The Rebuild Plan
Rebuilding the American Power Grid
A 25-year plan to rebuild the electric grid — making the United States energy independent, cutting families' utility costs, rebuilding household savings, and paying down the national debt.
Every figure on this page comes from our open model, which you can download and check. All dollars are 2025 dollars. These are planning estimates, honestly labeled — the kind you use to decide whether to build, before the engineers sharpen every number.
The problem, in one spring
This spring, a conflict half a world away spiked gasoline 31% in twenty weeks and cost American families roughly $132 billion — at the pump, on the utility bill, across the whole economy. Not because we did anything wrong. Because we still rent our energy security from the world market, and the world market has landlords.
Here is the fact that should make you angry: the steel it would take to make that kind of shock impossible costs less than one decade of the shocks themselves. We have run that math again and again, at every scale, and it always comes out the same way. The arithmetic has been on our side for years. What's been missing is the decision to build.
The Rebuild Plan is that decision, written down.
What we build
The plan rebuilds the American power grid around a simple discipline: waste less first, then build what's needed — not the other way around.
Waste less first. The cheapest power plant is the trip you don't drive and the heat you don't lose. Efficient homes built to standards that cut heating bills by half or more. Heat pumps that replace a furnace and an air conditioner in one machine. Electric vehicles that turn a dollar of energy into three times the miles. Neighborhoods where the store, the school, and the job don't all require a windshield. Demand-first design cuts the size of everything we have to build by more than half — that's not a slogan, it's the single biggest number in the model.
Build American supply. Solar from the Sunbelt. Wind from the Plains and off our coasts. Geothermal heat from the rock under our feet — drilled by the same crews and rigs that built the shale boom, put to work on power that never runs out. A modest expansion of hydropower. And we keep every existing nuclear plant running through license extension — that fleet is bought, paid for, and carbon-free, and retiring it early would be waste. The plan builds no new nuclear plants; it builds what is fastest and cheapest to deploy right now.
Store it smartly. Batteries on the grid for the daily cycle. Two hundred million electric vehicles whose batteries — already bought, sitting in driveways — can feed the evening peak and get paid for it. Heat stored cheaply in tanks and rock. Hydrogen and clean fuels reserved for the jobs nothing else can do: aircraft, ships, and heavy industry. Every technology assigned to the work it does best, nothing forced into a role it's bad at.
Connect it all. A national high-voltage backbone — an interstate highway system for electrons — so Arizona sun serves a Chicago evening and Plains wind lights the coasts. Eisenhower didn't ask every county's permission to connect the country by road; the backbone gets one federal corridor process and gets built.
The pace. America added a record 53 gigawatts of new power in 2024. The Rebuild runs at roughly twice that pace, front-loaded hard in the first decade, sustained for twenty-five years. That number — the build rate — is the whole ballgame. Money is not the constraint. Speed is. Which is why the plan's laws are aimed at the things that actually slow America down: permits, corridors, and certainty.
Run the pace yourself on the throttle. It's the whole debate in one lever.
What it costs, and who pays
The full Rebuild — grid, vehicles, buildings, transmission, storage — is an $11 to $12 trillion national project over 25 years. Before that number stops your breath, look at where it comes from:
82% is private capital. Utilities, developers, automakers, homeowners, and pension funds — investors who consider long-lived American infrastructure the best asset there is. They aren't donating. They're investing in projects that pay, the way private capital built the railroads and the power plants the first time. The federal government's job is not to write the check. It's to set honest rules, price what's real, and get out of the way of the pour.
The federal share is about $98 billion a year — tax credits that automatically shrink as costs fall, the national backbone, research, and a square deal for fossil-fuel workers and their communities. For scale: that's about five percent of this year's federal deficit.
And it's more than paid for. The plan's revenue side — a border-adjusted carbon fee returned to households as a monthly dividend, the end of century-old fuel subsidies, loophole closures at the very top, a lifted Social Security wage cap, and the savings that follow when cleaner air means fewer hospital bills and straits stop needing carrier escorts — outweighs the federal cost in every scenario we ran. In the cautious case, the deficit improves by $177 billion a year. In the central case, $377 billion a year — roughly $9.4 trillion of deficit reduction over the life of the plan.
