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Energy affordability has become a flash point over the past few months. It’s a key issue in this year’s gubernatorial races. It’s something President Donald Trump has promised to fix by boosting fossil-fuel production. And of course, it’s showing up in the bills that arrive in mailboxes every month.
Three-quarters of Americans count electricity costs as a source of stress in their lives, according to a new Associated Press-NORC survey. But a recent study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provides more nuance to the conversation. When adjusted for inflation, 31 continental states actually saw their power prices decline from 2019 to 2024, while the other 17 states experienced increases.
One reason why some states saw prices jump? Utility spending on disaster recovery and preparedness. Take California, where utilities have added billions of dollars in wildfire-recovery costs and mitigation programs to retail electricity prices in recent years, the national lab found. It’s a bracing fact as the planet warms and disasters become more frequent and destructive.
But the report also tempered fears that the growth of data centers and other power-hungry industries will jack up electricity prices. Grid maintenance has been a top driver of increased electricity costs over the last few years, but spreading these expenses among more customers — like data centers and manufacturers — has helped lower retail electricity prices, researchers found. One caveat: That dynamic tends to benefit large, commercial consumers more than residential ones.
The Trump administration has elevated fossil fuels as a solution to rising electricity bills, positing that more coal and gas power can cut prices. But building a new gas-fired plant is increasingly expensive and takes years, and the U.S. is preparing to ship more liquefied natural gas out of the country anyway.
If you look at two rare examples of power utilities reducing their rates, it’s clear that falling back on coal isn’t the answer either. In Oregon, Idaho Power Co. has asked regulators to lower electricity prices by nearly 1%, saying the closure of a coal-fired power unit and demolition of another coal plant have brought down costs. And in Virginia, where a state law is pushing the electricity sector to lower emissions, Appalachian Power cited the addition of renewable power in its request to lower rates. West Virginia is meanwhile pushing to keep its coal plants running — a move that Appalachian Power said would raise prices for its electricity customers in that state.
But putting the national lab’s inflation-adjusted numbers aside, it’s clear that rising utility bills are reaching a fever pitch across the country — and it’s going to take both more clean energy and smarter utility regulation to rein them in.
Trump sinks a global shipping-decarbonization plan
Until a few weeks ago, the International Maritime Organization was on track to approve a global shipping-decarbonization strategy. That is, until the Trump administration launched a last-minute offensive and got the United Nations body to delay adoption of the plan, Maria Gallucci and Dan McCarthy reported late last week.
The tens of thousands of shipping vessels that travel the oceans are responsible for about 3% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. But as Maria points out in her follow-up dive into shipping decarbonization, the industry doesn’t currently have much incentive to replace dirty diesel-powered vessels with lower-carbon alternatives.
Some good news, some bad news for U.S. battery startups
The U.S. Department of Energy slashed another wave of federal funding this week, targeting $700 million in grants for battery and other clean manufacturing projects. Nearly half of that funding had been awarded to Ascend Elements, which had already canceled a portion of its planned battery-recycling facility in Kentucky earlier this year. A smaller portion was going to American Battery Technology Co., which said it will carry on with its lithium mine and refinery project in Nevada.
But it wasn’t a bad week for every battery company. Redwood Materials raised $350 million, which it’ll use to expand its unique energy-storage business that packages together used EV batteries into grid-scale resources that can power data centers and other industrial users. And Pila Energy raised $4 million to keep building batteries that provide backup power to large appliances, but are more affordable and portable than whole-home systems like the Tesla Powerwall.
Losing the reactor race: China has a clear head start on the U.S. when it comes to nuclear power, as China has figured out how to produce reactors cheaply and quickly, while the U.S.’s last project went billions of dollars over budget. (New York Times)
What whales? The Trump administration has repeatedly blamed offshore wind farms for whale deaths but just canceled funding for research meant to protect the marine mammals in an increasingly busy ocean. (Canary Media)
Drill here, drill there, drill everywhere: The Trump administration opens 1.56 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to new oil and gas leasing, and reportedly plans to open significant swaths of the East and West coasts to offshore drilling as well. (New York Times, Politico)
Testing the grid: Xcel Energy is taking different approaches to building out distributed energy resources depending on the state, installing batteries at local businesses in Minnesota while pursuing a more complicated, legislatively mandated model in Colorado. (Latitude Media)
Battling battery blazes: California passes a new law to strengthen fire-safety standards for grid battery systems after a devastating blaze in Moss Landing earlier this year, though new storage-facility designs have already made similar fires unlikely. (Canary Media)
Flagged and forgotten: The United Nations says governments and oil and gas companies are ignoring nearly 90% of leaks that methane-tracking satellites have detected for them. (Reuters)
A winding road to decarbonization: Rondo Energy’s “heat batteries” could be key to decarbonizing heavy industry, but the company’s first industrial-scale test is at a controversial site: a California oil field. (Canary Media)
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