The biggest barrier to cheap energy in America isn’t technology, cost, or even politics in the abstract, it’s that utilities get to decide who competes with them. That’s the throughline of this week’s conversation with Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL-06), a clean-energy engineer turned Financial Services Democrat who has spent four years co-authoring the Energy Bills Relief Act with Rep. Mike Levin.

The numbers Casten lays out are startling. There are 2,000 gigawatts of new generation waiting to connect to the U.S. grid. Only 85 of them are fossil fuel. The market has already chosen clean energy; the regulatory system keeps blocking it. Meanwhile, electricity bills are up 13% in Trump’s first year, and utilities just asked for $31 billion in new rate hikes.

From there the conversation widens: what the One Big Beautiful Bill’s rollback of IRA tax credits actually does to coal communities, why one Category 5 hurricane could push Florida into bankruptcy, and Casten’s central argument, that the Republican Party of his youth was pro-market, the Republican Party of today is pro-business, and Democrats have an opening to claim the difference.

Tahra Hoops: Hi everyone. My name is Tahra Hoops. You are joined here at The Rebuild with my co-host Gary Winslett. Today we have a very special guest: Congressman Sean Casten, who represents Illinois’ Sixth Congressional District. It includes a lot of Chicago’s western suburbs. He was first elected in 2018, actually flipping a Republican-held seat at that time. Casten serves on the House Financial Services Committee and the Joint Economic Committee. Before joining Congress, he spent two decades in the clean energy sector, including as CEO of Turbosteam and co-founder of Recycled Energy Development. In Congress, he’s focused on energy policy, climate change, grid modernization, and helping to lower utility costs for constituents across the nation. We are very excited to have you. Representative Casten, how are you doing today?

Rep. Sean Casten: Good. Thank you for having me.

Tahra Hoops: I wanted to jump into the recently introduced Energy Bills Relief Act, which is the most ambitious affordability-focused energy legislation House Democrats have put forward this Congress. It comes at a moment when electricity bills are up 13% in Trump’s first year, and utilities just requested $31 billion in rate hikes. Tell us what is in this bill and why this is the moment for it.

Rep. Sean Casten: It’s funny. Sometimes moments just come to you. Mike Levin and I, who came in together in 2018, have literally been working on this bill for four years, and we’ve been half joking that we were just waiting for Trump to totally botch our energy policy and invade Iran to really make it resonant, so we could run between the shackles.

Somewhat more seriously: when Mike and I both got elected, the Speaker picked us to serve on the climate committee. We wrote a set of 700 recommendations, about 300 of which became law in the Inflation Reduction Act. But when we got our report done, we had a bunch of outside experts vet it, and we said: what is the biggest thing we’re missing that’s going to delay our ability to achieve these goals? And they said, without exception, that the United States has never built transmission fast enough to deploy clean energy.

We’re very good at building gas pipelines, which means we build gas plants where we can run the gas to it at the load. But we try not to build transmission. And so we said, we’ve got to have a package, and we have to have a package that when the window opens, it gets there.

I say this in a climate perspective, but I could just as easily say it in an affordability perspective, because if you can keep your lights on and keep your house warm and get back and forth to work every day without buying fossil fuel, that also means you can do all those things without paying for fossil fuel. Clean energy and affordable energy are completely synonymous.

And candidly, that’s always been the biggest political barrier, because truly prioritizing the interests of consumers to have affordable energy is an existential threat to the fossil fuel sector.

Gary Winslett: It’s funny you mention transmission. Where you are, we make tons of wind in Iowa, and Chicago’s where it needs it. You’re sitting across exactly one of those transmission corridors.

Rep. Sean Casten: Yeah, and there are multiple projects that would bring that wind, that cheap power, into the area, and they’ve been consistently bedeviled by grid interconnection. Grid interconnection is one of these things. The old joke is that asking a utility to connect to their grid is like asking a man for permission to date his wife. Whether or not that’s the best outcome for all involved doesn’t really factor into the conversation.

