President Donald Trump has largely delivered on his promise to lower costs for American consumers, except in one area: electricity. According to the latest Consumer Price Index, electricity prices rose 6.2% over the last 12 months, more than double the current rate of inflation. But this steep rise in electricity costs isn’t Trump’s fault. It is a problem decades in the making. Luckily, there is a solution sitting in the House Natural Resources Committee if Trump wants to take it.
Electricity prices are rising for the simple reason that demand, mostly driven by new data centers for the Artificial Intelligence industry, is growing faster than supply. It doesn’t help that some of the largest states, like California, have the highest electricity prices in the country, thanks to environmental policies that punish fossil fuels like oil and gas. According to the Census Bureau, one in three households in the United States reported forgoing necessities, including food and medicine in order to pay their energy bills.
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Trump has blamed renewable energy projects for the energy price hikes, and while renewable energy does have reliability problems, the true culprit of the dearth of new energy availability lies elsewhere. This is evident by the fact that states with the lowest energy prices, including Republican states like Iowa, Oklahoma, and South Dakota, also have many wind and solar projects coming online.
But what these Republican states with low energy prices have that Democratic Party-controlled states like California, Illinois, and New York do not is a commitment to an “all of the above” energy policy that stresses the importance of getting projects built, no matter the underlying technology. While California has been forcing natural gas power plants and oil refineries to shut down, Republican states have been adding energy infrastructure of all kinds.
But even Republican states could be building energy infrastructure faster, particularly transmission lines. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, there are nearly 2,600 gigawatts of electricity generation and storage capacity, double the current output of all currently operating power plants in the country, just waiting to be connected to the electricity grid by transmission lines. The problem is that these transmission lines almost always cross state lines, have some degree of federal funding, and need permits from multiple federal agencies before construction can even begin.
Unfortunately, thanks to a relic from the 1970s called the National Environmental Policy Act, our federal permitting process is broken. On its face, NEPA sounds like a decent idea. Every project that has significant environmental effects must first undergo an environmental assessment. But the law contains a powerful citizen suit provision that empowers environmental activists to block any federally funded infrastructure project by claiming in court that the government did not adequately study all environmental impacts. The average NEPA review takes over 4 1/2 years and costs $4.2 million.
Fortunately, House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) have introduced a bipartisan solution to this problem. They have introduced the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act which, Westerman’s words would “launch America into a future where we can effectively innovate and implement to revitalize our infrastructure, meet skyrocketing energy demands, lead the world in the [artificial intelligence] race and work in harmony with our natural environment.”
Specifically, the SPEED Act exempts projects from NEPA review if the agency action needed is only financial, like a loan guarantee. It also limits who can sue under NEPA to those who participated in the public comment process, made a specific substantive claim, and can show direct harm to themselves from the agency action. Most importantly, the SPEED Act allows projects to continue while the agency addresses NEPA noncompliance. This would end all NEPA construction delays.
Democrats are open to cooperating with Republicans, but they have a reasonable ask in exchange for their support. In July, the Interior Department issued a memo requiring all agency action on wind and solar projects, no matter how small, to be approved by Secretary Doug Burgum personally. The Trump administration has since ended multiple wind and solar projects. Democrats simply want the persecution of wind and solar projects to stop.
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“I want to get to ‘yes’ on this bill. We need to make it easier to build in this country again,” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) said. “But we are having this conversation in an abnormal time when the Trump administration is unilaterally and most likely illegally stopping clean energy projects. We can’t ignore the broader context.”
Westerman wants to work with Democrats to “keep it technology- and project-neutral to create a transparent and fair process.” The White House should work with Westerman and Democrats to get this bill passed so we can start building the energy projects of all kinds, and the transmission lines to connect those projects to the grid, and lower energy costs.