It’s Time to Build American Energy—but It’s Getting Late

The energy and technology sectors are merging, the demand for power is surging, and the battle lines that have defined energy policy debates for decades are being overtaken by events. To lead the world in artificial intelligence (AI) and—as Adam Smith envisioned—enable people to earn a better living with greater ease, America must learn to build big things again without breaking people’s backs with rising costs—and we’ve got to do it with a sense of urgency. To succeed, we need stable energy policy, lasting permitting reform, and a sustained focus on cutting bills for American families.

COMMENTARY

The need to act is apparent. Demand is growing faster than we can build new generation from any source. U.S. load growth is projected to increase by up to 128 GW by 2029, while backlogs for new gas turbines are stretching out to four years or more, and the average interconnection queue for new generation takes more than five years to complete. The pressure on America’s ability to generate and deliver enough power isn’t just coming from AI and industry. The increasing impact and frequency of extreme weather is straining regional power grids with residential heating and cooling loads, with two more major winter storms and one intensive heatwave pushing system limits since Winter Storm Elliot forced rolling power outages across the Southeast on Christmas Eve in 2022.

At the same time that we need more energy, we also need more affordable energy, so hardworking families can keep the lights on without skimping on groceries. Families and seniors living on less in rural counties are particularly stressed. They already pay an average of 20% of their entire household income for electricity, not because rates are high, but because rural housing is in such a poor state of disrepair. Add upward pressure on rates from the cost of new generation, aggravated by the complexity tax of America’s antiquated permitting system, and residential energy bills will continue to rise if we don’t correct our course.

Market Stability

Against this backdrop, the House of Representatives is considering a full repeal-replace of the Inflation Reduction Act, which, despite its name, set an energy and industrial policy framework that the market has been executing against for three years. While course corrections are needed and necessary in a dynamic market, and the sharp upward shift in demand projections requires a legislative response, rapid reversals in policy direction are out of sync with an industry that undertakes resource planning in 10- to 30-year cycles. Even community-scale solar and storage projects like those we build at Groundswell take two or more years to complete and can barely keep up with the shifting sands in Washington.

Moreover, new potential energy projects representing more than double our current installed capacity are currently standing in line in interconnection queues. Repealing investment incentives that have driven large-scale project development since 2022 would kill too much of this in-process capacity while the market retools around new rules. Moreover, pre-commercial technologies including advanced nuclear, which use some of the same incentives as solar, have longer development timelines and an even greater need for market stability to reach commercial scale. If we are truly committed to an American-made nuclear renaissance, we need to sustain critical existing policies, including tax credits aligned with U.S. manufacturing, so we can finish building what we’ve started while Congress charts new paths to American AI leadership.

Lasting Permitting Reform

Whether it’s new nuclear or a weatherization program, large and small energy projects face a morass of federal, state, and local permitting and paperwork that isn’t just red tape, it’s a complexity tax that increases project delivery costs and timelines beyond our ability as a society to pay. As a nation, we will not be able to keep up with energy demand, or realize the kitchen table benefits of energy efficiency or AI-driven economic development, without lasting legislative permitting reform.

As a senior advisor at the Office of Management and Budget, I led President Obama’s permitting accelerator and cut timelines in half for $350 billion in infrastructure projects. While we made big gains, the work revealed the need for a more fundamental legislative modernization. More than a dozen federal agencies issue a host of permits defined in laws that have been layered on top of one another over more than a hundred years. Many of these permits have conflicting statutory requirements that make it impossible—and even illegal—for agencies to rally around a shared project timeline or goal. Only Congress can consolidate federal permits and eliminate the complexity tax so America can start building again, but it has yet to pass a bill.

Cutting Household Bills

We are currently producing—and paying for—the energy we need plus the energy we waste. Prioritizing energy efficiency, as mundane as it sounds, cuts waste and has the additional benefit of confronting the affordable housing crisis through the same measures. As with infrastructure permitting, however, there is an inherent complexity tax of duplication and red tape that limits the number of families who realize savings from federally funded energy efficiency programs. The most recent fiscal year (FY) 2026 federal budget proposal would eliminate them almost entirely, effectively increasing household energy bills and raising the risk of shut-offs for people who are already struggling to keep up. The greater opportunity, however, is to sustain the federal commitment to energy efficiency while undertaking the hard work of optimizing program design so that federal funds can be easily layered with utility and corporate investments to get more bill savings, and more available capacity, for the money.

Local solar projects paired with energy storage also have a role delivering bill savings where siting new capacity on the distribution system avoids more costly infrastructure investments. Initiatives like Groundswell’s Southeast Rural Power program and the City of Baltimore’s Community Resiliency Hubs show how municipalities, utilities, and nonprofits are working together to strengthen the local grid and reduce bills. Local programs can scale savings nationally. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Solar for All program, for example, is enabling 60 teams across every state to build new local solar capacity that will cut electricity bills by a minimum of 20% for nearly one million American families.

Working Together

We’re short on power and families are facing risings costs. We need to expand capacity and lower people’s bills. There are projects and programs in the pipeline that will help achieve these goals if we sustain a stable market environment, and keep investing in efficiency and local projects to keep energy affordable while we transform the permitting process to support the new technologies and American industries that will help make life better and easier for the next generation. It won’t be simple, particularly in a cultural environment that increasingly rewards outrage, but it’s important to do hard things the right way. Remaining mired in conflict that whipsaws the market each election cycle costs precious time. And as people like me who build stuff for a living know, you can’t build much of anything unless you work together.

—L. Michelle Moore is CEO of Groundswell, a nonprofit that builds community power, and a former Tennessee Valley Authority board member, where she served as Audit, Risk, and Cybersecurity Committee Chair. During the Obama administration, Moore led the White House team that cut permitting timelines in half for more than $350 billion in infrastructure projects.