It’s no secret that U.S. electricity prices have been rising over the last few years: The average residential energy bill in 2025 was roughly 30 percent higher than in 2021. This jump is largely in line with the overall inflation Americans have experienced during this period. As the cost of groceries, gas, and housing has increased, so too has the cost of electricity.

But there are big differences from state to state and region to region. Some places — like California and the Northeast — have seen mammoth price increases that outpaced inflation, while costs have held steady in other parts of the country, or even fallen in relative terms. Nearly everywhere, though, rising electricity costs have strained the budgets of low-income households in particular, since they spend a much larger share of their earnings on energy compared to wealthier Americans.

Higher energy bills have also become a political flashpoint. Over the past year, rising electricity prices have helped push voters to the polls, and politicians have taken note. In Virginia and New Jersey, newly elected governors campaigned heavily on reining in utility bills. In Georgia, incumbent utility regulators were booted out by voters, who elected two Democrats to the positions for the first time in two decades.

A wide range of culprits have been blamed for the surge in electricity prices, with energy-hungry data centers shouldering much of the criticism. Tariffs, aging power plants, and renewable energy mandates have also come under fire. But the reality is far more nuanced, according to recent research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the latest price data from the federal government’s Energy Information Administration. Electricity prices are shaped by a complex mix of factors, including how utilities are structured, how regulators oversee them, regional divergences in fuel prices, and how often the grid is stressed by heat waves or cold snaps. In many states, the biggest driver is the rising cost of maintaining and upgrading grids to survive more extreme weather — the unglamorous work of replacing old poles and wires.

But the forces driving high bills in California aren’t the same as those affecting households in Connecticut or Arizona. In this piece, we highlight one key driver of recent price trends in each region of the country. (The regions below are organized alphabetically, with individual entries for Alaska, California, Hawaiʻi, the Midwest, the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, the Southeast/Mid-Atlantic, the Southwest/Mountain West, and Texas.) While the dynamics of every utility bill are different — including those within the same state — recent data demonstrates the many challenges ahead as public officials promise a laser focus on energy affordability.

Alaska

Key factor: Geographic isolation

Alaska’s electricity prices are among the highest in the country, largely because the state’s power grid operates in isolation. Unlike utilities in the lower 48 states, Alaska’s providers can’t import electricity from neighboring states or Canada when demand spikes or supply runs short. That isolation limits flexibility and drives up costs. Utilities also have to spread the expense of generating and transmitting power across a relatively small customer base. The state’s primary grid, known as the Railbelt, serves about 75 percent of Alaska’s population. Beyond it, more than 200 microgrids power rural communities, many of which rely heavily on diesel generators. These structural challenges contribute to electricity rates that are roughly 40 percent higher than the national average.

Electricity prices have been rising in the state over the past decade, even after adjusting for overall inflation. A study by researchers at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power found that residential rates for Railbelt customers increased by about 23 percent between 2011 and 2019. Rural customers saw a roughly 9 percent increase during the same period.

While more recent data charting electricity prices adjusted for inflation isn’t readily available, energy costs are likely to grow in the state. That’s because Alaska depends on natural gas for electricity generation and heating, and it relies on the Cook Inlet basin for natural gas. With supplies dwindling in that reserve, the state is expected to face a shortage soon. If it chooses to import natural gas, it will be much more easily affected by price swings in the natural gas market. State regulators have also approved a 7.4 percent interim rate increase for the Golden Valley Electric Association, the primary utility that serves the Fairbanks area. A full rate case review is underway, and a final decision on the rate will be made in early 2027.

California

Key factor: Wildfires

Californians have long paid above-average electricity prices. Since the 1980s, rates in the Golden State have typically been at least 10 percent higher than the national average. For decades, however, those higher per-kilowatt-hour prices were largely offset by lower electricity use as a result of the state’s relatively temperate climate. In other words, electricity in California cost more per unit, but residents consumed far less than households in many other states, keeping average monthly bills relatively low. That began to shift in the mid-2010s when the state began experiencing more frequent and larger wildfires. Since then, electricity prices have outpaced consumption, leading to exorbitantly high energy bills.

