The Electricity Arsonists’ Prevarication (Pt. 1)
Democrats and their legacy media Organs stand at the scene of the electricity price fire they set, holding the gas can, pointing the finger at Orange Man Bad.
“Change is not progress.” H.L. Mencken
In the Spring of 2022, with gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and electricity prices all rising in part due to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden might have still been mentally capable of assessing the impact high energy prices would have on the midterm elections that fall.
With retail gasoline prices up almost 50% from March 2022 to just over $5 per gallon, fearing (with good reason) that Republicans would use energy prices as a cudgel against Democrats in the upcoming November 2022 midterm elections, President Biden opened the taps, draining 180 million barrels from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) from March through October – about 1 million barrels per day, equal to about 1% of global demand.
At the time, Doomberg was fond of calling Biden the “Senator from DuPont” (Delaware, headquarters of that iconic industrial corporation). Despite being elected on his “climate change” agenda and squeals from the regressive “progressive” green wing of the party that helped him achieve victory, the Senator from DuPont was cogent enough (if barely) to do the necessary energy calculus and drained the SPR for purely political reasons.
By the midterm election that fall, the national retail gasoline price average fell just below $4, Democrats outperformed expectations, and the threatened “red wave” failed to materialize. While Republicans narrowly won the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats not only held the Senate but gained a seat.
Three years later, the same Democrat party that feared voter response to high energy prices in 2022 is trying to flip the script. Regular readers of this publication will not find it the least bit ironic that Democrats in U.S. Congress and their legacy media water carriers are now attempting to politically capitalize on electricity prices that have been rising for years, ignoring two Democrat administrations’ energy policies - culminating the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act – that unequivocally contributed to the very problem for which they are now attempting to blame Orange Man Bad.
During twelve years in control of the executive branch and one-third of that controlling both legislative branches of government during the Obama and Biden administrations, with U.S. EPA attempting to choke hydrocarbon energy out of the power generation sector by regulation, and after subsidizing “renewables” into America’s electricity market to detrimental levels, the people whose policies drove electricity prices up everywhere for more than a decade now blame a President in office for barely 9 months. Let that sink in.
Democrats’ recent legislative and executive policy history is conveniently being memory-holed with the help of legacy media. The summer 2025 electricity price increases are a fraction of the surges caused by Democrat energy and environmental policies over more than a decade.
How are Congressional Democrats trying to obfuscate their role in electricity price increases and sell this prevarication with the help of their legacy media water carriers? And what does the empirical data say about their allegations? Grab your bullshit meter, bring extra batteries and let’s dig into the numbers.
We begin the story by noting that multiple legacy media outlets relying on the same obscure “report” to substantiate their story within a matter of days is often a clue that the political posturing and messaging have been methodically synchronized by Democrat Organs and their media allies. In late July and August, timed to coincide with U.S. residents’ receiving their electricity bills from traditional peak summer usage, news stories began to appear in traditional press blaming “sudden” increases in electricity prices on President Trump’s energy and environmental policies.
Three examples demonstrate the point. See if you can spot the coordinated “tell” (all emphasis added):
President Donald Trump came into office promising to lower energy and electricity costs. But with the cost of electricity rising, congressional Democrats and left-leaning groups see an opening to go on the offense ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
A Wednesday letter led by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to six of Trump’s cabinet secretaries asks administration officials to explain why they are cutting programs to help Americans pay for high energy costs, while passing a tax cut bill that eliminated incentives for cheaper forms of energy like wind and solar.
Three other Democratic senators signed the letter: Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. The letter was first provided to CNN.
An independent analysis from think tank Energy Innovation shows that US household energy bills will be higher over the next decade now that Republicans have passed Trump’s tax and spending bill, which shredded incentives for cheap forms of energy like wind and solar as well as electric vehicles and energy efficient appliances.
Trump’s tax changes are expected to reduce the amount of cheap renewables on the grid and increase the cost of building them. Wind and solar are now largely cheaper than fossil fuels like natural gas and coal, and adding more renewable energy to the grid helps keep utility bills lower, experts say.