When you’re sitting there as a utility and power prices are running 90, 100, $110 a megawatt-hour, and somebody wants to build a line that would bring $20 or $30 power in, that’s a competitive threat. You don’t need to be cynical about it. That’s just a practical reality. No business wants to compete with lower-cost supply if it doesn’t have to. And so we’ve seen time and time again utilities and regulators doing a really good job of building transmission lines to bolster reliability and an objectively terrible job of building transmission lines for affordability.

Gary Winslett: Has your region, PJM, been particularly tough on this?

Rep. Sean Casten: Everybody’s tough in their own special way. I criticize ERCOT all the time because ERCOT has remained un-interconnected. That’s the Texas grid. On the bright side, I think PJM has done a much better job than MISO of really embracing markets as tools to solve problems. But all of the regional transmission organizations are really bedeviled by governance problems. Their governance is set by their members, and their members, because they have so much capital invested in the system, are innately lowercase-c conservative.

And a lot of what Mike and I have done tries to fix those things: let’s reform the governance process, let’s compel all the RTOs to be evaluated on a consistent set of metrics over the same geography and on the same timeline, let’s give FERC the authority to permit transmission lines, which it already has for gas lines. We know that system works. We have the ability to do it. But let’s get rid of these abilities for local actors to gum this up, while still making sure that we protect consumers and the environment.

Gary Winslett: Of course. That would just put green energy on the same level playing field as natural gas. What we’ve done with natural gas has been great, but green and clean electricity should be on the same playing field.

Rep. Sean Casten: Look, you can see it in the numbers. We currently have about 1,300 gigawatts of generation in this country. There are 2,000 gigawatts waiting to be interconnected. Of those 2,000 gigawatts, 85 are fossil fuel-fired. Everything else is wind, solar, batteries. That’s what markets want to build. Wouldn’t you prefer to build an asset with no operating costs so you can make more margin? That’s what they want to build. But that stuff is also the competitive threat.

Gary Winslett: Could I also ask you about the tax credits in this bill? What do they do and why do they help?

Rep. Sean Casten: The simplest way to answer is: we simply restore all of the IRA tax credits that were taken away in the One Big Beautiful Bill that Republicans passed. The reason is a little more important from a policy perspective than just “let’s get back at those bad guys.”

If we were to fully embrace affordable energy, it would be a massive wealth transfer from energy producers to energy consumers. Every single American is an energy consumer. A small number of Americans are energy producers. Do the math. All is more than some.

However, for certain communities, that wealth transfer is really, really economically painful. Look at what’s happened to the West Virginia economy as markets have turned away from coal. If you’re living in a town where the mine shut down, then the power plant shut down, then the Walmart shut down, and now the school can’t afford an improvement to the football field, you might understandably not see affordable energy as your friend.

And part of the reason why we wanted to bring those tax credits back in is that when we crafted them, and when I say “we,” I’m talking Mike Levin and the other members of the climate committee, we were really intentional about saying we have to put incentives in place that prioritize investments in those communities that have historically stapled their economy to yesterday’s technology. Because they’re all Americans, and we want everybody to see this as a win, not just the people who don’t depend on the oil derrick in their back 40.

And so those IRA credits with those incentives were really important to put back in.

Tahra Hoops: It is great to see you champion that, because there was so much progress in the prior years and it seemed like we were just starting to see results. But then we have people across the aisle who seem stuck in the past. There was a recent quote from Energy Secretary Chris Wright who said, “I am pretty confident coal will lead the world in global electricity production”. I find that mind-boggling, because if you look across the globe, coal seems like something of the past. Right now we are in an all-of-the-above energy approach, and renewables are a part of that. You’ve directly criticized the Trump administration’s energy policies. What would you say to Republicans who argue that coal or fossil fuels are still the cheapest and most reliable option?