Between 2019 and 2024, California had the largest increase in retail electricity prices of all U.S. states. Monthly energy bills in 2024 averaged $160, roughly 13 percent higher than the national average. Much of that increase has been driven by the soaring cost of infrastructure upgrades aimed at reducing wildfire risk, along with rising wildfire-related insurance and liability costs. After the 2018 Camp Fire, PG&E declared bankruptcy, citing $30 billion in estimated liabilities. Utilities have also poured billions of dollars into replacing aging transmission and distribution lines and expanding the grid to meet growing demand.

California’s high rate of rooftop solar adoption has also played a complicated role in rising prices. As more customers install rooftop solar, they purchase less electricity from the grid. That leaves utilities with the same fixed infrastructure costs — but fewer kilowatt-hours over which to spread them. The result: higher per-unit rates for customers who remain more dependent on grid power. Since renters and low-income Californians are less likely to benefit from residential solar, rising electricity rates hit them harder.

Hawaiʻi

Key factor: Oil dependence

Hawaiʻi has the highest electricity bills in the country. Average residential rates rose about 8 percent between 2019 and 2024, even after adjusting for overall inflation, and the typical household now pays more than $200 per month for electricity.

Those high costs are rooted in the state’s unique energy system. Hawaiʻi remains heavily dependent on oil to generate power, and many of its oil-fired plants are aging and relatively inefficient. That reliance ties electricity prices directly to global oil markets. Hawaiian Electric, the state’s primary utility, purchases crude oil on the open market and pays to have it refined before it is burned to produce electricity — meaning fluctuations in both crude prices and refining costs show up on customers’ bills.While oil prices have eased in the past couple of years, they spiked sharply in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, driving up fuel costs and, in turn, electricity rates. Refining costs on the islands have also risen in recent years, adding further pressure to household bills. Fuel and equipment must also be shipped thousands of miles from the mainland — and often transported between islands — adding significant logistical costs. Hawaiʻi’s power grids are also small and isolated. Electricity generated on one island cannot easily be transmitted to another, limiting flexibility and preventing the kind of resource sharing common on the continental grid. Together, those structural constraints help keep electricity prices in Hawaiʻi persistently high.

Midwest

(Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.)

Key factor: Wind energy

The Midwest and Great Plains states saw only modest changes — and sometimes even declines — in inflation-adjusted retail electricity prices per kilowatt-hour between 2019 and 2024. Average monthly electricity bills typically fall between $110 and $130.

This stability is largely a renewable energy success story: Many Midwestern states are now deeply reliant on wind power. Wind supplies more than 40 percent of electricity in Iowa and South Dakota, and more than 35 percent in Kansas. Investments in utility-scale wind and solar have helped shield consumers from price shocks tied to natural gas volatility, since renewables have no fuel costs and can reduce exposure to sudden spikes in gas prices. Research also shows that these investments can lower wholesale electricity prices by displacing higher-cost generation during periods of high wind and solar output.

Northeast

(Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont)

Key factor: Natural gas prices

Aside from California and Hawaiʻi, northeastern states experienced some of the steepest increases in retail prices between 2019 and 2024. Prices in New York and Maine rose more than 10 percent over the last few years. Connecticut residents pay nearly $200 per month for electricity.

The region’s heavy reliance on natural gas as both a home heating fuel and a source of utility-scale electricity is a major driver of high energy bills, especially in winter. When temperatures drop, demand for natural gas surges as homes and businesses burn more fuel for heating. Power plants are then forced to compete with those heating needs for the same constrained supply. (Gas has to be transported to the region via pipelines that stretch as far as Texas.) With no easy way to bring in additional gas, prices spike, and those increases ripple through to power bills.