“We know that this issue of rising utility bills is top of mind for voters and we know Republicans voted to raise their utility bills,” said Alex Witt, the senior advisor for accountability campaigns at Climate Power, a left-leaning group focused on clean energy and climate. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure they pay the political price for that.”
A report from Energy Innovation, a non-partisan think tank, found the GOP tax law will increase the average family’s energy bill by $130 annually by 2030.
“The real scam is blaming solar for fossil fuel price spikes,” the Solar Energy Industries Association said in response to Trump’s post.
“Farmers, families, and businesses choose solar to save money, preserve land, and escape high costs of the old, dirty fuels being forced on them by this administration,” the group added.
(The Solar Energy Industries Association is - clearly - not talking to the same farmers as our friend Robert Bryce. Or surveying the same landscape.)
Even the UK media was in sync. The Guardian:
But studies have found that Trump’s pro-fossil fuel, anti-renewable energy policies will raise prices. A July report from climate thinktank Energy Innovation, for instance, found that the Republicans’ spending megabill that the president signed last month could increase wholesale electricity prices by as much as 74%, largely due to its repeal of many Biden-era green energy incentives.
“Republicans are fueling an energy crisis and inflicting a massive utility bill hike on Americans across the country,” said Climate Power senior adviser Jesse Lee. “This is nothing short of a betrayal of their own voters. Families are losing jobs while their bills climb, all because Republicans would rather protect their donors than lower costs.”
Elizabeth Warren strutted about as usual on X:
The Energy Innovation report on which they all relied comes from an obscure “non-partisan climate policy think tank” – headquartered on Battery Street in San Francisco - that runs to the exhaustive length of two pages without bothering to show its data or methods. The “analysis” was issued in July after “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBA) was signed into law. This nugget is more than a bit telling (emphasis ours):
Households will face significantly increased energy costs: we find $130 annual increases in household energy bills by 2030 and $170 by 2035 due to the Senate text. Note that household impacts will vary significantly by state; see our prior modeling which found electricity cost increases of over $400 per household per year by 2035 in some states.
$130 annually in 5 years equates to under $11 per month, and $170 annually to just over $14 per month. If you do not believe that the aggregate effect of Obama and Biden administration and Democrat legislative “climate change accomplishments” raised your electricity bill by far more than $11 or $14 per month over the last decade, please let us know in the comment section (identify your state).
A multitude of factors have caused the steady rise in U.S. electricity prices since 2010. Many are structurally related to Democrat climate policies and EPA regulation on hydrocarbon energy, at least one has bipartisan origins, and others are connected to market dynamics and geopolitical events, some with roots in ideologies similar to U.S. “progressives” in Europe and the UK. (As we have previously written, Europe became dependent on Russian natural gas to backstop its wind and solar illusions, and Putin used this leverage to invade Ukraine.)
It would be too easy, lazy, sophomoric, and politically convenient to chalk up the increase to one man (like him or hate him) and his policies after seven months in office. In the real world, there is little any U.S. President could do in such a brief period to have any material impact on electricity prices. Policy, commodity prices, supply and demand, material and resource abundance or constraints, and geopolitical events impact electricity prices over longer time horizons.
Using U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) data, the graph below shows U.S. residential electricity prices over the last fifteen years.
In 2010, President Obama’s second year in office, the average residential electricity rate was 11.54 cents per kilowatt hour (Kwh). In 2022 – the year President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law – after more than a decade of energy policy driven by “climate change,” the average rate had increased to 15.04 cents/Kwh, an increase of 30% over twelve years. By the time President Trump began his second term in January of this year, that average had climbed to over 17 cents/Kwh, an increase of over 50% in 15 years.
That history is conveniently absent from this summer’s legacy media propaganda parroting Democrat allegations that electricity prices have increased because of Trump policies after only 7 months in office. The omission is intentional.