Two honest notes, because this plan earns trust by volunteering the hard parts. First: this is not a cure-all for the national debt. The structural deficit is driven mostly by healthcare costs and demographics, and anyone who tells you an energy plan fixes that is selling something. This plan makes the problem meaningfully smaller and stops making it worse — that's the honest claim, and it's enough. Second: two of the plan's choices — how Social Security is strengthened and how defense savings are counted — are judgment calls, not arithmetic. We show our reasoning in the open model and we're prepared to defend it, but we won't pretend a value choice is a math result.
What your family gets
The national numbers are trillions. Yours are smaller and they matter more.
A typical household — twelve thousand miles a year, gas heat, a $220 utility bill — that switches to an EV at the next trade-in and a heat pump when the furnace dies keeps about $250 a month, including a monthly dividend check that arrives whether or not you change anything. Families in walkable neighborhoods who can drop a second car keep far more; the all-in cost of owning a car runs about $850 a month, and no gadget on earth saves what a good neighborhood saves.
Invested steadily, those savings are how a working family goes from getting by to owning something — a cushion, a down payment, an inheritance. Half of American families couldn't cover three months of expenses if a paycheck stopped. The Rebuild's answer to that isn't a program. It's margin: money that used to burn up in a tank, staying home.
Run your own numbers. It takes ninety seconds, and every figure on this page becomes yours.
The Rebuild Plan: seven laws, one generation
The Power Dividend Act (2027). A border-adjusted fee on carbon, imported and domestic, with the proceeds split two ways: a monthly dividend check to every American household, and the deficit. Families come out ahead — the dividend is designed so that ordinary households receive more than they pay — and the market does the rest, steering trillions of private dollars toward American power without a bureaucrat picking a single winner.
The End Energy Welfare Act (2027). Century-old tax loopholes for fuels that no longer need training wheels, phased out gradually over seven years with dates industry can plan around. Mature industries compete; they don't collect.
The Interstate Power Act (2028). The national transmission backbone, permitted the way Eisenhower permitted the highways: one federal corridor process, clear rules, built where the wind blows and the sun shines, delivering everywhere.
The Build American Energy Credits Act (2028). Technology-neutral credits that automatically decline as costs fall and sunset themselves when the job is done. Made-in-America content rules. A launch ramp, not a crutch — the opposite of an open-ended subsidy.
The Fair Share & Solvency Act (2029). Close the loophole that lets the largest fortunes pass untaxed at death, set a minimum tax on billionaire gains, and lift the Social Security wage cap — strengthening the program for the next generation without cutting a single earned benefit.
The Homefront Efficiency Act (2030). Modern building codes, heat pumps, and deep retrofits — the most jobs per dollar of anything in this plan, performed by local crews in every ZIP code in America, cutting bills in the homes that need it most.
The Peace Dividend Review (2032). As tankers stop needing escorts and straits stop mattering, an independent audit counts the actual savings in the oil-security mission before a single defense dollar moves. Verified first, reallocated second.
The hard parts, told straight
We would rather you hear these from us.
The pace is unprecedented. Twice the best year America has ever had, held for a generation. Supply chains, crews, and factories all have to scale. The plan front-loads the effort because the early years are the hardest: new demand from data centers and a growing economy eats the first years of the build before independence gains ground. Coast, and we lose the decade.
Permitting is the real enemy. Nearly two terawatts of ready power projects are sitting in interconnection queues right now. The bottleneck isn't invention or money — it's paperwork. That's why two of the seven laws are aimed squarely at corridors and process.
Materials must be mined and made. Copper, lithium, steel, silicon — at scale, much of it here at home. That's a challenge and a jobs program wearing the same hard hat.
And it takes a generation of resolve. Twenty-five years spans six Congresses and several presidents. The plan is built to survive them: private capital that keeps flowing once committed, credits that sunset on schedule instead of becoming permanent fights, a dividend that arrives monthly in every mailbox — the kind of thing, history shows, that no party is eager to take away.
Check our math
Every number here traces to the open model — a working spreadsheet with every assumption labeled, every source cited (Congressional Budget Office, Energy Information Administration, NREL, Department of Energy, EPA), and every judgment call flagged as one. Download it. Change the assumptions. Break it if you can.
If you find an error, tell us. We'll fix it and thank you by name. A plan that asks for a generation of trust should start by showing its work.
The choice
Do nothing, and the do-nothing tax compounds forever: bills that spike with every crisis, wealth that leaks out of family budgets into the world's most volatile market, a debt that grows because we never claimed the savings sitting in plain sight.
Or build — at the pace this country has hit before and can hold again — and hand the next generation the first American century that runs on power nobody can take hostage.
Not left. Not right. Forward.