A combination of forces has worsened natural gas constraints in recent years, pushing electricity prices even higher, particularly during cold snaps. More households in the region are switching to heat pumps and buying EVs, driving up demand for power. International energy policies, like increasing U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas and the global gas crunch caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are driving up fuel costs stateside. Utilities in the Northeast, like those elsewhere in the country, are also pouring money into infrastructure upgrades, and those investments are being passed on to customers through higher bills.

Pacific Northwest

(Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington)

Key factor: Hydropower

Retail electricity prices in the Pacific Northwest rose only modestly over the last few years, at least compared to the country’s general rise in the cost of living. Inflation-adjusted prices in Washington and Oregon increased by about 5 percent between 2019 and 2024, while Idaho and Montana saw slight declines. In 2024, average monthly energy bills across the four states ranged from about $105 to $130, roughly in line with the national average. (This is not to say that customers haven’t noticed growing totals on their energy bills; the Energy Information Administration estimated that Oregon’s average retail price increased by 30 percent between 2020 and 2024, which is roughly in line with overall inflation over the last several years.)

So why has the region been largely insulated from the inflation-adjusted cost spikes that have struck neighboring areas like California? Hydropower. Abundant, low-cost hydroelectric generation has long kept energy bills in the Pacific Northwest — and the climate impact of the region’s power generation — among the lowest in the country. And while utilities in these states are facing rising costs tied to wildfire mitigation and infrastructure upgrades, cheap and plentiful hydropower has so far helped offset those increases.

Southeast and Mid-Atlantic

(Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia)

Key factor: Extreme Weather

Southeastern states frequently face hurricanes, flooding, and extreme heat. In recent years, the number of billion-dollar disasters in the region has increased, an ominous sign of the havoc that climate change will wreak. Utilities are fronting the costs of both weathering these events and rebuilding in their aftermath — and then they pass them on to their customers.

The cost of distributing electricity — think the power lines that deliver energy to your home — rose significantly in the Southeast over the past few years, driven mostly by capital expenditures to upgrade and build new infrastructure. In Florida, for instance, damage from Hurricanes Debby, Helene, and Milton in 2024 resulted in residential price increases from 9 to 25 percent the following year. Similarly, Entergy Louisiana’s plan to harden its grid costs a whopping $1.9 billion, much of which will be borne by customers through rate increases.

Some states in the region, such as Virginia, have also seen a major influx of data centers, which consume enormous amounts of electricity. In some areas, utilities are upgrading infrastructure to meet that demand, raising concerns that those costs could push electricity prices higher. However, a national study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that an increase in demand in states between 2019 and 2024 actually led to lower electricity prices on average. That’s because when there’s more demand for power, the fixed costs of running a utility — such as maintaining the poles and wires that deliver electricity to your home — are spread out over a greater number of customers, leading to lower individual bills.

In Virginia, the world’s largest data center hub, electricity prices rose only modestly between May 2024 and May 2025, despite a rapid buildout of new facilities. But that dynamic could shift as hyperscalers construct ever-larger campuses. Ultimately, prices will hinge on how utilities and regulators choose to plan and pay for that demand.

For now, however, extreme weather remains one of the region’s main drivers of rising costs.

Southwest and Mountain West

(Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming )

Key factor: Hotter summers

Arizona and New Mexico saw a decrease in retail electricity prices between 2019 and 2024, after adjusting for overall inflation. However, there is a big difference between the states in how much residents pay for energy every month. Energy bills in New Mexico averaged just $90, while in Arizona they were nearly double at $160.

The main difference between the two states comes down to the fact that a greater share of Arizona residents are exposed to scorching summer temperatures — and therefore use more air conditioning, especially in population centers like Phoenix. (Average summer highs in Phoenix are about 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city.) As a result, Arizonans use an additional 400 kWh every month, which leads to higher energy costs.

Arizona residents could also see higher prices in the coming years as a result of rate cases that are being considered, which, if approved, will take effect in 2026. Both Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power are asking the state to approve a 14 percent increase in rates, which could translate to an increase of about $200 in average household energy bills per year. Both utilities have justified the increase by citing the need to modernize the grid as well as higher costs of constructing and maintaining infrastructure.

