As Gov. Spencer Cox prepares to be sworn in for his second — and, he says, final — term this week, there is a two-headed monster he’s focused on conquering: housing affordability and energy production.
Specifically, Cox says he wants to put Utah on course to double its energy production in the next decade, relying at least in part on nuclear power, and he wants to add 35,000 affordable housing units within five years, a push aimed at making homes more affordable for young families and a workforce squeezed by the high cost of living.
Both, he acknowledges, are massive undertakings.
“It’s hard. I’ve been told, don’t ever put goals out there or take on something that you don’t have complete control over,” he said last month. “There are so many variables in these two issues that are outside the state’s control, but we have to do it anyway, and we have to use our influence federally and with the private sector to make sure that we have enough housing for our kids and we have enough energy for all of us across the globe.”
The governor believes his efforts will be bolstered by the incoming Donald Trump administration, which Cox anticipates will loosen regulations and has committed to accelerating energy production nationwide. Trump is scheduled to be inaugurated Jan. 20. Cox takes his oath of office Jan. 8.
The degree to which Cox achieves his goals also depends largely on how he navigates his relations with the Republican supermajority in the Legislature, which ultimately dictates the bulk of state policy. Presidents and governors have less constitutional power than the public often assumes, said Adam Brown, a political science professor at Brigham Young University.
“We’ve gotten used to thinking of these chief executives as the person primarily responsible for delivering what we expect from the governor, but those who wrote our constitutions did not envision the office that way,” Brown said. “Much of a governor’s real power comes from the ability to persuade, negotiate and rally the public to pressure other actors — like the Legislature — to follow the governor’s lead.”
Building out of a housing hole
According to the Utah Foundation’s Utah Priorities Project, housing affordability — in a market where the cost of buying a home had increased 50% since 2019 — was the top issue on the minds of voters in 2024.
Analysts from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute projected in 2023 that the shortfall in housing in the state would grow to 37,000 units in the coming year.
Heading into last year’s legislative session, Cox’s top priority was to get $150 million for his goal of building 35,000 starter homes within five years. He didn’t get it but said he was optimistic that policy and zoning changes passed by the Legislature still made the target reachable.
Homebuilding in Utah was sluggish in 2024, however, and not close to the levels needed to keep pace with the state’s growth, much less dig out of the housing hole swallowing up prospective homebuyers.
A legislative audit in November 2023 projected that the state would need to build 27,900 new units each year for the next 20 years just to keep up with the projected population growth. But, according to data from the Gardner Institute, Utah saw just over 22,000 new units — including single-family homes, apartments and condominiums — the lowest number since 2016 and well short of the pace required.
And, for 2025, researchers are projecting only a slight uptick to 22,500 new units — meaning the state will slip further into its housing abyss.
The reason for the tepid building is that high interest rates have made financing projects challenging, according to Dejan Eskic, a senior research fellow at the Gardner Institute.
“Inflation led to interest rates being pushed upwards, and now we’re kind of in this environment where financing anything is near impossible unless you’re willing to pay an arm and a leg,” he said. “Unless you’re a large homebuilder and you have the credit lines or a publicly traded company, financing any project is challenging.”
Housing prices have dipped slightly in recent years, but even after the Federal Reserve cut the base interest rate last month, the interest on a new mortgage has gone up.
With Utah’s population projected to reach 4 million by 2033, Eskic said, the state will need roughly 270,000 new housing units by then. “We can’t just sit here,” he said, “and wait for it to solve itself.”
Cox said the policy changes the Legislature enacted last session just took effect in July, so they remain in their infancy.
“We’re just starting to ramp this up. It was a bold goal and one we’re committed to trying to figure out, and everybody’s on board,” the governor said. “We’ve been meeting over the course of the past few months, looking at the slow start that we’re getting … and figuring out what the roadblocks are, what’s holding people back. We know the demand is there, but [the question is now]: ‘What’s stopping the supply?’”
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gov. Spencer Cox gives remarks during a news conference at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Monday, Dec. 2, 2024.
Powering Utah’s future
Last October, Cox launched his new energy initiative, branded “Operation Gigawatt,” with an ambitious goal of doubling Utah’s energy production in 10 years and building the transmission lines that will be needed to deliver the power to homes in the state and export surplus power to the region.
The need for so much new electricity, he said, stems from Utah’s decade of growth and demands placed on the grid by the proliferation of electric vehicles and projected deployment of artificial intelligence, which, he said, requires “more power than you can really comprehend.”
One proposed project in Utah has requested access to 1.4 gigawatts of electricity, a little less than a third of what the entire state currently uses.
