America’s Energy Future Begins With Public Understanding | Opinion

Detailed summary

America's energy conversation is stuck, and we rarely talk about the thing that determines whether any of the infrastructure gets built.

America's energy conversation is stuck. We argue about generation sources, subsidies, and emissions targets. We rarely talk about the thing that determines whether any of it actually gets built: whether the people living near a project understand why it exists and what it delivers for them.

That gap has consequences. The United States is projected to set record highs for electricity consumption in 2026 and 2027, climbing from 4,195 TWh (Terawatt-hour) in 2025 to 4,288 TWh in 2026 and 4,356 TWh in 2027, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration via SXcoal. A TWh is a large-scale unit used to measure electrical generation or consumption, equivalent to one terawatt of power running for one hour.

The bottleneck is not technology. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, via Energy Markets & Planning, reported that as of the end of 2025, over 2,060 gigawatts (GW) of total generation and storage capacity were actively seeking connection to the grid.

Many of those projects will never be built. They are withdrawn, delayed, or stalled by a combination of grid constraints, permitting, and local opposition.

Some of that opposition is legitimate. Communities have real concerns about land use, environmental impact, and whether a project will benefit them or simply pass through. But not all opposition reflects the majority view. A public hearing where ten people shout the loudest does not tell you what a community actually thinks. It tells you who had the time and resources to show up.

The industry has not helped itself. For decades, developers treated community engagement as a box to tick after the project was designed and the permits were filed. They walked into towns with technical slides about powerlines, transformers and substations and assumed that explaining the engineering was the same as explaining the value. It is not.

People do not need to understand how a transmission line works. They need to understand what it means for their electricity bills, the…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from Newsweek. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.