Texas

Key factor: Regulatory free-for-all

Texas is a land of contrasts. Though it’s an oil-and-gas stronghold, the Lone Star State generates a significant share of its electricity from wind and solar. And unlike most states, it operates its own power grid and runs a deregulated electricity market in which electricity prices can swing sharply from hour to hour.

In Texas, local utilities compete to buy power from generators — natural gas plants, wind farms, and solar arrays among them — in a wholesale market, and then sell that energy to customers. The system gives consumers a lot of choice in picking utility providers, but it also allows utilities to pass on wild swings in the price of power generation. If the cost of natural gas skyrockets during a particularly cold winter when solar is less available, for instance, wholesale electricity prices jump with it. This can lead to eye-popping energy bills, like those seen during 2021’s Winter Storm Uri. The setup ultimately leaves consumers exposed to price shocks, especially when extreme weather hits.

Perhaps as a result, rising electricity costs in Texas are driven by the cost of delivering power — and in particular by swings in natural gas prices, since gas-fired power plants are the state’s primary providers when weather conditions don’t enable wind and solar. While average retail electricity prices fell by a little more than 5 percent between 2019 and 2024, Texans still pay some of the highest energy bills in the country, reflecting surging demand driven by population growth and industrial expansions as well as sharp price spikes during the state’s scorching summers and winter months.

As the state’s population grows, new data centers get built, and more renewable power is brought online, utilities are also having to invest heavily to expand the grid and harden it against extreme weather like Uri, during which at least 246 people died, mostly due to hypothermia. One analysis found that transmission costs grew from $1.5 billion in 2010 to over $5 billion in 2024 and could surpass $12 billion per year by 2033.

Anita Hofschneider contributed reporting to this piece.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/power-bills-electricity-prices-state-by-state/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

For more than a decade, the clean energy economy has been on a steep growth trajectory. Companies have poured billions of dollars into battery manufacturing, solar and wind generation, and electric vehicle plants in the U.S., as solar costs fell sharply and EV sales surged. That momentum is set to continue surging in much of the world — but in the United States, it’s starting to stall.

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According to a new report from the clean energy think tank E2, new investment in clean energy projects last year was dwarfed by a cascade of cancellations for projects already in progress. For every dollar announced in new clean energy projects, companies canceled, closed, or downsized roughly three dollars’ worth. In total, at least roughly $35 billion in projects were abandoned last year, compared to just $3.4 billion in cancellations in 2023 and 2024 combined.

“That’s pretty jarring considering how much progress we made in previous years,” said Michael Timberlake, a director of research and publications at E2. “The rest of the world is generally doubling down or transitioning further, and the U.S. is now becoming increasingly combative and antagonistic towards clean energy industries.”

Timberlake said the Trump administration’s attacks on renewable energy are the main driver of the slowdown. Companies began pulling back their investments shortly after the November 2024 election, when a victorious Trump telegraphed that he would promote fossil fuels over solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies. For instance, TotalEnergies, the French oil-and-gas giant, paused development of two offshore wind projects in late November 2024, citing uncertainty after Trump’s election. The company has not restarted the projects since.

Trump followed through on those promises once in office: One of his first actions in office was to pause leasing and permitting for offshore wind. The freeze resulted in several wind developers indefinitely pausing or abandoning their projects while lawsuits trickled through the courts. (Federal judges have issued judgments in favor of the wind companies in recent months.) Trump’s administration also pulled billions of dollars in funding for a range of clean energy projects and cancelled or retooled Biden-era policies favorable to the industry, such as energy-efficiency measures, IRS tax guidance, and loans for a transmission line expected to carry solar and wind power.

Congress, at the behest of Trump, also passed the “One Big Beautiful Act” over the summer. In addition to sunsetting lucrative tax credits for renewable energy production, the law hammered the electric vehicle industry from multiple sides: It ended investment credits supporting the buildout of battery manufacturers, and simultaneously nixed the $7,500 tax credit available to American consumers who purchase EVs.

