Yes, it all sounds quite intimidating.

We know for a fact that such a program is possible, however. We know so for the simple reason that America has tackled grand projects on this scale before.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1933, most of rural America still had no electricity. In 1935, he created the Rural Electrification Administration, and in just five years the nation built 250,000 miles of power lines and hooked up nearly a million farms. By the early 1950s, virtually the entire country had electricity. Many Americans have probably heard from their older relatives about the moment the R.E.A. transformed their lives.

As a young Army officer, Dwight D. Eisenhower joined a cross-country convoy in 1919 and was appalled by the condition of the nation’s roads. As president, he began construction of the Interstate Highway System in 1956, perhaps America’s greatest peacetime construction project. Within five years the country built 10,400 miles of freeways; by 1992 that number quadrupled, to 48,000 miles.

True, those grand programs happened back when America had competent national leadership and a functional Congress. Can we still build at scale? Well, consider this: Since 2010, companies drilled 130,000 new oil and gas wells, many using a tricky — and controversial — technology called hydraulic fracturing. Each of those wells was at least as complicated as erecting a wind turbine. Washington may be broken, but America remains a wealthy and skilled nation with a tremendous capacity for large-scale enterprise.

As you may have guessed, the real barriers to getting this done are not physical — they are legal and bureaucratic. The most critical missing element is a national mandate to do it, but that is not the only problem.

Our power markets, for example, are broken in some big ways. Ill-conceived market rules mean that dirty power plants are still getting paid to keep operating — or just to sit there! — across large areas of the United States where wind and solar power can now beat them on price. We may need to use some combination of market reforms and public money to pay utilities to shut down those dirty plants.

If liberals and conservatives joined forces to develop more of a free market in electric power, that would also unlock more low-cost renewable energy. Texas has done this, under Republican leadership, and that huge state of 29 million people is expected to get more than 20 percent of its power from wind turbines this year.