2025 letter seeking an exemption. The company declined to specify the likely cost of such upgrades.
At the same time, the region is experiencing an uptick in data-center construction that is pushing electricity demand higher. Ameren said it has signed service agreements amounting to as much as 2.3 gigawatts of potential peak demand from data centers - roughly the output of the Labadie plant - and noted it continues to receive additional requests for service. One of the largest proposed projects is a 1,000-acre development by Amazon Web Services in rural Montgomery County, about 55 miles from Labadie, with Ameren slated to provide the power. Amazon declined to comment.
The Data Center Coalition, a trade group representing the industry, said its members are significant purchasers of clean energy but noted that utility resource planning and procurement decisions are ultimately made by utilities, grid operators and policymakers rather than by large-load customers. "While the data center industry is leaning in to support the development of the 21st-century electrical grid, it’s important to recognize that resource planning and generation procurement decisions are made by utilities, grid operators, and policymakers, not large load customers like data centers," Lucas Fykes, Senior Director of Energy Policy and Regulatory Counsel at the coalition, said in a statement.
The policy recalibration to prioritize grid reliability for AI workloads has produced a complex trade-off among competing public priorities: maintaining electricity reliability while managing pollution and public health impacts. In St. Louis and other communities downwind of large coal facilities, the consequence of that trade-off is tangible and immediate - more days of unhealthy air and continued economic and health burdens tied to pollution.
For activists who have spent decades pushing for cleaner air, the recent regulatory reversals represent a major setback. The choices made now about how to meet the energy demands of an expanding data-center footprint - and which generation resources to prioritize - will determine whether communities like North St. Louis see long-sought reductions in pollution or remain exposed to lingering harms for years to come.
Key actors in this story - utilities, federal agencies, tech companies and community groups - all frame their positions around distinct and partially overlapping priorities. Utilities emphasize reliability and community employment. Regulators cite system-wide safety margins and the need to balance costs. Tech firms point to voluntary commitments on clean energy purchases. Community groups underscore direct health impacts and unequal exposure to pollution. The tension among these perspectives lies at the center of ongoing debates over how to reconcile rapid technological expansion with environmental justice and public health.