Energy Secretary Chris Wright has blamed high electricity prices in Democrat-led states on climate policies. Prices do tend to be higher in blue states than red states, but climate policies explain at most a modest portion of the price difference.
Longstanding structural and geographical factors — combined with more recent price increases from wildfires, extreme weather and, in certain areas, anticipated rapid load growth from data centers — have also contributed to high electricity prices in certain states and regions.
Wright’s recent comments have emphasized political differences between states while omitting many of these other factors, at times misleadingly blaming large price rises on climate policies.
“Electricity prices are almost 50% higher in states run by Democrats,” he said Oct. 1 on Fox News. “For 17 years since President Obama came to office, the Democrat position has been to constrict the growth of energy and drive the prices up so Americans could afford less and we would solve climate change.”
In other interviews, the secretary has suggested state-level requirements for adopting renewable energy — called renewable portfolio standards — are to blame for the price differential.
“Subsidizing and forcing wind and solar onto electricity grids around the country has been a disaster,” he said Oct. 28 on the Bloomberg show “Balance of Power.” “You can see it in the states with renewable portfolio standards that have forced wind and solar. They have 50% higher electricity prices than the states that don’t have those. I haven’t met anyone that wants their electrical bill to go up 50%.”
“Half of the states have renewable portfolio [standards], half of them don’t,” Wright also said at a Sept. 23 event hosted by the New York Times. “Forty-five percent more expensive electricity in the states that have them. That’s not coincidence.”
Wright’s math approximately checks out when comparing average retail electricity prices in states with and without current renewable portfolio standards, or states with Republican versus Democratic governors as of fall 2026. But renewable portfolio standards have not on their own made electricity prices rise by 50%, experts told us, nor do all states with these policies have higher-than average prices.
“The correlation is real, but this does not establish causality,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Fischer J. Espiritu Argosino and Christopher R. Knittel told us in an email. Their 2025 working paper found that renewable portfolio standards aren’t a driver of electricity prices once other differences between states are accounted for.
Other research has indicated a partial role for renewable portfolio standards in raising electricity rates in certain states, particularly if the standards are very strict. Still, “[m]ost of the electricity price differences between Democratic and Republican states are not attributable to RPS,” Devin Hartman, president of the Lighthouse Energy Institute, a newly founded energy policy nonprofit, told us.
The data also do not indicate a relationship between renewables in general and rising prices, despite Wright’s claim at the New York Times event that everywhere renewable energy has had “meaningful penetration has meaningfully higher electricity prices.”
“That’s just demonstrably false,” Paul Donohoo-Vallett, an independent energy consultant who previously worked for the Department of Energy, told us, pointing to Texas, Iowa, South Dakota and New Mexico as examples of places that added relatively high levels of wind and solar in recent years while maintaining relatively low prices. “There’s no inherent connection between more wind and solar and higher prices,” he said.
“Renewable portfolio standards or net-zero goals lead states to force reliable power sources, such as coal-fired power plants, to close, which drives up prices,” DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich told us, in response to questions about the data supporting a link between the renewable portfolio standards and electricity prices.
As for the counterexamples of states with relatively low prices and high renewable energy penetration, they “still have strong reliance on coal, nuclear and/or natural gas power which prevents their electricity prices from being higher,” he said. “In that sense, penetration of wind and solar is not as meaningful there.”
Structural Reasons for Expensive Electricity
The high average electricity prices among blue states is driven largely by a few specific areas of the country: Hawaii, California and a group of states clustered in the Northeast. Electricity prices have been elevated in these areas for many decades. Experts pointed to several major factors that help explain why prices are higher in these states.
For Hawaii, a major underlying cause is geography. The island relies heavily on oil to produce electricity, which puts it at the whims of the global oil market. The state’s electricity prices have soared recently in part due to the war in Iran.
Similarly, isolation from the rest of the country and a large number of unconnected microgrids contribute to high prices in Alaska, a Republican-led state without renewable portfolio standards that nonetheless has high electricity prices.
Geography plays a role in the lower 48 states, too. “Utility-scale wind and solar resources are predominantly located in Republican-led Midwestern and Southwestern states, whereas Democrat-led Northeast states are highly reliant on pipeline-capacity-constrained natural gas,” Michelle Levinson, a senior manager at the nonprofit research organization World Resources Institute, told us.
“A large number of blue states are small geographic states that are all clustered in New England, which just happens to not have any natural gas production,” Donohoo-Vallett said. This leads these states to pay elevated prices for natural gas to be piped in via limited pipelines, he said.
Price increases may in some cases be related to implicit climate policies, Hartman said. In the case of New England, “policy decisions that suppressed pipeline development” played into high regional natural gas costs, he said.
In California, wildfires have been the “big driver” of increasing costs, Hartman said. Wildfire risk has driven up transmission and distribution costs in the West, while also leading to liability costs, he said. Transmission lines carry electricity over long distances while distribution lines take it the rest of the way to customers.