“We have multiple ... campuses that want to build in Utah,” Cox said during his One Utah Summit in October. “We have an energy crisis in our country today and what are we going to do about it? We can let other people lead or Utah can step up and lead.”
It is a tall order in a state that has seen its commercial-scale energy production decrease over the past decade. Between 2013 and 2023, Utah’s overall energy production dropped by 26%, according to data from the Utah Geological Survey. Renewable power, which increased by 277% over the past decade, has not been able to replace the sharply declining fossil fuel energy on which the state has traditionally relied.
From 2020 to 2022, Utah, which had been an exporter of energy since the early 1980s, was consuming more power than it produced, before moving back into the black in 2023.
To build the state’s portfolio, Cox is urging not only the continued expansion of renewable energy but also $4.2 million to encourage development of geothermal energy and $20 million to bring nuclear power to Utah for the first time. His goal is to have a commercial reactor running within the next decade. But, first, the Legislature will have to approve the spending.
“I could spend the rest of the day on how screwed up our energy policy is,” Cox said last month. He said the United States essentially stopped building new nuclear plants in the late 1970s — although according to the U.S. Department of Energy, the amount of nuclear energy produced has more than tripled in that span.
It is true that there had not been a new nuclear plant built in the United States in three decades, but that changed when a Georgia plant went on line in 2023 and a second unit powered up in 2024, becoming the largest nuclear plant in the nation.
It took 14 years to get that plant permitted and built, seven years longer than planned, and its $35 billion cost came in more than double what was projected.
Rocky Mountain Power proposed retiring its coal-fired power plants in Utah early and building two nuclear power plants in Carbon and Emery counties, but it scrapped that plan last April partly because of the Cox administration’s lawsuit to block rules limiting ozone pollution — and as a result the amount of coal that can be burned.
Another nuclear project with ties to Utah was also scrapped. A group comprised mostly of cities known as the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS, had partnered with NuScale to build a nuclear power plant in Idaho, to provide power to 27 Utah cities, but pulled the plug on that project in November 2023 because there were not enough customers to make the project viable.
Josh Craft, head of government relations for Utah Clean Energy, said it’s encouraging that the governor wants to improve the aging transmission lines and that there is an opportunity for the state to make strides in generating clean energy.
But the state “shouldn’t put all our eggs” in the nuclear basket because projects are expensive and take time to get licensed and built, Craft said. “If you’re looking in a 2030 time frame, I think it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll be seeing much in the way of new nuclear deployment as part of the portfolio by then.”
There are opportunities to develop more geothermal energy in Utah, Craft said, and additional energy projects like a hydrogen-powered plant being built near Delta and wind and solar, coupled with new battery technologies, could bring additional clean energy to the grid. There is money available from the Biden administration to help transition to clean fuels.
“It would be a missed opportunity for Utah,” he said, “if we’re not leaning into that in the next decade.”
Cox wants the $20 million in state money he asked for promoting nuclear to be spent helping with site selection and preparation to reduce some of the costs and attract private sector investment. He said he has also spoken with the governors of Idaho and Wyoming, hoping to make it a regional endeavor.
“It’s time to stop the madness. It’s time to start building nuclear again,” Cox said. “It should not take us 15 years to build a nuclear facility that costs three times what it was supposed to cost.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, Gov. Spencer Cox and Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, at the National Governors Association’s summer meeting in Salt Lake City on Friday, July 12, 2024.
Navigating the Legislature
As if the challenges Cox is taking on aren’t daunting enough, he will also have to persuade the Legislature to go along with his grand plans. And while the body is dominated by fellow Republicans, they have frequently had their own ideas about how policy should play out.
“The Legislature has been keen for several years now to assert itself,” Brown said, but that may be tempered some after lawmakers were repeatedly rebuffed on high-profile issues by the courts in 2024.
Cox has said repeatedly that eight years in office is long enough, and he will not run again. While it effectively makes him a lame-duck governor on day one, he said he made the pronouncement so “you will hold me accountable if I try to change my mind in four years.”
“I’ve seen far too many people who say things like this, and then they start to believe that the state can’t function without them or the country can’t survive without them, that ‘we’re so important, that we’re needed everywhere and I just have to run one more time or the state will fall apart,’” Cox said. “There are so many good people in this state who can do this job.”
The decision not to seek another term may be liberating for Cox, Brown said, enabling him to “no longer feel beholden to the more extreme wing of the party” that controls the nominating process.
“The governor can potentially move the needle a lot, especially if he effectively wields his stature as the person in politics most capable of driving media narratives and employing veto threats to shape legislation,” Brown said. “We’ve seen moments of such leadership from the current governor and his predecessor but also moments where he has chosen to sit things out. I don’t know which version of Spencer Cox we’ll see this winter.”
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