Increases in the price U.S. residents pay for electricity have not been evenly distributed. The effects of subsidizing wind and solar energy at the nosebleed levels supported by twenty-first century Democrats, in conjunction with the most aggressive Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) mandating wind and solar energy in the states committed to reaching “net zero” CO2 emissions the fastest, can be seen in the trends in electricity prices over time. It is not surprising that many of these states have the highest residential electricity rates and largest rate increases over the last decade or more. A few examples demonstrate the difference.
The chart below shows those increases since 2013 for five high RPS states: New York, California, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island, all with “net zero” goals of 2050 or earlier. Note the start/end ranges of this chart and the one that follows it:
The next graph shows the increases in Florida, Georgia, Idaho, South Carolina, and Tennessee over the same period. These states have no mandatory or legislative RPS and no aggressive “net zero” commitments.
Over twelve years, residential customers in the five high RPS states saw their rates increase from the 14-19 cent/Kwh range to about 23-33 cents/Kwh. Over the same period, rates in the no RPS states remained more tightly rangebound, starting in the 9-13 cent range and only increasing to about 13-16 cents/Kwh.
Georgia ratepayers are helping fund the most expensive and over budget commercial nuclear power plant ever completed on U.S. soil (Plant Vogtle). California ratepayers, after closing all the state’s nuclear power plants except Diablo Canyon (fate still TBD) and installing the second most wind and solar capacity in the U.S., pay more than double the current Georgia rate.
Some will argue we left Texas out of our comparison despite the fact that it has the most installed wind and solar capacity. Texas has geographic characteristics that are unique (Tier 1 wind and solar locations; enormous, cheap natural gas production, and intrastate pipeline infrastructure, and consumption; hydrocarbon friendly regulatory structure; political landscape, etc.) in the continental U.S. and virtually no grid interconnects. But in case you’re wondering what happened to residential electricity rates in Texas over the same period, the table below provides the answer (data from the Public Utility Commission of Texas and EIA):
The 39.5% increase in electricity rates over the same period in Texas is higher than the corresponding rate increases in all of the five “no RPS” states in the graph above, one of whose (Georgia) rate payers are burdened with an expensive but world class new nuclear plant. Even with the most installed wind and solar capacity in the U.S., ~70% of Texas electricity generation is still provided by the combination of natural gas (over 50%), lignite/coal (12%) and nuclear (~7%).
Texas using natural gas to generate >50% of its electricity is a perfect segway to another key aspect of recent increases in U.S. residential electricity prices. The copious amounts of natural gas unleashed by the shale, horizontal drilling, and fracking revolution in the U.S. have, on one hand, helped close many coal-fired power plants which became uncompetitive as natural gas got cheaper.
That trend is good for the environment. Combusted natural gas emits about half the CO2 emissions of coal, but more importantly far less particulate matter as well (significantly reducing respiratory harm). On the other hand, this has made the U.S. increasingly reliant on natural gas as the main source of baseload electricity capacity to keep the lights on and industry running. So when natural gas prices rise, they drag electricity prices along with them. And because its super cool phase - liquified natural gas (LNG) - has become a global commodity for power generation, it is subject to global commodity price swings.
In Part 2, we delve into natural gas prices, wholesale electricity prices, data center/AI load growth, LNG export volumes and capacities, and the costs of transformers, switchgear and inflation, all of which have more to do with rising electricity prices than any impact from less than nine months of Orange Man Bad policies.
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whirly-gigs and sparky billboard are strait up waste of money.
Excellent analysis. One thing you mention that might need a bit of clarification is your reference to the Vogtle nuclear plant. The main reason it is so expensive is the required adherence to multiple radiation protection rules, some of which change during construction, all of whuch are based on the debunked Linear No Threshold hypothesis of radiation risk.
Please see the website or SARI- Scientists for Accurate Radiation Information, the publications of Dr. E.J. Calabrese, and the work of Jack Devaney. The latter can be found at www.gordianknotbook.com. The "should" cost of nuclear energy is discussed, and, spoiler alert, is much more favourable than any "renewable".