“California stands out among all states with a massive 64% increase in rates since 2019 (30% after adjusting for inflation), driven by significant and unique wildfire-related expenses accounting for 40% of the rate increase at least through 2024,” an April 2026 report from the research firm the Rhodium Group concluded.
In 2018, Pacific Gas and Electric Company equipment started the deadliest fire in California’s history, the Camp Fire, one of a number of highly destructive fires in recent history in the state to be started by electrical equipment.
In addition, a “big issue is transmission is old, so replacing that aging infrastructure is expensive, especially in New England,” Hartman said. New England has older transmission infrastructure than some other areas of the country, he said, and it is also relatively expensive there to upgrade infrastructure due to high land values, labor and taxes. California and the Northeast have also had relatively high distribution cost increases, Hartman said.
In some cases, the aging of equipment and wildfires or extreme weather come together to necessitate spending, said Donohoo-Vallett, who was the first author of the Rhodium Group report. Aging infrastructure is “colliding with increasing threats from extreme weather and climate change,” he explained. “That’s just accelerating the need to replace this stuff.”
For example, he said, the Camp Fire occurred after a metal hook holding up a century-old transmission line broke. “The power price had been low for a long time because we just weren’t paying for this stuff,” Donohoo-Vallett said.
Between 2019 and 2025, average residential electricity prices nationwide rose 33%, but only 5.6% above the rate of inflation, according to a July analysis from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to which Donohoo-Vallett contributed. LBNL is a government research center affiliated with the DOE. However, residential prices rose significantly more in California and some New England and mid-Atlantic states.
The LBNL researchers cited recovery and mitigation from wildfires and extreme weather, as well as the need to replace or improve aging distribution and transmission infrastructure, as top drivers of electricity price increases above inflation during this period.
Madalsa Singh, an energy researcher at Rochester Institute of Technology, also pointed out that tying average electricity prices to state-level policies ignores the wide variation within states in prices, which are set by utilities.
Singh and her colleagues studied electricity prices in California from 2019 through 2023, finding that electricity prices were relatively flat in publicly owned utilities while investor-owned utilities had price increases that made them “some of the most expensive power providers in the United States.”
“Neighboring utilities in states — red or blue — can have different price trajectories,” Singh said.
Renewable Portfolio Standards and Prices
As we said, analyses have come to mixed conclusions on whether renewable portfolio standards have contributed to electricity price increases.
A 2025 working paper by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tried to rigorously answer this question by comparing states to themselves over time between 1998 and 2023. The researchers found that even though having more stringent renewable portfolio standards shows a “clear, positive correlation” with higher electricity prices, the standards are not the cause of this pattern.
After controlling for both longstanding, fixed differences between states and national drivers of price increases during the period of the study, “the escalation of a state’s RPS has no detectable effect on residential electricity prices,” Knittel and Argosino told us.
Instead, they said, “states that already had high electricity prices were more likely to adopt an RPS in the first place … creating the correlation.” Further factors continued to raise electricity prices as more states adopted the standards and strengthened them. But again, this doesn’t mean the standards were the cause. Rather, “the big rate increases over the past two decades line up with waves of capital spending on transmission and distribution, not with renewable mandates,” the researchers said.
Other analyses have found that RPS does increase prices in certain circumstances – although not to the degree that Wright claims.
Noah Kaufman, an economist and senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told us that “policies that mandate increases in renewables, regardless of costs, do tend to increase electricity prices,” but that such rules “have not been the main driver of increases in electricity prices in recent years.”
As of 2026, 27 states had standards mandating a certain level of renewables, according to LBNL, and most of those states are controlled by Democrats. (A larger number of states has had RPS at some point in the past, including some red states that have gone on to have robust levels of renewable energy outside of any requirements.)
Current policies vary, with states requiring anywhere from 9% to 67% renewable energy in a utility’s energy mix in 2026. States have various ways to allow utilities to comply with the policies, such as requiring them to have a certain number of renewable energy credits, which they can either obtain by acquiring or generating energy from renewables or simply buying the credits themselves.
Standards requiring a limited amount of renewable energy “generally don’t affect prices” because “market-driven renewables have exceeded” these requirements, Hartman said, but policies with very high levels “are becoming infeasible to meet” and can raise prices.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s July analysis of the drivers of electricity price increases between 2019 and 2025 concluded that renewable portfolio standards have “often increased prices” if they require renewable energy adoption beyond what would be driven by the market. However, the researchers found that the majority of wind and solar development during this timeframe — occurring outside of any RPS requirements — does not “appear to have driven price increases.”
The standards raised electricity prices approximately 1 cent per kilowatt hour in a few New England and mid-Atlantic states between 2019 and 2025, according to the LBNL analysis, with much lower impacts on average among states with these standards. For context, the price of electricity in Maine, one of the states with a 1-cent increase from RPS, rose more than 5 cents per kilowatt hour in total during this period.
A version of the LBNL analysis that looked at the drivers of rising rates between 2019 and 2024 concluded that RPS played a “medium” role in pushing up prices above the rate of inflation. For context, the researchers concluded that replacing or improving aging distribution and transmission infrastructure also played a medium role in increasing prices, but over a broader geographic area. Wildfires and extreme weather had a larger effect than renewable portfolio standards, over a similar geographic breadth.
