Want abundant energy? Ask who benefits from scarcity.

A new obsession with abundance is spreading through policy conversations and governors’ mansions across the country. Abundance advocates, boosted by a recent book from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, envision a future in which we defeat the climate crisis, reduce cost of living and improve quality of life by speeding up construction of housing and energy infrastructure.

Making clean energy abundant is certainly critical to addressing the climate crisis. We need plentiful, cheap, clean energy to replace polluting fossil fuels in buildings, vehicles and factories. As a senior policy advisor in the Biden White House, I worked on many policies aimed at clean energy abundance, directly or indirectly, and I also saw firsthand how those policies were insufficient. That’s why it is now clear to me that the abundance movement’s playbook — to streamline permitting, simplify government processes and make public investments more focused — falls short of what’s needed.

We won’t achieve energy abundance unless we contend with the powerful interests that benefit from scarcity. Doing so requires reforming electricity markets, refreshing regulation of electric companies and rethinking the way we pay for grid infrastructure.

Let’s start with the problem: we are not building nearly enough clean energy to curb climate change and keep electricity affordable. Analysis from three leading research projects found that for us to get within striking distance of the Paris climate goals and plan for the lowest electricity costs, we must build 70 GW to 125 GW of clean energy per year, much higher than the record 50 GW built in 2024. As a result of our failure to build new energy projects fast, families and businesses will pay more for power and the planet will warm faster.

This is no longer an economic issue. Clean electricity is now often cheaper to deploy than new coal and gas, and in many cases cheaper than existing fossil-fuel-fired power plants. So what is stopping us from building it fast enough?

To answer this question, abundance proponents, including Klein and Thompson, largely focus on two main obstacles: 1) opposition from people who live nearby specific projects and groups concerned with local environmental impacts and 2) “everything-bagel liberalism,” the tendency to add too many strings to government incentives. The solution to the first problem, they argue, is to limit the power of the opposition by streamlining federal permitting and constraining public input in state and local siting processes. And for the second, their remedy is to limit the number of goals of government programs and reduce the requirements for funding.

There is no doubt that some clean energy and transmission projects have been thwarted by local opposition and lengthy litigation. And it is a worthy goal to make government incentives as effective as possible. But by portraying the primary villains defending scarcity as local landowners, conservation groups and the diversity of the liberal coalition, Klein and Thompson ignore important characters and policies that, if left unchecked, will continue to hamstring the pursuit of abundance.

For example, consider the situation unfolding in the electricity market organized by the PJM Interconnection, which operates the electricity grid for 65 million people in 13 mid-Atlantic and midwestern states and Washington, D.C. An independent, non-governmental entity, PJM runs the process to connect new power plants to the grid, among other important processes to make the electricity system work. PJM has been notoriously bad at this job. It ranks as the worst grid operator in the country in terms of the speed and effectiveness of its interconnection process. The average project waits five years for PJM to give it permission to connect to the grid. In fact, PJM closed its doors to new project applications in 2022 and has yet to re-open it. As a result, electricity demand is outpacing supply, prices are rising rapidly, and new clean energy projects are dying as they wait for word from PJM.

PJM has the power to speed up the process to connect new projects, which would increase electricity supply and cut electricity prices. But PJM has largely resisted reforms and focused instead on extending the life of existing power plants. Here is where it is helpful to ask: who benefits from an electricity shortage and the resulting high prices? It is not conservation groups or liberal stakeholder groups with competing goals (who have no voting power in PJM’s governance structure). It is the incumbent utilities that own the fleet of aging coal-fired power plants, which are struggling to compete with new clean energy projects. If cheap clean energy is allowed to enter the market, these companies will make less money. The outdated processes for approving new projects help prevent cheaper energy resources from threatening their business model. The companies have significant decision-making power — together, power plant owners, transmission owners (many of whom also own generation) and other energy service suppliers make up 60% of the voting power in PJM decisions.

Energy will not be abundant in the mid-Atlantic unless we take on the interests that are benefitting from scarcity. That means reforming the electricity market to stop overpaying existing power plants at the expense of customers, changing the rules to make it easier to connect new power plants to the grid and updating governance structures to make sure that customers are properly represented.

Similar cases abound of powerful interests benefitting from scarcity and defending policies that prevent abundance. Monopoly utilities, for example, benefit from abundant energy to the extent that they can build it and can earn a return on their investments — but not if the energy comes from their competition. That’s why utilities in the southeast have gone to great lengths to block transmission lines that enable cheap clean energy to compete with their existing power plants. Changing how those utilities make money (for example, by paying for outcomes instead of investments) could flip the script and turn the utilities into energy abundance advocates.

If the abundance movement is to succeed, it must identify the defenders of scarcity and broaden the playbook to either overcome those interests or change their incentives to bring them on the team.