The Levin Letter: Energy Costs Are Too High. Here’s My Plan to Fix It.
Over the past year, household electric bills have risen by as much as 13% and are expected to climb even higher as new data centers come online. Millions of American families are already making impossible choices, deciding whether to pay for gas, groceries, rent, electricity, or health care. The war in Iran has made a difficult situation dramatically worse.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and a quarter of all seaborne oil trade normally flow, has sent crude oil prices surging past $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022. Californians are now paying over $5 per gallon. The ripple effects are hitting shipping costs, grocery bills, and virtually everything that moves by truck, ship, or plane.
More than 40% of American electricity is generated from natural gas, and global prices have skyrocketed since the conflict began. This crisis exposes a hard truth: dependence on volatile global energy markets puts American families at risk. We need affordable, reliable, domestic energy sources to power American homes and businesses.
I recently introduced the Energy Bills Relief Act along with my friend Sean Casten of Illinois. The core principle is simple: American consumers should come first, not utility profits, not foreign energy markets. For the first time in history, the most affordable and reliable forms of energy available are domestic and clean. After decades of American innovation and investment, we have the tools to power this country ourselves. What we lack is a consumer-first policy to deploy them.
The Energy Bills Relief Act addresses energy costs through three core principles: deploying more affordable domestic energy, putting affordability over utility profits, and modernizing our electric grid.
The bill would restore cost-saving tax credits for home and system-wide energy improvements that help families lower their monthly bills. It requires high-demand facilities like data centers to pay their own energy costs rather than shifting those costs onto households. It incentivizes utility companies to modernize inefficient systems, passing savings directly to ratepayers. It provides financial assistance to families facing shutoffs. And it gives communities a voice in energy decisions that affect them.
The bill also targets California-specific pressures, including wildfires, by funding electric grid upgrades that prevent equipment failures from igniting costly fires. Reducing wildfire damage means lower costs for ratepayers.
Taken together, these measures would shield American families from the energy price spikes eating away at household budgets month after month.
Every megawatt of domestic energy added to the grid insulates American consumers from foreign market shocks. Our goal should be energy that is affordable, reliable, clean, and produced here at home. The Energy Bills Relief Act gets us there. Congress needs to act.
By: Rep. Mike Levin
Source: Picket Fence Media