Donohoo-Vallett said that the LBNL and MIT analyses came to different conclusions because they used different methods of estimating the impact of RPS. The LBNL work is based on calculating the costs of complying with renewable portfolio standards. But this does not fully measure what would have happened to prices if there weren’t renewable portfolio standards, he said, whereas the MIT work attempts to account for this counterfactual scenario.
The MIT paper found that utility-scale renewables adoption was associated with lower electricity prices. Investing in renewables can also mitigate costs from spikes in prices of other forms of energy, such as natural gas, Donohoo-Vallett said.
“On the substance, we largely agree,” Knittel and Argosino said of the LBNL analysis. “Neither analysis supports the claim that renewables or RPSs explain a 40 to 50 percent price gap.”
Exception for Some Versions of Rooftop Solar
While renewable energy adoption overall is not associated with rising electricity prices, both the MIT and LBNL analyses concluded that rooftop solar in some cases can increase prices.
Knittel and Argosino explained that a method of compensating people with rooftop solar for the power they send back to the grid — called net metering — can drive up electricity prices for everyone else.
Under this system people are charged only for the net amount of electricity they pull from the grid — their use minus the amount they produced. But electricity rates are meant to cover the cost of maintaining the grid, not just the cost of the electricity itself. As people with rooftop solar pay for less power, they pay less to maintain the grid, and electricity rates rise. Net metering in effect “shifts the fixed costs of the grid onto households without solar,” the MIT researchers told us
Rooftop solar had a small effect on electricity prices in most states in recent years, the LBNL analysis concluded, and a higher effect in a few others, including Maine and California.
These states have now made changes to lower how much they compensate people with solar panels to alleviate the problem.
Even in those states, the LBNL researchers found that rooftop solar and renewable portfolio standards were only responsible for a portion of the price increases. For Maine’s primary utility, net energy metering policies for rooftop solar contributed to an increase of 1 to 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour between 2019 and 2024. Winter storm recovery costs played a slightly bigger role in cost increases, at 1.6 cents per kilowatt hour, while distribution-related spending and renewable portfolio standards each contributed about a cent to the increase.
For California’s largest three utilities, the researchers calculated that net-metered solar policies led electricity prices to increase by around 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour over this period — less of an impact than wildfire costs, at 4.3 cents per kilowatt hour, and inflation in distribution and transmission costs, at 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour. Renewable portfolio standards contributed to less than half a cent per kilowatt hour of the increase.
“California’s prices are high mainly because of wildfire costs, distribution spending, and rate design, not because it has a lot of solar on the grid,” Argosino and Knittel said.
Electricity Price Increases During the Trump Administration
Wright has often spoken about electricity prices in Democrat-led states as a response to questions about affordability or criticisms of electricity prices under Trump. At the Sept. 23 New York Times event, he responded to a question about rising electricity prices by suggesting Democratic policies were to blame for rising prices during the Trump administration.
“Electricity prices in red states that have followed the United States federal policy have not seen a rise in inflation-adjusted electricity prices during the Trump administration,” he said. “Electricity price rises that are well above inflation are all limited to states with aggressive climate policies. California, Massachusetts, New England — those are the places with the fastest rise and the most expensive electricity prices.”
Price rises, however, have not been limited to blue states and are not just due to climate policies. Nor have all blue states seen major increases. California, for example, saw its 2025 electricity prices rise more slowly than inflation.
Between 2024 and 2025, 39 states had electricity price increases above inflation and 26 had increases of 2% or more above inflation, according to data from the Energy Information Administration analyzed by the nonprofit Institute for Progress. The largest increases — between 7.1% and 11.9% above inflation — were in New Jersey, Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois and New York, all states with renewable portfolio standards whose governorships and legislatures were at least partially controlled by Democrats as of fall 2026.
However, Republican-controlled states without RPS also had some significant price hikes. Indiana, Louisiana and Utah, for example, had increases between 4.2% and 5.7% above inflation.
One driver of the cost increases was a 36% rise in the price of natural gas after hitting a low in 2024, according to the LBNL analysis. The greatest natural gas-related increases affected grid operators in New England and New York, followed by those in the mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest. “It’s not really about who’s leading the state,” Levinson said. “It’s about … your exposure to natural gas prices.”
Meanwhile, states in the region of the electric grid operated by PJM Interconnection — the largest grid operator in the country, stretching from the mid-Atlantic to Illinois — began in 2025 to see price increases due to the rapid growth of data centers. (To learn more, read “Data Centers and Electricity Prices: It’s Not as Simple as Voters May Think.”)
“PJM spans 13 states and DC, many of them red or purple states,” Singh said.
The LBNL report listed clean energy policy and wildfire costs as lesser contributors to price increases in 2025.
There has been more limited analysis on electricity prices in 2026 so far, but the available data continue to show price increases in both blue and red states.
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