Rep. Sean Casten: Look, it’s not freaking complicated. I could tell you academically all the reasons why, if you don’t have to pay for inputs, you’re going to have a lower operating cost and therefore compete in a market. That makes me sound like a college professor. If you don’t want to treat it that way, just look at the freaking scoreboard.

Coal consumption in the United States has declined over 50% in the last 15 years. That’s not because of wokeism. It’s because a coal plant is a really lousy investment. The private sector is not building coal because you can’t make any money running a coal plant. Coal plants don’t run that often because they get outcompeted by everything else on the grid.

Oil consumption in the United States is exactly the same as it was 15 years ago, not because of wokeism, but because given the choice between a car that gets 10 miles to the gallon and a car that gets 30, or better yet an EV that doesn’t take any fuel, people like not paying for energy. It’s pretty awesome not to have that bill.

So as I tell my Republican colleagues: shut up with your wokeism. You are just afraid of capitalism, because you are a mediocre individual who cannot compete, because you are part of that half of the population that is well below average. That is the Chris Wright story.

Tahra Hoops: I cannot agree with you more. I saw that and I’m like, these are the people who lead and govern us.

Rep. Sean Casten: Chris Wright testified before a science committee hearing that I was on, before he came to Trump’s office. I told him that he was a disposable human being who would be an embarrassment to his grandchildren. I stand by my words. Nobody in the energy industry took Chris Wright as a serious player. He was a guy who could say things and go on Fox TV, and he is as qualified to be Secretary of Energy as Pete Hegseth is qualified to be Secretary of Defense. These are not people who were recognized as understanding the nuance in their industry. Before they got there, they did a good TV hit, and that’s what Trump wanted, and that’s what Trump got.

We have to engage with them because of their power and because they’re tied with the White House. But when you look at what markets were building, markets wanted cheap. When you look at what the rest of the world is building, those not bedeviled by this political concern, they’re making those transitions to more affordable energy.

I’ll give you a statistic. If you divide US GDP by total energy use, we generate about $200 of GDP for every million BTUs of energy. The Danes generate over $500. The Swiss generate over $600. The Brits generate over $300. That means we could potentially double the size of our economy with the same amount of energy input, or cut our energy input by half and have the same standard of living. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

We invest in labor productivity all the time. We want to get the maximum return on capital. If you’re a steel manufacturer, you don’t want to throw iron away. You want to turn as much of it into steel as possible. Energy is the only place where the United States does such a terrible job relative to other first-world economies at turning inputs into useful output. We can either be depressed about that, or say: what an amazing opportunity to grow our economy.

Gary Winslett: That’s exactly right. The United States has both solar and wind potential, different places, to be sure. Denmark has great wind, not ideal for solar. We actually have both. So we’re kind of just leaving a lot on the table.

Rep. Sean Casten: And candidly, our challenge is that we also have a lot of coal and a lot of gas, and you’ve got a lot of communities that have built their economies on that in ways you don’t see in other countries that embraced efficiency sooner. Denmark is a little bit weird because Denmark made the commitment to efficiency before the North Sea oil discoveries, and by then it was habit. The US, I think, is still deciding whether we want to be full-on adults or whether we still like having the lack of responsibility that you have when you’re a teenager.

Tahra Hoops: It seems to me, just from hearing this, that Democrats are the people who would like to succeed in a capitalistic market, and it’s the Republicans who are holding us back by trying to own the libs and arguing about culture wars from ten years ago. That’s not the narrative you see online. When you think about Democrats and how they move when it comes to innovation, somehow you’d think they’re going to be the party trapped by woke culture stories that you’ll see in the New York Post, stories that are going to harm innovation for all, and that Republicans are trying to be the serious adults. But as you can see from the work you’re doing, it is just the opposite.

Rep. Sean Casten: There’s ample data, and I hate that we have to say this. The Joint Economic Committee, bipartisan and bicameral, has done research showing that going back six presidents, the economy always performs better under Democratic leadership. Not just a little better. A lot better. Eighty to ninety percent of all the jobs created under those six presidents were created under Democratic presidents. The GDP always grows more, the dollar’s always stronger.

