Democrats Bid to Become the Party of Cheap Energy

House Democrats introduced a new package of proposals on Wednesday taking aim at rising electricity prices. The move signals a shift in how the party plans to talk about the energy industry — and an even bigger change in how the party plans to talk about climate change in the Trump 2.0 era.

After four years in which the party focused on climate change as an existential crisis, Democrats have reoriented to talking about energy chiefly as an affordability problem.

The new package, sponsored by Representatives Sean Casten and Mike Levin, would encourage new power line construction and strengthen utility regulation in much of the country. It would also restore longstanding tax credits for wind and solar energy, which were repealed as part of President Trump’s partisan tax and spending law earlier this year.

Many of the provisions, although not all of them, were first proposed in a Democratic bill called the Clean Electricity and Transmission Acceleration Act last year. This year, it’s been rechristened to something much simpler: the Cheap Energy Act.

“The purpose of the bill is a longtime wish of mine — that we would have an energy policy that puts the interests of American consumers first, by making sure that American consumers have access to cheap, reliable energy,” Representative Sean Casten, who is one of the bill’s coauthors, told me. “We’ve never done that as a country.”

In his view, achieving that goal will require many of the same policies that would cut carbon emissions. But that’s just good luck: “It’s a happy coincidence that cheap is synonymous with clean,” Casten said. “But the goal is cheap.”

The bill arrives at an unusual moment for the American energy economy. Although oil and gasoline prices have stayed low this year, electricity prices have surged. Over the past year, power costs have grown twice as fast as overall inflation. At the same time, the artificial intelligence boom — as well as the rise of electric vehicles and the country’s spate of new factories — have helped increase overall U.S. electricity demand for the first time in decades.

The politics of energy, in other words, have gone topsy-turvy. Americans normally sweat over gasoline prices and don’t think too much about their power bills. But this year, 57% of U.S. registered voters say that surging electricity costs are having at least “a decent amount” of influence on their personal finances, according to a recent Heatmap Pro poll.

“I believe very strongly that right now, in this moment — when electricity costs are increasing at double the rate of inflation, and when the administration has totally doubled down on fossil fuels — that highlighting the ability to transition to more affordable energy, and that clean energy is cheap energy, and talking about the bill in the context of cheap energy, is really the way to go,” Representative Mike Levin, a cosponsor of the bill and a Democrat from California, told me.

The Trump administration knows that electricity is becoming a political problem. Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted last month that the Trump administration “is going to get blamed” for higher power prices, although he blamed the increase on Democratic policies.

The new Democratic bill contains a slew of reforms to the country’s energy and electricity policies — including some changes that nobody expects to pass under the current administration, and some that could potentially advance in a bipartisan fashion.

Some of the most important are around transmission. The law would beef up the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s ability to plan and approve large-scale cross-country power lines. It would create a new tax credit for developers who build transmission lines, similar to those that exist for other clean energy technologies.

“We have to make it easier to site transmission lines so that we build where we need to build,” Levin said.

The bill also includes a proposal — which has support from some Republicans — mandating that each region of the country have enough infrastructure to send a minimum amount of electricity to its neighbors. And perhaps most importantly, it lays out the rules for how utilities would divide the cost of a new power line — an accounting hurdle that has held back many transmission projects.

Another important set of proposals would reshape the utility industry. The bill would allow state regulators to engage in “performance-based ratemaking,” which compensates utilities for how well they save money rather than how much infrastructure they build. (This is closer to how the EU and United Kingdom regulate utilities — my cohost Jesse Jenkins and I talked about it on a recent episode of our podcast, Shift Key.)

Casten said that changing how utilities are regulated will ultimately get more new power generation built — and keep rates lower — than loosening permitting rules alone. “If we fix the profit incentives in the energy industry so that [utilities] make money by saving their consumers money, then permitting is easy,” he said. (Such an approach is “much smarter” than that taken by Senator Joe Manchin and John Barrasso in their permitting bill last Congress, he added.)

The bill would also allow the government to step in and cover some of the cost of new grid-enhancing or wildfire prevention equipment. It would also spend $2.1 billion to unsnarl and build manufacturing capacity for transformers, a key piece of grid equipment, through the Defense Production Act. Electrical transformers, which can step up or down electricity voltage, have been in short supply since the pandemic, helping to drive up power prices.

“We’re trying to figure out where the bottlenecks are and trying to unclog them, as best we can, so that we can actually deliver the lowest cost energy to the end user,” Levin said.

Other proposals appear to respond to Trump-led initiatives. For instance, the bill would limit the Energy Department’s ability to keep fossil fuel power plants open for an “emergency” when that emergency is more than a year in the future. The Trump administration has used this emergency authority to keep coal, oil, and gas plants open in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.

It would also require the Energy Department to study whether approving a new liquified natural gas export terminal would drive up domestic gas prices before approving it. “If you take gas out of the United States and send it overseas, you're going to reduce supply,” Casten said. “The mere act of connecting those markets raises prices.”

Yet the bill also includes a grab bag of environmental proposals from other Democratic bills, not all of which seem necessarily designed to produce cheap energy. The package would support owners of reflective roofs, expand community solar programs, and double the cap on how much the government can spend on the weatherization assistance program. It would have FERC pay nonprofits that participate in public comment periods on proposed regulations — an approach already used in California — and it would speed up permitting approvals for infrastructure projects that include a community benefit agreement.

That points to the bill’s hybrid nature: Although it’s focused on cheap energy, it retains many policies from an era when Democrats were focused more exclusively on reducing carbon emissions. That change might make for good politics, but it leaves key questions about the future of Democratic energy policy unanswered. If Democrats really do want cheap energy for consumers at all costs, as Casten said, are they willing to accept, say, new fossil fuel development to get it?

Levin demurred. Democrats will next face something like that choice when Congress takes up a bipartisan permitting reform package, he said. But as long as the Trump administration continues to wage a regulatory war on wind and solar projects, he said, then it doesn’t make sense for Democrats to come to the table to negotiate a bill like that.

“If the [natural] gas folks — if they actually want a good-faith dialogue around what the energy system needs — an actual system analysis, looking at AI and data centers and all the rest of it, and then looking at what the permitting situation needs to look like — that would be one thing. But we’re not seeing that. We’re seeing a reflexive repetition of President Trump’s message that wind is bad,” he told me.

“I don’t know how we could have a good faith discussion around permitting reform — or a bipartisan permitting reform package — that would make any sense when people are saying things that are objectively untrue,” Levin said. Many Republican officials “know better,” he added, naming Wright and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “But they don’t want to get sideways with Trump.”