Timberlake cautioned against pinning clean energy’s disappointing year on any one policy. While the One Big Beautiful Act was the “biggest signifier” of the shift, “the overall policy and regulatory attack” is to blame for the glut of project cancellations, he said. “It’s not an environment that encourages more investment because no one knows what six months from now will look like.”

Electric vehicle and battery manufacturing have been hit the hardest over the past year. Each sector lost roughly $21 billion in investment over the past year, according to E2’s analysis, which includes some overlapping projects that serve both purposes. The industries also lost an estimated 48,000 potential jobs. These two industries likely lost the most investments because they had been growing the fastest in recent years, meaning they had more projects in the pipeline to cancel or downsize once President Trump was elected. The EV industry’s outlook, in particular, changed once Congress repealed consumer tax credits made available by former President Joe Biden. That, along with the general policy uncertainty, led to automakers revising their expectations for EV demand in the U.S. and reallocating their investments accordingly.

Some states were hit harder than others. In 2025 alone, Michigan lost 13 clean energy projects worth $8.1 billion — more than twice as many as any other state, due to its role as the capital of the U.S. auto industry. Illinois, Georgia, and New York also lost billions of dollars in investments.

Many automakers that scaled back electric vehicle plans last year redirected those investments rather than abandoning them outright. Ford, for example, had originally planned to build all-electric commercial vehicles at its $1.5 billion Ohio Assembly Plant in Avon Lake. But after revising its EV ambitions, the company pivoted the facility toward gas-powered and hybrid vans. Because Ford did not scrap the plant altogether, Timberlake said, facilities like Avon Lake could still be retrofitted for electric vehicle production if market conditions and policy outlooks improve.

“The silver lining view is they’re hopefully maintaining those facilities so that when there is certainty, those factories will still be available for making EVs down the road,” said Timberlake.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/trump-2025-renewable-energy-investment-electric-vehicles/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

On the campaign trail last year, Donald Trump frequently criticized the Biden administration for new regulations targeting what he called “clean, beautiful coal.” In April, he signed executive orders directing federal agencies to undo any regulations that “discriminate” against coal. Coal-fired power plants produce a significant but shrinking share of U.S. electricity — about 16 percent in 2023 — and are by far the most polluting and planet-warming component of the power sector on a per-kilowatt basis.

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So it was no surprise when, on Wednesday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin gathered more than a half dozen Republican lawmakers at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters to announce the planned repeal of two rules, finalized under the Biden administration, that established limits on carbon and mercury emissions from U.S. power plants. Once finalized, the Trump administration’s proposals will eliminate all caps on greenhouse gases from the plants and revert the mercury limit to a less strict standard from 2012, respectively.

The Biden-era rules, Zeldin said Wednesday, were “expensive, unreasonable, and burdensome” attempts “to make all sorts of industries, including coal and more, disappear.” With demand for electricity poised to surge in the coming years, especially as tech companies make massive investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure, Zeldin said that the EPA’s new proposals will boost electricity generation and “make America the AI capital of the world.”

His argument was echoed by the slate of Republican lawmakers who followed him at the podium. The old rules “would have forced our most efficient and reliable power generation into early retirement, just as Ohio and the rest of the nation are seeing a historic rise in demand due to the AI revolution, new data centers, and a manufacturing resurgence,” said Representative Troy Balderson. “Between data centers, AI, and the growing domestic manufacturing base, the simple fact is we need more electrons on the grid to power all of this,” added Representative Robert Bresnahan of Pennsylvania.

But despite their vigorous agreement that as many energy sources as possible are needed to power America’s future and keep utility bills affordable, every single representative who spoke on Wednesday had, just weeks earlier, cast a vote for a major bill in Congress that will almost certainly have the opposite effect. Analysts say that the pending legislation, which has the Trump-inspired title “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” will slow the country’s buildout of new electricity sources and eventually lead the average U.S. household to incur hundreds of dollars in additional annual energy costs.

