In this paper, I argue how Frank Princiotta and his colleagues at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) successfully demonstrated scrubbers as a viable pollution control technology. The study focuses on the Control Systems Laboratory (CSL) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, highlighting it as a crucial site for the co-production of emissions regulations, control technologies, and environmental institution-building. Although the electric utility industry preferred alternative methods, such as tall stacks and intermittent control systems, to disperse sulfur dioxide emissions from smokestacks, Princiotta’s demonstration of scrubbers effectively resolved prevailing industry concerns regarding cost and operational reliability. The increasing waste from scrubbers, however, became another concern. Cooperating with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), one of the main sulfur oxides emitters, and with other manufacturers of scrubbers, CSL engineers shifted the focus from pollution abatement for health benefit to development of pollution control technology for effective regulation. New knowledge about the operation and maintenance of power plants equipped with scrubbers, as well as a new identity as a regulatory engineer at the EPA, TVA, and contractors, contributed to expansion of scrubbers as a technology for regulatory engineering. Paradoxically, this regulatory and technological success came with the risk of using more coal-fired power plants facing the energy crisis of the 1970s.