I will say there’s nothing innately Democratic or Republican about supporting competitive markets. Ronald Reagan deregulated the airlines and telecoms and led antitrust enforcement. That’s an ideology that works.

I think what’s hard, and this is arguably just as hard for Democrats as Republicans, is that any business that has achieved a certain scale has a lobbying shop. Any entrepreneur with a great idea who can compete against that incumbent doesn’t spend their time on lobbying. So you hear very few voices on either side of the aisle in Washington saying, “What we need is more competition.” Competition has never really had an advocate in Washington.

Gary Winslett: It’s funny you mention how bipartisan some of this is. A lot of that deregulation actually starts under Carter. Carter just doesn’t get as much credit for it as he probably should. But that goes to your point. There’s not a Democrat or Republican way to ensure competition.

Rep. Sean Casten: Maybe this is just my anchor point. I was born in ‘71, I don’t remember Nixon at all, I have vague memories of Carter, but Reagan was the first president I really remember. But I do think the Republican Party of my youth was a pro-market party. The Republican Party of today is a pro-business party, and those are not synonymous terms. There’s a real opportunity for Democrats to step into that void and say: let’s be the pro-market party.

Gary Winslett: I did want to ask you a little more about the Energy Bills Relief Act. If we could get it, it’d be great. How would you assess success in the first few years, if it passes?

Rep. Sean Casten: Let’s make no small plans. I think the last real meaningful energy bill Congress passed was the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct 1992). That sounds crazy given how long ago that was. We do energy policy roughly every 15 years. We had the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA), which was transformative. We had EPAct 1992. We did one in 2005, but it was kind of small. So that’s really the last big one.

When EPAct was passed, within 10 years we built 200 gigawatts of natural gas combined-cycle generation, because suddenly there was an incentive for people to build the lowest-cost source, which at the time was natural gas. Within 10 years, the nuclear fleet went from running at 60% capacity to 90%, because utilities had an incentive to dispatch their lowest-cost assets. So I think we should hold that as a minimum measure of success: within a decade, a complete transformation of the US grid.

Right now you have in the queue all the generation you need to fully decarbonize. If we don’t deploy that quickly, we didn’t get the rules right. Some of what we’ve done is top-down and mandatory, but a lot of it is just changing the incentives.

For example, we have provisions that say: if a utility is investing to decongest the part of the grid you’re on and bring prices down, why don’t we let them make a little more money? Instead of seeing that as a zero-sum fight. If a utility deploys what are known as grid-enhancing technologies, tools that lower line losses on their grid, why don’t they get to keep some of those savings and give some back to the ratepayers? Right now, all of those things are zero-sum fights. So a lot of what Congressman Levin and I have done is to make utilities partners in this, the way EPAct ‘92 gave utilities a pathway to preferentially build the lowest-cost assets. It’s time to update that bill.

The measure of success: let’s be ambitious. Once we’re having a conversation about how zero-marginal-cost supply competes in a market awash in zero-marginal-cost supply and still gets paid to generate, that’s when I know we’ve succeeded.

Tahra Hoops: That all sounds great, and I hope we can get past the gridlocked Congress. Midterms matter so much. But I want to look beyond this bill. You spent four years working on this, and it’s incredibly politically salient right now. What are the top issues you’re focused on, and where do you think you could make the biggest impact this Congress, outside of this bill?

Rep. Sean Casten: The stuff we’re really focused on, and you mentioned that my committees are mostly financial regulation, I’m really increasingly concerned that our next financial crisis is either going to come from crypto or from climate change. Both are creating massive systemic risks.

We spend a lot of time trying to identify where those risks are pooling in our financial connective tissue. On the climate side, here’s a little example: six of the top seven most uninsured housing markets in the country are in Florida counties. Miami-Dade is number one. Broward County is number two. I think Harris County, Texas, is number three. And then it’s a bunch more Florida counties. Twenty percent of all Florida homeowners are in the state insurer of last resort. If that insurer goes away, they have no coverage.

