America Can’t Afford Not To Build The Energy Infrastructure We Need

As winter approaches, many households across America will be taking a closer look at their utility bills, and many won’t like what they see. New England offers a chilling example: last winter, the region’s wholesale electricity costs reached $6.53 billion, up 45 percent from the winter before. Households using electric heating are expected to spend $1,196 in total from November through March, up 4 percent.

The formula is predictable: cold weather pushes up demand for natural gas, while constrained pipeline capacity limits how much fuel can reach the region. Cold weather and limited natural gas availability aren’t new for New England, but that bottleneck makes little sense for the United States, the world’s largest producer of natural gas.

The paradox is that despite producing vast amounts of natural gas and other resources, the constraint is often being able to move such products from where they are produced to where they are most needed. As it turns out, Congress has the power to reduce the size of the bottleneck—and help save Americans from the sticker shock on their electric bills.

The opportunity is in making it easier to build in America: ensuring that projects receive timely approvals and have reasonable certainty that their work won’t be stopped or their issued permit overturned. The proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) shows how the current environment has gone awry.

The project was intended to carry Appalachian natural gas into Virginia and North Carolina. Project backers estimated that construction would support more than 17,000 jobs and that the completed pipeline could save consumers about $377 million a year in energy costs. Through years of project development, the developers faced repeated litigation, but eventually won a 7-2 victory at the U.S. Supreme Court.

But less than three weeks later, the project was canceled.

Why? Because even after winning a landmark victory, project costs had accumulated to the point that the overall proposition was untenable. Costs rose from an initial projected $4.5 billion to $8 billion. The developers specifically cited ongoing litigation and other uncertainties in their decision to cancel the project.

When ACP was canceled, consumers lost a potential source of additional supply and the savings its developers had projected. Worse, this is a system-wide phenomenon. For environmental impact statements (EIS) completed in 2024, the median review took 2.2 years to finalize. And that’s just one part of the regulatory review process.

Those delays add up: financing costs mount as projects wait for initial approval or for work to restart after project opponents file a lawsuit. While firms deal with legal issues, shifts in labor and equipment availability can add still more cost. Some projects survive the process at a higher cost. Others no longer make financial sense at all. Still others may never be proposed because developers anticipate years of legal challenges.