Heinrich Blasts Trump Administration for Raising Electricity Costs on American Families Amidst Growing Energy Demand
Heinrich: “Electricity bills are starting to become unaffordable for too many Americans...And recent actions by President Trump and the Republican reconciliation bill will only make it worse”
WASHINGTON — In his opening statement during a U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on rising energy demand, U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ranking Member of the Committee, raised the alarm on the energy affordability crisis facing working families and cited recent, irresponsible actions taken by the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans that will raise energy costs on working families — including the passage of their Big, Bad Bill, their dismantling of our nation’s clean energy industry, and a recent directive from the Department of the Interior that will inevitably delay new generation additions to the grid and drive up costs further.
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“As Mr. Gramlich points out in his testimony, electricity bills are starting to become unaffordable for too many Americans,” said Heinrich. “And recent actions by President Trump and the Republican reconciliation bill will only make it worse.”
“The reconciliation bill alone is estimated to increase annual energy costs more than $16 billion in 2030 and more than $33 billion by 2035,” continued Heinrich. “This is because, at a time when we need every electron we can get, the reconciliation bill is causing many clean energy projects to be canceled.”
Heinrich additionally noted his concerns on how a new directive from the Department of the Interior that requires Secretary Doug Burgum to personally review and sign off on wind and solar projects on federal lands will risk delaying new generation additions to the grid, subsequently driving up families’ energy costs.
A video of Heinrich’s opening remarks can be found here.
A transcript of Heinrich’s remarks as delivered is below:
Thank you, Chairman Lee. Welcome to our witnesses, Mr. Gramlich, Mr. Huntsman, and Mr. Tench.
As we’ll discuss today, the scale and drivers of today’s rising electricity demand are relatively unprecedented.
It’s not just that electricity demand is reaching record highs, it’s that we’re entering a new era of a sustained load growth.
The structural forces underlying today’s load growth are converging: the growth of AI data centers; the electrification of vehicles, buildings, industry; as well as a resurgence in domestic manufacturing.
And meeting this load growth will require structural changes to how we permit and build our energy infrastructure.
In his testimony, Mr. Tench states that Vantage would prefer to “source power from the grid” but the “system is out of sync.”
From interconnection timelines that are too long, transmission lines that take too long to build, and permitting that is too fragmented, the challenges that Mr. Tench articulates are the same ones that this Committee has been trying to address for some time.
As Mr. Tench noted in his testimony, “No single business or technical workaround can substitute for a coordinated, modern, responsive grid.”
Fortunately, we sit on the Committee that can help make that happen.
The urgency isn’t just about maintaining our edge in AI innovation, it’s about affordability.
As Mr. Gramlich points out in his testimony today, electricity bills are becoming unaffordable for too many Americans.
And recent actions by President Trump and by the ‘Big, Bad Bill’ will make this worse.
The reconciliation bill alone is estimated to increase annual energy costs more than $16 billion in 2030 and more than $33 billion by 2035.
This is because, at a time when we need every single electron we can get, the reconciliation bill is causing many clean energy projects to be canceled.
And the President's tariffs are driving up equipment costs—raising the cost of all energy generation resources. All of them.
This is leading directly to Americans spending more on their utility bills.
And on top of this, an aging electrical grid is causing many energy projects to be stalled for years in interconnection queues.
In June 2025, Grid Strategies released a study that found that investing in well-planned, high-capacity transmission could save U.S. households between $6.3 and $10.4 billion annually—and that’s even after accounting for the cost of actually building those transmission lines.
The amount of energy currently in U.S. interconnection queues substantially exceeds the existing electricity demands—if only the grid could integrate it.
According to the Energy Information Administration, in 2024, the U.S. installed nearly 49 gigawatts of new grid capacity, 95% of which was from renewable resources.
This year, the EIA estimates that developers will build 63 GW of new capacity, including 32.5 GW of new utility-scale solar, 7.7 GW of wind power, 18.2 GW of energy storage, and just 4.4 GW of natural gas-fired generation.
Clean energy is the most affordable and it’s the fastest type of energy generation to deploy—outpacing natural gas, which is facing years-long backlogs in turbine availability.
If you order a gas, combine cycle natural gas turbine today, you’ll be lucky if it puts its first electron on the grid before 2032.
Meanwhile, states like Texas and California are demonstrating that high levels of renewable energy do not compromise grid reliability—in fact, they improve it.
After Texas added 9,600 MW of clean energy, including 5,400 MW of solar, 3,800 MW of energy storage, and 253 MW of wind, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said that the risk of grid emergencies dropped to less than 1 percent, that’s down from 16 percent the previous year.
NERC’s 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment confirmed this trend, showing that the risk of rolling blackouts in Texas fell from 15 percent to 3 percent as battery capacity came online.
I’ll close by saying that I am deeply disturbed by the recent Department of Interior policy that requires Secretary Doug Burgum to personally review and sign off on wind and solar projects on federal lands.
This nakedly political decision will risk delaying new generation additions to the grid when we need them the most.
And consequently, will drive up costs.
According to the Department of Energy, federal lands in the contiguous United States could support more than 7,700 GW of renewable energy capacity.
And with that said, I look forward to discussing how we can meet the rise in electricity demand and lower energy costs for households by integrating the most affordable and rapidly deployable energy resources today, while also investing in long-term modernization.
Thank you, Chairman.
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