Economic shocks have historically caused us to rethink our nation’s energy systems. After the 1970s oil embargo, as the United States tried desperately to save energy and reduce reliance on foreign oil, Congress enacted the first federal standards to make cars more fuel-efficient and passed new tax credits for investing in wind and solar.

When the Great Recession walloped the U.S. economy, lawmakers expanded those incentives and pumped billions of dollars into clean energy and energy efficiency in the 2009 stimulus package. Those investments helped keep demand growth and energy prices stable for consumers and businesses for years as the economy recovered.

Today, while the current conflict in Iran seems to be ending, it has shown again that the international oil and gas market is vulnerable to wild price shocks that raise costs for domestic consumers and businesses. Meanwhile, U.S. electricity prices continue to rise with unprecedented new power demand. But for the most part, policymakers aren’t taking lessons from past energy crises.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle need to change course and begin considering the real cost drivers that will keep energy prices high over the long term, rather than haphazardly slashing or restructuring existing programs in the name of fleeting price relief.

Clean Energy Isn't a Zero-Sum Game

That starts with dispensing with the idea that deploying more clean energy is a zero-sum proposition.

When Republicans came to office last year, Congress repealed Biden-era renewable energy and electric vehicle incentives—policies with deep Republican roots. The EV tax credit was enacted under President George W. Bush, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) often calls himself the “father” of the federal wind energy tax credit.

The current administration replaced those incentives with new, arbitrary red tape for renewable energy and orders to keep aging coal power plants open. It’s costing ratepayers millions of dollars. The administration has also rolled back vehicle efficiency standards that lowered costs at the pump.

At the state level, even some Democrats are attempting to roll back energy efficiency programs and weaken successful clean energy laws that can help keep power prices down .

But the reality is that wind, solar, and battery storage are often the fastest and cheapest ways to add new power to the grid. They compete with traditional power plants on those merits, which is exactly why deep red Texas is on track to generate more electricity with solar than with coal this year, and it’s why the Lone Star State is leading the country in battery storage.

Lawmakers in both parties need to acknowledge that rising power demand from AI data centers and manufacturing, alongside volatility in international oil markets and strained global supply chains, are at the root of our current affordability crisis. That’s colliding with a power grid hitting its useful lifespan and in dire need of investment.

The free market works best when businesses, and not the government, decide what the cheapest and most efficient energy options are. The government’s job is not to pick the winner. It is to clear the barriers that stop the market from delivering the cheapest power. Those barriers are concrete, and so are the fixes.

Bipartisan Fixes Are Within Reach

There are bipartisan solutions on the table right now to address this. Lawmakers in Virginia, for instance, recently passed a new law that will help the state deal with demand by more fully using its existing grid infrastructure.

It took more than ten years for the SunZia wind and transmission project — now the largest wind farm in the Western Hemisphere — to get all of its required federal permits. Everyone agrees that’s too long, and lawmakers increasingly agree that environmental permits should have some certainty once they’re in place so that they can’t be pulled back at the political whims of a presidential administration.

Two federal reforms have bipartisan support: modernizing environmental review laws so projects get built and pushing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to set clear rules for long-distance transmission.

These policy solutions have the potential to cut through the partisan noise because they are technologically useful and provide a level playing field for all types of energy to compete on price and speed.

Businesses across the economy—manufacturers, retailers, hospitals, farms—are feeling the squeeze of higher prices, and almost universally the barriers they hit have more to do with the grid than with ideology. Retailers like IKEA U.S. are already pressing for the permitting reforms that would bring cheaper power to their stores and supply chains.

In many ways, the policies that emerged to recover from the crises of the 1970s and 2000s were the country’s first “climate” investment programs, though no one would have thought of them that way at the time.

The larger lesson is simple: for half a century, building more energy and using it more efficiently has kept costs down for Americans. The cheapest path forward is to get out of the way and let the market build it.