Why America Must Unleash Its Energy Potential

America sits on one of the most extraordinary concentrations of energy resources on the planet: natural gas reserves that could power cities for generations, solar corridors stretching across the Southwest, wind corridors threading through the Great Plains, and battery storage technology maturing faster than anyone predicted five years ago. Yet, the country's ability to actually *build* the infrastructure needed to move that energy from source to socket is grinding against a bureaucratic ceiling that gets harder to break through every year.

Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the American Gas Association, put it plainly: governing bodies must act quickly to untie the hands of the energy industry and allow America to build. That's not a partisan talking point — it's an operational reality that developers, grid operators, and industrial energy buyers are living with every day.

The question isn't whether America has the resources; it does. The question is whether it has the will to build.

The Current State of Energy Development

The gap between America's energy potential and its energy reality comes down to one bottleneck more than any other: permitting. A transmission line that could move renewable power from a Wyoming wind farm to a California load center can spend five to seven years in federal review before a single tower goes in the ground. A natural gas pipeline serving millions of households can face litigation that outlasts the presidential administration that approved it.

The resources exist. The technology exists. The capital exists. What's missing is a regulatory framework that reflects the urgency of the moment.

This isn't a new complaint, but the stakes have sharpened considerably. Data center construction is accelerating at a pace that's stressing regional grids from Virginia to Arizona. Domestic manufacturing — semiconductors, EVs, battery cells — is coming back onshore, and those facilities are power-hungry. Industrial load growth that was flat for a decade is suddenly surging. The grid, and the infrastructure feeding it, wasn't built for this demand profile.

Meanwhile, project queues at regional transmission organizations have become so backlogged they function more like holding patterns than actual development pipelines. MISO's interconnection queue alone held over 2,000 projects as of recent counts — most of which will never get built, not because the projects are bad, but because the process buries them.

The Need for Regulatory Reform

Regulatory reform in the energy sector is often framed as a deregulation argument — a way to cut corners on environmental review or safety standards. That framing is both politically convenient and intellectually dishonest. What serious industry voices are actually calling for is *process reform*: faster decisions, clearer timelines, and accountability when agencies miss them.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process, for example, was designed with legitimate goals. Environmental impact matters. Community input matters. But when a review for a single pipeline compressor station takes longer than it took to build the Hoover Dam, something has broken in the execution. The law isn't the problem — the implementation is.

There are working models to learn from. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC) Order 1920, finalized in 2024, represented the most significant overhaul of transmission planning rules in over a decade. It won't solve everything, but it established a framework where long-range planning actually accounts for anticipated load growth — a change that sounds obvious but was genuinely absent from how transmission had been planned for years. That's the kind of targeted, technical reform that moves the needle without dismantling oversight.

At the state level, some of the most effective reforms have come from unlikely places. States that streamlined their siting processes for both gas infrastructure and renewable generation — Texas being the clearest example — didn't abandon environmental standards. They created defined timelines and staffed their agencies adequately to meet them. The result is a state that leads the country in both wind generation and natural gas production. That's not a contradiction; that's what functional permitting looks like.

Economic Benefits of Accelerating Development

Energy infrastructure isn't just about keeping the lights on; it's an economic multiplier that reaches well beyond the construction phase.

A single large-scale transmission project employs thousands of workers during construction — electricians, welders, civil engineers, project managers — and supports permanent operations and maintenance jobs for decades. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that inadequate energy infrastructure costs the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually in lost productivity and business inefficiency. That's money leaving the economy not because of a market failure, but because of a policy failure.

Investment capital is ready to move — but capital has options, and it doesn't wait indefinitely for regulatory clarity.

Foreign direct investment in U.S. energy infrastructure has historically tracked predictability as much as returns. When permitting timelines are uncertain and litigation risk is high, investors price that risk into their required returns — which raises the cost of every project and ultimately raises costs for ratepayers and industrial consumers. Streamlining the process doesn't just help developers; it lowers the cost of energy for everyone downstream.

There's also a workforce dimension that often gets underweighted in these conversations. The energy transition — however it ultimately unfolds — is going to require a massive surge in skilled trades: linemen, pipefitters, construction managers, grid engineers. The pipeline for those workers takes years to develop. Starting that workforce investment now, tied to real projects with real timelines, is how you avoid the bottleneck showing up in a different form five years from now.

Roadmap to Effective Energy Infrastructure

Policymakers serious about accelerating energy development in America don't need to reinvent the wheel. The playbook exists. Executing it requires political will more than policy creativity.

The critical steps are sequenced and interrelated:

Permitting timelines with teeth. Federal agencies reviewing energy projects should operate under defined review windows — 18 to 24 months for major projects — with consequences for missing them. Several legislative proposals have circulated around this concept. The ones that have stalled generally ran into jurisdictional fights between agencies that have more incentive to protect their review authority than to accelerate outcomes.

Coordinated federal-state siting authority. The current patchwork — where federal approval doesn't preempt state obstruction for interstate projects — creates leverage points for delay that are disproportionate to legitimate local concerns. A clearer framework for resolving those conflicts, with binding timelines, would reduce years of uncertainty from many projects.

Interconnection queue reform that actually reforms. FERC's Order 2023 was a step toward first-ready, first-served queue management, but implementation has been uneven. The rule needs consistent enforcement and a willingness to cull zombie projects from queues so viable projects can move.

Technology-neutral infrastructure investment. Natural gas infrastructure and renewable infrastructure are not competing priorities; they serve different reliability functions on a grid that needs both, particularly as variable generation increases. Policy that treats them as a zero-sum tradeoff misunderstands how grids actually work.

A Call to Action That Industry Leaders Can Actually Act On

The conversation around energy development in America too often becomes abstract — a debate about principles rather than a plan for execution. What's needed now is specificity.

Industry leaders have a role that goes beyond lobbying for better conditions. The most effective interventions tend to come from coalitions — utilities, developers, labor unions, and large industrial energy consumers — presenting unified, concrete reform proposals to regulators and legislators. When FERC sees a transmission reform supported by a utility, a solar developer, a steel manufacturer, and an electrical workers union, it lands differently than a trade association letter.

The companies that move fastest when the regulatory environment clarifies will build the projects that define the next decade of American infrastructure.

The capital is lined up. The technology is ready. The workforce can be developed. What's needed is the regulatory architecture that makes it rational to deploy all three at the scale the moment demands. That architecture doesn't build itself — it gets built by people willing to engage the process, make the case, and push past the institutional inertia that has slowed American energy infrastructure for too long.

America's energy potential is real. Realizing it is a choice.

Explore more about energy infrastructure and development opportunities.

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