The U.S. economy desperately needs more electricity. Demand is projected to outstrip supply in the coming years, largely due to data centers powering artificial intelligence.

That leaves the government no choice: To avoid an energy crisis, it needs to supersize the nation’s electrical grid.

The Trump administration, apparently, hasn’t gotten the memo. Instead, it’s allowing its opposition to clean energy sources, such as wind and solar, to stymie growth.

Case in point: The Energy Department’s cancellation last week of a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for a major transmission project in the Midwest. The line, known as the Grain Belt Express, would cross 800 miles of farmland to deliver wind energy generated in Kansas to power more than 3 million homes in the region. This is exactly the sort of development the country needs to strengthen the grid and make use of its natural wind resources.

Yet the administration sided with (Not-In-My-Backyard folks) who have long opposed the project, which has been in the works for more than a decade. The Energy Department explained in its announcement that it was “not critical for the federal government to have a role” in the project. It also claimed that the project is “unlikely” to meet the conditions required for the loan guarantee — without clearly laying out those conditions.

Invenergy, the company behind the project, has said it will pursue private financing. Hopefully that materializes, and ideally such undertakings could happen without any government backing. But the loss of the loan guarantee poses a serious threat to both the transmission line and to the renewable energy projects that would have been built to supply it.

Such paralysis is now typical of the U.S. energy system. Despite ever-increasing demand for electricity, construction of the new transmission lines needed to deliver it has slowed to a glacial pace. That’s because building the infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions is expensive and comes with painful regulatory headaches. And far too often, politics gets in the way, especially when it requires construction on privately owned land.

In 2024, only 322 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines were completed, one of the slowest annual figures in the past 15 years. An Energy Department study last year projected that, to meet the nation’s energy needs most optimally, regional transmission capacity needs to double by 2050 and interregional capacity needs to rise by a factor of 3.5. That would require the nation to build more than 5,000 miles of transmission lines a year, according to Americans for a Clean Energy Grid.

Despite President Donald Trump’s promises to “unleash American energy,” his administration seems to be actively working against that lofty goal. This month, New York’s Public Service Commission halted a new transmission line that would bring the state’s offshore wind power to New York City. Why? Because Trump’s executive order to stop offshore wind developments makes the power lines risky for taxpayers.

Meanwhile, the administration seems to be trying to kill solar and wind projects by a thousand bureaucratic cuts. This month, the Interior Department issued a directive requiring virtually every aspect of such developments on federal lands — or those that pass through it via transmission lines — to receive personal approval from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum or his deputy. That policy change came shortly after Congress passed its reconciliation package, which restricted access to tax credits for any wind and solar project that does not begin construction by July 4, 2026. A bottleneck seems to be the goal.

The administration justifies its antisolar and wind posture by arguing that other forms of energy, such as fossil fuels and nuclear, are more reliable. It also leans on national security concerns, since China controls much of the supply chain for those industries.

But these points don’t stand up to scrutiny. To start, building up the renewable energy sector would help alleviate climate change in the long term, which itself would make the energy sector more reliable and boost national security.

Moreover, many European countries rely heavily on solar and wind and have not experienced the “intermittency” problems that critics warn about. No energy source is 100% reliable, which only underscores the need to diversify the United States’ energy sector and modernize its electrical grid with more transmission lines. That would allow electricity from multiple sources to move around the country as needed.

And while China’s chokehold on the renewable energy supply chain is a genuine problem, it hardly justifies giving up on these industries. China’s investments in solar and wind already put the United States to shame. The answer is not to cede the technological advantage to America’s most powerful adversary. It is to compete so that the U.S. can regain its edge.

The great irony here is that, for years, Republicans decried subsidies for renewable energy as the government “picking winners and losers.” Now, they are embracing the same mindset they once opposed, but in the opposite direction. They are intent on making solar and wind losers; if they succeed, U.S. consumers will lose, too.

ONLINE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/04/trump-wind-solar-grainbelt-transmission/

— The Washington Post