Electricity is the New Price of Eggs

In 2025, the issue of skyrocketing energy utility bills started to go mainstream. To put a number to it, in 2025, we saw $34 billion in utility rate increase approvals and requests in just the first three quarters. Because many of those were only rate hike requests, a whole lot of increases still have yet to hit people’s utility bills. To put it in a perhaps more understandable numerical perspective, our energy bills have already increased by about 30% since 2021. Rising energy prices are among the fastest drivers of inflation.

“Electricity is the new price of eggs” has become memorable quote from Charles Hua of consumer advocacy group PowerLines, expressed in a recent NY Times Article . 

Electricity prices are rising and have been rising at more than twice the rate of inflation over the last year, becoming a major driver of a worrisome broader cost of living crisis.

That phrase captures how most Americans feel this trend happening, and are becoming concerned. It is a phrase that encapsulates how American consumers, and voters, hate higher prices and how people respond viscerally to utility-bill discussions. It has already had political ramifications shown in recent elections of utility regulators in Georgia where two candidates who promised a focus on affordability and ​“clean, reliable energy” unseated 2 Republican incumbents on the regulatory commission that oversees ratemaking for the state’s utilities. That was the first time in at least 20 years when incumbents were ousted, and it was due to backlash over utility bills that had risen over $500 a year for the average Georgia household.'

Despite President Donald Trump campaigning on bringing down energy costs with additional frequent promises to do so, his energy policies are are actually making an already bad situation worse.

On his first day in office,  he declared an ​“energy emergency,” based on one grain of truth that Americans faced an ​“active threat” from high energy prices. But he used that ​“emergency” to keep coal-fueled power plants open past their retirement dates after a many years when the coal industry had been on the way out.  This came at a great expense to ratepayers. 

For example, a Michigan coal plant that was supposed to shutter in May instead racked up $650,000 each day in costs for ratepayers after the Department of Energy ordered it to keep running.

Renewables and battery storage are a cheaper and quicker way to get more new power to come online. Clean renewable wind and solar are the quickest forms of new energy supply to build when more generation is needed, and are also the most affordable forms of new power to add to the system. But the Reconciliation Bill which Trump signed in July, scraps tax credits for not only such solar and wind deployment but also incentives for home energy improvements that directly result in lower utility bills. Also driving the crunch for cost-burdened households has also been a delay in the distribution of federal home heating assistance, spurred by the government shutdown. Natural gas bills too are expected to rise.

Ending support for renewables and keeping fossil fuel power plants going longer are the wrong tactics for addressing skyrocketing electricity rates and is based on data that is decades outdated. Building and maintaining power lines is the main reason why rates are rising. It is disingenuous to associate coal and gas plants with ​affordability and reliability while the other hand scheming up even more plans to make even more cuts to the exact same federal programs that help households reduce their energy usage and bills, such as Energy Star and the Weatherization Assistance Program.

The federal government confiscating clean energy incentives and funding while making a renewed commitment to fossil fuels (including coal) will only make our utility bills climb even further. With fewer cheap, affordable clean energy projects being built, the average American household will pay $170 more each year for energy than they do now by 2035, according to the think tank Energy Innovation. So therefore, these federal rollbacks, that will limit us to building only about half of the clean energy previously planned, are a lose-lose proposition for both affordability and our climate.   

It is basic simple-to-explain economics. Suppressing our ability to increase electricity supply at a time when electricity demand is going up, largely because of data centers and AI, will lead to higher prices.   

In addition to the new energy-guzzling data centers being built to train and run AI models, we have beneficial electrification of gas appliances and additional manufacturing input.  

While there are many directions that we can take this information, here is one course of action to take into account.   

We can pay less if state legislators and utility regulators seize the moment and act in the interest of consumers — rather than the shareholders of utility companies.

These regulators are small decision-making bodies, known as state public utilities commissions, who play a powerful role in shaping our energy future and determining what people pay on their utility bills. Because we are still locked into outdated incentives set in place in the earlier 1900’s, there are a few main points to be aware of that they don’t teach us about in schools: 

1. Investor-owned utilities receive guaranteed profits by the state. 
2. The more the infrastructure utilities build, the more profit they make. Utilities really like to build new things because that is what they are incentivized to do, while regulators are supposed to ensure that they don’t build unnecessarily.
3. If regulators allow utilities to make a certain big investment in the grid or and the demand for it doesn’t materialize or builds a new power plant that does not end up functioning, then ratepayers—i.e., everyday consumers like you and I—are legally on the hook to be left paying for it.
4. Most utilities are monopolies in their service territory, meaning that customers commonly have no other choice in where to buy electricity from.  

So therefore, state regulators (in Minnesota, the Public Utilities Commission) are the ones who are in charge of 

#1 Setting the rate of return the utilities can make,

#2 Setting the rates that the energy utilities charge customers, and

#3 Approving or denying which infrastructure project expenditures utilities can build, as to whether or not they are in the public interests.

These are important safeguards against monopoly utilities gold-plating us and price-gouging customers who have no other choice in where to get their electricity from.   

The main course of action is that there are 3 ways policymakers could act to lower electricity bills now (without needing help from the federal government):

1. Cut excess utility profits (along with their inflated executive and shareholder pay).
   • Utility profits are way higher than they used to be because utilities have scared state regulators into boosting their guaranteed rates of return by making threats that their service quality will go down or that costs will get passed onto consumers. But there is a lack of evidence for those negative impacts.  Utilities still received enough capital to build new infrastructure and maintain quality service when profits were more reasonable back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
   • Former utility executive Mark Ellis estimates the average American household overpays utilities by $300 per year, because the companies extract 3 to 7 cents more on every dollar of investment than they ought to.
2. Stop regulating utilities like it's 1920! Reward utility companies for boosting efficiency, not just for making capital expenditures. 
   • We could significantly reduce electricity use through energy-efficiency investments that routinely cost less than building fossil-fuel power generation that are favored by most utility interests.
   • According to most analysts, the main or major culprit behind high electricity prices is excessive utility spending on transmission and distribution infrastructure at times when cheaper upgrades to existing poles would suffice and be more affordable for customers. 
     • Why is this the case? The utility’s overemphasis on building unnecessarily expensive new high voltage transmission line infrastructure is a result of this outdated “the more they build the more they make” incentive. If every grid problem is a nail, the utility wants to use a gold-plated hammer to “solve” it.
3. Unleash local solar power & storage (along with a whole suite of cost-saving, community building ways we can use distributed energy!) 
   • Local renewable power + battery storage saves everyone money because it provides electricity right where people use it. 
   • Dramatically scaling up rooftop solar and batteries will cut future grid costs by half a trillion dollars if it is given a chance. That is because it does not require new transmission infrastructure that is favored by utility companies because they get guaranteed profits for it (though costly to us but because we pay for it on our monthly bills). 
   • Another part of regulators taking bold leadership on affordable clean energy rather than being weak on utility oversight is to cut the red tape on permitting and interconnection for local solar projects including those with batteries.