That’s because the new GOP legislation essentially repeals the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark 2022 law that has resulted in roughly $800 billion in investments in clean energy technologies. By rolling back regulations on coal-fired power, the GOP’s hope seems to be that some of those lost energy investments can be compensated by fossil fuels. However, analysts agree that this is highly unlikely, due largely to the sheer cost of new coal-fired power, as well as supply bottlenecks that have sharply limited the feasibility of new natural gas plants. Instead, the result will likely just be more expensive electricity.

“The economics of coal plants are the worst they’ve ever been,” said Robbie Orvis, a senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “Even just keeping existing coal plants online compared to building new renewables is more expensive.”

To justify its repeal of the greenhouse gas emissions rule for power plants, the EPA is arguing that the U.S. power sector is responsible for just 3 percent of global emissions, and as a result is not a “significant” contributor to air pollution, which is the threshold the Clean Air Act sets for when the government can regulate a stationary source of emissions. While the 3 percent figure is factually accurate, experts say the argument is misleading, especially given that the power sector is responsible for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions within the country.

“You’re dealing with something that has lots and lots and lots of sources, and you can’t just throw up your hands and say, ‘Well, this won’t achieve anything,’” said David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by former EPA enforcement attorneys.

If the U.S. power industry relies more on coal and natural gas relative to renewables, as Republicans appear to hope, those emissions could remain stubbornly high, especially as demand for power grows. What’s even more certain is that costs will continue to go up. The latest government inflation data shows that consumer electricity prices are already rising much more dramatically than overall consumer prices. In this environment, the technology companies building massive data centers to power cloud computing and AI have struggled to find adequate, cheap electricity. In fact, so many power-guzzling facilities are being built that lawmakers in Virginia, which is at the heart of the data center belt, have enacted legislation to prevent them from overwhelming the grid.

Since utilities have been unable to meet the power needs of tech players like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services, some of these companies have begun directly contracting with renewables developers and striking deals with nuclear power plant operators. A trade group representing these companies recently asked the Senate to revise the pending legislation so it restores some of the clean energy provisions from the Inflation Reduction Act, saying the U.S. needs “affordable and reliable power” in order to “maintain its leadership in AI.” Analysts say such leadership is threatened if the Trump administration continues to try to tip the scales toward fossil fuel sources that are not competitive with newer sources of energy.

“The current administration is picking technology winners and losers and making trade-offs,” said Orvis. “And the trade-off they want to make is: get rid of the clean energy tax incentives that are driving all of this new clean electricity onto the grid, which puts downward pressure on prices and will lower people’s rates.”

Orvis added that higher electricity costs raise the cost of doing business for manufacturers, including those at the leading edge of AI, making it more difficult to compete with China.

“We’re at a pivotal crossroads,” said Orvis. “We can either lean in and support the domestic growth of these industries by creating a policy environment with certainty, incentives, and support. Or we can do what the current administration is trying to do, and pull back on all of those things and allow China to step in.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/regulation/trump-epa-power-plant-rules-big-beautiful-bill/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Energy policy analysts are in broad agreement about one consequence of major legislation that Republicans are currently pushing through Congress: It will raise energy prices for the average American household by hundreds of dollars, once all is said and done.

That’s because the legislation, which President Donald Trump has dubbed the One Big, Beautiful Bill, will repeal the vast majority of clean energy provisions contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which a Democrat-controlled Congress passed in 2022. That earlier law provided a wide array of financial incentives for the deployment of electricity sources like solar, wind, battery storage, and nuclear power, as well as support for consumers looking to buy zero- and low-emissions products like electric vehicles. Choking off support for those measures not only hobbles U.S. efforts to fight climate change — the IRA, if left intact, could single-handedly reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 40 percent — but it also means there are fewer new sources of energy for a country that has started to need more and more of it. And reduced supply coupled with increased demand means higher prices.

