Energy Insecurity in the U.S.

Like many people, I have tried to stay arm’s length from the news coming out of Washington, D.C., over the past few weeks, in particular the passage of the Republicans’ massive and devastating budget reconciliation package, the Big Beautiful Bill. The new law’s likely impact on clean energy in the U.S. is still being parsed, but the overall impression is that President Trump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright are out to strangle solar and wind by any means available, legal or not.

Searching for shreds of sanity, I found myself at two events on July 7, which put the antics in D.C. into perspective at both the macro and micro levels. For the macro, I listened to a webinar on the Energy Institute’s 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy, which lays out the numbers showing that under Trump, the U.S. has quickly become irrelevant in the global energy transition that China is now leading at a blinding pace. 

The micro view emerged at a live event where Columbia University Professor Diana Hernández spoke of how one in 10 Americans live day to day with energy insecurity, making excruciating decisions between feeding their kids or paying their utility bills. 

While seemingly different, both these events had something important to say about this pivotal moment in U.S. energy policy. Our current obsession with U.S. energy abundance and dominance — and Trump’s sharp politicization of energy policy — has skewed and narrowed our focus. 

We are losing sight of key global trends and the impacts of our own policies on people’s lives, and per usual, it’s all about who controls the narrative. 

The renewables counternarrative

The Energy Institute is a London-based nonprofit and its 76-page Statistical Review is one of those high-level reports that is heavy on numbers, light on analysis and context, and can be spun to support a range of interpretations.

According to the report, “wind and solar grew nearly nine times faster than total energy demand … [and] continued to be the fastest growing areas of the energy system, increasing by 16% in 2024.” By comparison, natural gas production rose 1.2%, but speakers at the EI webinar focused more on the role of fossil fuels in meeting rising energy demand, while reframing the growth of renewables as an “addition” to the existing energy system, rather than a “transition.”

I am not naming names here but the absence of a clean tech representative definitely tilted the conversation, and what was not discussed was, in some cases, telling and significant. For example, the report provides a striking counternarrative to the conventional wisdom that it takes more clean energy to replace fossil fuel generation. 

“To undertake the same amount of work as fossil fuels, technologies such as wind, solar, and hydro enable us to supply significantly less clean electricity,” the report says. “Consequently, in 2024, the global energy system was effectively 7% more efficient in terms of the total amount of energy that it needed to meet end-use demand.”

The chart above, from the report, tracks just how much fossil fuel use and GHG emissions have been avoided since 2010. 

“In addition to avoiding the need to explore for and produce fossil fuels, around 109 gigatonnes of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions have been avoided [since 2010], 170% more than were emitted in 2024. The Asia Pacific region, underpinned by China which was responsible for nearly 60% of the renewable power supply additions in 2024, has been at the forefront of realising the benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuels.”

Of course, demand growth was a key theme but with a few twists. Global electricity demand grew 4% in 2024 – about twice the rate of overall energy demand – according to Energy Institute CEO Nick Wayth. Data centers and AI are a factor, but climate change and an increasing demand for air conditioning are core drivers — “in India, in Africa and in parts of Europe,” Wayth said. An estimated 2,300 people died during Europe’s recent heat wave.

Meeting this rapidly growing demand resulted in a record year for all forms of energy generation in 2024, led by the boom in renewables, Wayth said, “but with very stark differences between key economies.”

The report notes that over the past decade, deployment of renewables in developing and emerging economies has moved ahead at twice the rate of deployment in industrialized countries. In other words, at least some developing countries are leapfrogging over fossil fuels and building out local energy systems with renewables.

Cipher reporter Amena H. Saiyid recently visited her home country of Pakistan, where she found a solar revolution in progress, fueled by cheap Chinese solar panels.

The China factor

Wayth’s analysis of China’s role in the global energy transition provided a strong contrast with Trump’s one-dimensional drive for fossil-fueled energy dominance in the U.S.

“China is at the heart of the transition,” he said. “This is a country that is growing fast and doing things differently to virtually anywhere else on the planet.” pushing rapid growth of all forms of electricity generation.