The total value of Florida real estate is about three times total Florida GDP, which means it would only take one Category 5 hurricane to essentially force the state of Florida into bankruptcy. I’m not being hyperbolic. Just run the math on how much of a hit you’d need.

The part of this I think is bipartisan: we’ve never really done a good job of monitoring systemic risks in our financial system beyond a handful of systemically important banks. As we saw with the 2008 financial crisis, if the risk goes off the bank balance sheet and onto an insurance company’s balance sheet, our regulators stop watching it. We made some changes after the financial crisis, but now you’ve got a scenario where the risk goes straight through the insurer onto the property owner, who just says, “I’m not going to get insurance because I can’t afford it.” Where does that risk start to pool? And our financial regulators, particularly in this Trumpian moment, are politically scorned if they even ask the question about climate financial risk. And yet we know those risks are there.

But really the government should be, in the words of Jack Handy, I’d rather be rich than stupid.

Gary Winslett: Fair enough.

Tahra Hoops: I live in Los Angeles now, and for the first time in over a year, we drove down to Pacific Palisades and part of Malibu, which over a year ago was completely burnt down. To see all the structures that were so iconic, and now it’s just complete rubble with not much work having been done. A lot of it is due to the insurance problem we’ve been facing here. It was something they were trying to ignore, and then the wildfires blew it up in everyone’s faces. To see it for the first time in over a year with my own eyes was a very shocking and eerie experience.

Rep. Sean Casten: This is heavy. If you haven’t read the work of Spencer Glendon, I would highly recommend it. He runs Probable Futures, a former managing director at a wealth management firm who has gotten really into climate. One of the points he’s been making for a while is that our species 10,000 years ago survived in a climate very similar to the one we have now, except we were migratory. We need to start thinking about what it looks like to survive in a climate as volatile as the one we have now, because when confronted with this before, our species thought it wasn’t a good idea to tie all your wealth up into a single fixed asset in a fixed geographical location. We didn’t build cities on rivers or along coastlines because we couldn’t count on them staying stable. That’s a really scary prospect. But read the news. There seem to be a lot more migratory people now, aren’t there?

Gary Winslett: It’s funny, in a couple of different ways over the last few minutes you’ve brought up housing, and that was something I wanted to ask you about. A lot of our first pillar at The Rebuild, and all the stuff we do on the cost-of-living blueprint, is about increasing the supply of housing. From your seat on Financial Services, what do you think is the single biggest federal lever that would actually move the needle on housing supply? Is it land use? Is it something to do with Fannie and Freddie? Is it something else?

Rep. Sean Casten: Historically the stuff that has worked best and been most politically durable is lowering costs for first-time homeowners. I say “politically durable” because if you’ve never owned a house, the price of housing is daunting, and we’re seeing the average age of first home purchase going up. On the other hand, 60% of American households own their own home, and the majority of people’s wealth is tied up in their home. And if you want to lose your next election, bring down the cost of 60% of Americans’ primary source of wealth.

If you don’t have housing, housing is a cost. If you have a house, housing is an asset. We want assets to inflate. We want costs to go down. So where Congress has been most effective is helping that first-time buyer get into a home, whether through tax credits or through programs like what we did after World War II, where at least if you were a white American you got a lot of opportunities for discounted mortgages.

The things we call “the projects” were initially built as places for people to get stable housing, and generally that was very racially mixed housing. I’m oversimplifying, but not by much. But then the incentives to lower the cost of first home ownership were applied in very racially disparate ways. And so the projects became a racial thing. That wasn’t how they were first defined, and they worked. We saw home ownership spike with those programs.