That’s the virtually unanimous conclusion of the academics and policy experts who have been trying to understand the likely effects of the rollback for the past few months, though each group of experts used different assumptions about the full extent of IRA repeal, given that the legislation is still being revised by the Senate. Part of the reason for this unanimity is that, once constructed, many newer energy sources like wind and solar don’t have substantial operating costs compared to traditional power plants that must be continuously supplied with fuel.

“Clean electricity has zero generation cost,” said Robbie Orvis, a senior director for modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “One of the dynamics is that less clean electricity gets built, and that makes power generation more expensive, because we’re relying more frequently on fossil fuels with higher generation costs.”

Orvis’ group calculated that those higher power generation costs from using coal or natural gas, along with other price increases stemming from IRA repeal, would result in household energy costs rising by more than $33 billion annually by 2035, compared to a scenario in which the IRA were left intact. That works out to roughly $250 more per year per household. Other analysts came to similar conclusions: The Rhodium Group, an independent policy analysis firm, estimates that average household costs could be as much as $290 higher per year by the same date. Princeton University’s ZERO Lab projects that energy costs could grow even higher: Their estimates show that, in a decade, annual household prices will be $270 to $415 higher under the GOP plan.

Energy Innovation’s analysis calculated the effects of repealing the IRA on energy bills and transportation costs across the nation. They found that if the tax credits for clean energy are taken away, utilities will increasingly rely on natural gas and coal, which have higher generation costs. These costs would then be passed on to customers. Additionally, as electric utilities’ demand for natural gas increases, the cost of the fossil fuel in the market will also rise, further raising household energy bills.

“Gas suppliers can’t respond immediately to large changes in the demand for gas,” said Orvis. “The change in gas demand is pretty large without the tax credits. So you’re really increasing the reliance on gas and therefore gas demand and gas prices.”

On the transportation front, the legislation passed by the House of Representatives eliminates IRA tax credits for electric vehicles and undoes the nation’s latest tailpipe standards, which limit the amount of pollution that new vehicles are allowed to emit. The result is a greater reliance on gasoline than would happen under the status quo — and more demand for gasoline means higher prices at the pump, per Orvis’ modeling.

These price spikes — and the electricity spikes in particular — won’t be felt uniformly across the nation. One key factor is how utilities in a state are regulated. Many states have just one utility that both generates power and provides it to electricity customers. But in so-called deregulated markets such as Texas and Pennsylvania, electricity providers compete on an open market to sell their power.

The rules around how utilities calculate and pass on the costs of generating electricity vary significantly between these two models. In regulated markets with just one provider, the cost of generating electricity and getting it to homes is averaged out and passed on to customers. But the competitive nature of deregulated markets means that customers can see wild fluctuations in price. During peak winter and summer, when demand for power is high, prices can be double or triple normal rates. As a result, customers in deregulated markets see more variation in their bills — because those bills closely track changes in the marginal cost of electricity. If those costs rise in a dramatic and systematic way because IRA repeal leads to fewer sources of energy, customers in deregulated markets will feel the full force of it. Customers in regulated markets like much of the Southeast, on the other hand, will be somewhat cushioned from the increase, because their costs reflect the average of all generation and transmission costs incurred by their utility.

“That helps minimize the impact of repealing IRA tax credits — though it also runs the opposite way and helps reduce savings when market prices go down,” said Jesse Jenkins, an associate professor at Princeton University who led the modeling conducted by the ZERO Lab, in an email.

These rising costs will come on top of U.S. energy bills that are already ticking upward. Electricity prices have been steadily rising since 2020, and the federal Energy Information Administration recently forecasted that that trend is likely to continue through 2026. Prices have increased for a variety of reasons, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupting global oil and gas supply chains, extreme heat and other weather shocks, costly maintenance needed to protected the grid from wildfires, and the buildout of additional capacity to meet growing demand. U.S. electricity demand is beginning to rise for the first time in decades, thanks to the construction of new manufacturing facilities and data centers, which support operations like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, as well as the growing adoption of electric vehicles.