“China … has been playing a very long game on the transition,” Wayth said. “Not because it wants to lead necessarily on climate change or any other dimension, but strategically in terms of energy security and strategically in terms of creating meaningful businesses around EVs, around renewables,” he said. “And that’s exactly what it’s doing.”

Which is also exactly the vision behind the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act — creating a long-term strategy for U.S. energy security and economic growth parallel to China’s. 

Beyond its astounding speed and scope, China’s energy transition has raised serious concerns about the country’s use of forced labor and lack of rigorous environmental standards and human rights guarantees. But in many ways, China is providing a real-time case study in what a truly all-of-the-above energy policy looks like at a time when every electron is needed.

And everyone, except maybe Trump and the Republicans, understands that clawing back the IRA’s clean energy incentives and rolling back clean energy policies is effectively ceding the field to China. 

Yes, the U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas and accounts for about one-sixth of the world’s energy production, but a one-sided dominance will not provide energy security or competitiveness in global markets.

The struggle for energy

Trump came into office pledging to cut Americans’ utility bills in half — something that quickly dropped out of his standard speeches. Meeting demand growth means utility bills will only be going up, as they already are. The drivers here are a mix of our aging grid, risk-averse utilities and grid-operators, and the resulting backed-up waiting lines for new projects — mostly solar, wind and storage — to get connected.

The underbelly of demand growth will likely be more Americans living with energy insecurity, according to Hernández and Jennifer Laird, an assistant professor at City University of New York, coauthors of a new book, “Powerless: The People’s Struggle for Energy.”

At the July 7 live event, hosted by Resources for the Future, Hernández said that 10% of the U.S. population is experiencing some form of energy insecurity, broadly defined in her book as “the inability to adequately meet household energy needs.” An additional 40% are one paycheck away, she said. 

“They just need to lose a job or … get sick or something else that kind of trips up their household budget, that produces that kind of economic risk” that can lead to energy insecurity.

Hernández sees energy insecurity as a tangle of economic, physical and experiential, or coping, components that feed on and intensify each other. The economic factor is what most people would understand as energy insecurity — the inability to pay a utility bill, leading to missed payments and possible disconnection. 

But, she said, “on the physical side, it’s inefficiencies and deficiencies … the kinds of things that might drive up a utility cost but also make it more challenging to experience comfort in your home environment,” as well as outages that affect reliability. In other words, people with low incomes are more likely to live in old buildings that have inefficient appliances and leak and waste heating and cooling.

The coping factor brings in “difficult choices, basically depriving oneself of using enough energy for health and safety,” Hernández said. “So [it’s] the underconsumption of energy and then discomfort and dangerous alternatives, [like] using your oven for heat.”

With more and more Americans seeing sudden jumps in their utility bills, energy insecurity may rise. According to Hernández, the shame and stigma surrounding these experiences keeps people from reaching out to existing assistance programs, like the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, commonly referred to as  LIHEAP. 

Only about 17% of those eligible for LIHEAP receive that support, she said, and only 1% of eligible households are able to access weatherization programs that could cut their bills by making their homes more efficient.

While LIHEAP funds have thus far not been affected by Republican cost-slashing, the administration has repeatedly targeted IRA funds aimed at promoting clean energy to cut utility bills and making low-income homes more energy efficient. So, exactly who is going to benefit from Trump’s version of energy dominance?

What’s next

Hernández has some radical ideas about potential solutions – like income-based electric rates. “Is it okay for a household that earns $4 million or $400,000 and another household that earns $40,000 to pay the same rate per kilowatt-hour?” she said.

Housing itself should be developed as a platform for transformative change, and secure, adequate household energy recognized as a basic human right, she said. “How do we bake in equity … so that people that might have affordability struggles right now are better positioned after the fact, not worse off?”

The book lays out a comprehensive set of strategies to end energy insecurity, including access to electrification, efficiency and clean energy. And as the EI report shows, that combination seems to be working pretty well on the global level, as well.

The question now is whether Trump’s attacks on clean energy will further erode U.S. energy security, beyond the damage already done, at the macro and micro levels – or whether we can reclaim the narrative and all the electrons we need to be truly secure.