While he has delivered on his promise to lower overall energy prices, the national average of electricity prices continues to spike. With only three months left to keep his promise, Trump only has one option left to drive electricity prices down in time: embrace solar power and energy efficiency.
Natural gas production is necessary, but at a time when innovations like artificial intelligence are driving up electricity demand, supply can’t keep up. It doesn’t take an economist to know that when demand is greater than supply, prices go up.
DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING AND FAILING TO BLAME REPUBLICANS FOR RISING ENERGY PRICES
That leaves solar power and energy efficiency initiatives as the best and most substantive ways to cut prices quickly.
The Alliance to Save Energy (a nonprofit coalition where I am a member) recently released a report demonstrating the immediate benefits of this strategy. Our analysis shows that targeted investments in efficiency programs—including the deployment of solar, heat pumps, and insulation—can save households $500 on their annual energy bills, reducing average costs by 15% and bringing Trump significantly closer to his 50% target.
The best part is that these cost-cutting measures can be deployed immediately. Right now, the Trump administration is in a legal battle over the future of $20 billion in Biden-era energy grants, having frozen the funds while outside groups battle to keep the program open. Instead of burning taxpayer money in litigation or sending it to left-wing special interest groups, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency should repurpose these already appropriated funds to directly drive down consumer electricity cost.
It’s been done before. After initially freezing $7 billion in the Solar for All Program at the start of the term, the Trump administration later released the grant funding in March to keep immediate-impact solar projects moving. The Trump EPA’s move was a sign that its goal isn’t to stop all government programs, but rather to curb waste, fraud, and abuse.
The next opportunity to expand high-impact energy tax credits and grants will come through technology-neutral policies like the 48E and 45Y tax credits, allowing taxpayers to keep their own money and use it to lower their energy costs through improved energy efficiency and at-home energy generation like rooftop solar.
While these tax credits were unnecessarily restricted in the One Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year, there is a silver lining. The bill requires projects accessing this tax credit to begin by July 4, 2026, giving the private sector an incentive to front-load energy generation projects, which will help bring down prices more quickly.
However, rapidly scaling clean electricity to meet surging demand will remain elusive unless we fix the permitting bottleneck. Today, the backlog of interconnection and transmission approvals, and the drawn-out environmental review process, drag down project timelines and inflate cost risk.
As the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA) notes, “uncertainty and delays in approving major high‐voltage interregional transmission lines leave our nation vulnerable to electricity disruptions,” and “energy customers are unable to complete energy procurement contracts because projects cannot connect to the grid.”
CEBA has also urged streamlining federal permitting and modernizing review rules so that energy customers can expand domestic clean energy production via a more efficient pipeline of approvals.
Permitting reform is widely recognized as “the single largest barrier to deploying new clean energy in this country.” While it would take time to get through Congress, a bipartisan Energy Permitting Reform Act could be more expansive than Executive-Branch-only deregulatory efforts, helping accelerate approvals, shorten litigation windows, and expand categorical exclusions for low-impact projects, all of which would keep prices down.
Without such reform, even the best technologies and investments will stall — making permitting modernization not merely helpful, but essential, if we are to deliver the scale of clean electricity deployment this moment demands.
Of course, solar generation and energy efficiency aren’t the only cost-cutting strategies, but they are the fastest.
RESTORING AMERICA: STATES MUST REGULATE RENEWABLE ENERGY JUST LIKE OIL AND GAS
So while reducing undue regulatory burdens and supporting innovation and deployment of nuclear, geothermal, hydrogen, and every other viable energy source should remain a priority for policymakers, those decisions must be made while recognizing that consumers won’t feel the benefit until much later.
To cut consumer energy costs in half in the short term, we must focus on what can be immediately deployed. Targeted solar and energy efficiency programs not only have the potential to save Americans billions of dollars in the months and years to come; they may also be the key to President Trump keeping his energy promise.
Chet Love is the Managing Partner of Cornerstone Group International. He also served as Director of Policy and Legal Counsel for SolarCity (now Tesla).