Orvis said that the IRA has been helping meet that demand and maintain the country’s competitive advantage with China, one of the Trump administration’s stated goals. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill would undermine that progress by reducing the amount of energy available for new manufacturing and AI development — and making the electricity that’s left more expensive for everyone.

“The ironic thing is that what’s in the bill, the net results of it will be completely contradictory to what the [Trump] administration’s stated policy priorities are and will cede a lot of the AI development and the manufacturing to China specifically,” said Orvis. “That’s the important macro context for everything that’s happening now — and some of the un-modelable implications in the long run.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/trump-big-beautiful-bill-congress-energy-costs/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The summer of 2021 was brutal for residents of the Pacific Northwest. Cities across the region from Portland, Oregon, to Quillayute, Washington, broke temperature records by several degrees. In Washington, as the searing heat wave settled over the state, 125 people died from heat-related illnesses such as strokes and heart attacks, making it the deadliest weather event in the state’s history.

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As officials recognized the heat wave’s disproportionate effect on low-income and unhoused people unable to access air-conditioning, they made a crucial change to the state’s energy assistance program. Since the early 1980s, states, tribes, and territories have received funds each year to help low-income people pay their electricity bills and install energy-efficiency upgrades through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. Congress appropriates funds for the program, and the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, doles it out to states in late fall. Until the summer of 2021, the initiative primarily provided heating assistance during Washington’s cold winter months. But that year, officials expanded the program to cover cooling expenses.

Last year, Congress appropriated $4.1 billion for the effort, and HHS disbursed 90 percent of the funds. But the program is now in jeopardy.

Earlier this month, HHS, led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off 10,000 employees, including the roughly dozen or so people tasked with running LIHEAP. The agency was supposed to send out an additional $378 million this year, but those funds are now stuck in federal coffers without the staff needed to move the money out.

LIHEAP helps roughly 6 million people survive freezing winters and blistering summers, many of whom face greater risks now that the year’s warm season has already brought unusually high temperatures. Residents of Phoenix are expected to have their first 100-degree high any day now.

“We’re seeing the warm-weather states really coming up short with the funding necessary to assist people in the summer with extreme heat,” said one of the HHS employees who worked on the LIHEAP program and was recently laid off. Losing the people that ran the program is “absolutely devastating,” they said, because agency staff helped states and tribes understand the flexibilities in the program to serve people effectively, assistance that became extremely important with increasingly erratic weather patterns across the country.

In typical years, once Congress appropriates LIHEAP funds, HHS distributes the money in the fall in time for the colder months. States and other entities then make critical decisions about how much they spend during the winter and how much they save for the summer.

The need for LIHEAP funds has always been greater than what has been available. Only about 1 in 5 households that meet the program’s eligibility requirements receive funds. As a result, states often run out of money by the summer. At least a quarter of LIHEAP grant recipients run out of money at some point during the year, the former employee said.

“That remaining 10 percent would be really important to establish cooling assistance during the hot summer months, which is increasingly important,” said Katrina Metzler, executive director of the National Energy and Utility Affordability Coalition, a group of nonprofits and utilities that advances the needs of low-income people. “If LIHEAP were to disappear, people would die in their homes. That’s the most critical issue. It saves people.”

In addition to Washington, many other states have expanded their programs to provide both heating and cooling programs. Arizona, Texas, and Oregon now offer year-round cooling assistance.

HHS staff plays a crucial role in running LIHEAP. They assess how much each state, tribe, and territory will receive. They set rules for how the money could be used. They audit local programs to ensure funds are being spent as intended. All that may now be lost.

But according to Metzler, there are some steps that HHS could take to ensure that the program continues to be administered as Congress intended. First, and most obvious, the agency could reinstate those who were fired. Short of that, the agency could move the program to another department within HHS or contract out the responsibilities.

But ultimately, Metzler continued, LIHEAP funds need to be distributed so those in need can access it. “Replacing the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program is a nearly impossible task,” she said. States “can’t have enough bake sales to replace” it.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-heat/trump-energy-assistance-liheap-rising-heat/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org