I think we’re close on doing a housing bill that would have some good stuff in it. We’ve still got to work out some kinks with the Senate, particularly on what a “financial buyer” of a home looks like and how to prevent financial buyers from coming in. That sounds easy if you just say “private equity is bad.” But then you ask: does anyone have a friend with some investment properties? Would they be covered by the ban? What about a firm that owns housing to provide temporary accommodation for people relocating for a job? I think there are some structural issues that don’t work in what’s come through the Senate, but I’m hopeful we’ll have really hefty credits for first-time buyers in a lot of different structures, because it’s worked in the past, and it stays away from that politically toxic third rail of lowering the price of everybody’s assets.

I represent wealthy people in the suburbs. I would absolutely lose my election if I said, “You know what we need to do is multifamily zoning on your property.”

Tahra Hoops: I appreciate your candor. Trump has even said himself: the thing about building more housing is it will lower housing prices. I understand that point of view, but I’m glad you brought up making it easier for people to own homes. I critique a lot that we are very much in a boomer economy, and it’s very difficult for younger generations to feel like they can get ahead. The economy used to feel like a waiting room. Now people feel like they can’t even get into the waiting room. I would love to pick your brain more, but we’re coming short on time. Let’s do some rapid-fire questions. Low effort, nothing crazy, just the first thing that comes to mind.

What is something you think is too expensive, and you can’t say housing or electricity prices?

Rep. Sean Casten: Junk fees. How much stuff do you get charged for where you’re like, “I don’t even know what value I got”? Every one of those junk fees is too expensive.

Gary Winslett: When I bought a house I remember title insurance. I started looking into it and I’m like, there was no reason this should be this much.

Rep. Sean Casten: Like every time you fly on an airplane. What am I paying for now that I didn’t use to have to pay for?

Tahra Hoops: And what is a policy or innovation that you believe is underrated?

Rep. Sean Casten: The Office of Technology Assessment. It was this amazing office that provided technology assessments for every member of Congress, so robust that in my early years as an engineer and consultant, I’d read OTA reports to get smarter. I’d go in and say, “Let me tell you how paper manufacturing works. Let me tell you how steel manufacturing works. I’m investigating next-generation battery technology. How does that work?” Gingrich and the Republican Congress killed it in [ed. ‘95]. It has never been brought back. Rather than criticize Congress for not being up to speed on new technologies, I don’t think we talk enough about the fact that Congress created an agency specifically to keep us up to speed, and it was a choice of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party to make Congress dumber. It hardly cost anything. A budget of about $10 million a year.

Gary Winslett: Really Pennywise pound foolish.

Rep. Sean Casten: Again, I’d rather be rich than stupid. That is a politically controversial statement.

Gary Winslett: What’s something people don’t really know about your district that you find fascinating?

Rep. Sean Casten: My district was the last home of Muddy Waters. Coolest guy who ever came from my district. You’d never know it. If you drive through Westmont, Illinois, right now, you wouldn’t think this is where you get the blues. But if you got the blues, got on the train, made it part of the Great Migration, came up north, inspired all these people, and finally had enough to put down a down payment and live in a little house in your final years, Westmont was the place to go. It’s a cool piece of history that runs counter to people’s stereotypes. This does not look like the heart of blues in America.

Gary Winslett: That’s fascinating. I didn’t know that. I’m glad I asked.

Tahra Hoops: And what is something that you think your district does really well?

Rep. Sean Casten: We have really smart and thoughtful people. I’m a nerd at heart. I’m an engineer. Every time I do a town hall, or when we do polls, you realize there are soundbites that infect our public discourse that you can put on a sign. And then you go and talk to people, and they’re just very nuanced and very thoughtful and appreciate the complexities of issues. I don’t know if that’s true everywhere in the country, but I joke all the time that the smartest, most athletic, most charismatic, most talented people in America are all in Illinois’ Sixth District.

Not just the 55% who vote for me, to be clear.

Tahra Hoops: All of them! Well, this has been a lovely conversation. Thank you for all the work that you do. We definitely appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time to be here.

Gary Winslett: Thank you.

Rep. Sean Casten: Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate you guys.

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