California has been a punching bag for anti clean energy trolls, due to the high retail, residential prices of electricity. But those prices are due in large part not to the price of production, which is very competitive, but to the added costs of hardening the transmission and distribution system to increasing impacts from fires and extreme weather, volatility of natural gas prices, and the cost of recent natural gas leaks such as the Alliso Canyon disaster.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab:
Data from the EIA show that the states most dependent on natural gas experienced some of the greatest increases in retail electricity prices through 2022–2023 (see SI-9), followed by some of the largest price decreases. The relationship between state-level natural gas share and retail electricity price variability is illustrated (see bottom).
Hurricanes, storms, and wildfires can raise retail electricity prices through both short-term recovery and rebuilding, and longer-term costs such as infrastructure hardening, operational expenditures, and liability insurance coverage to protect utilities against future risks.
In Florida, for example, hurricane damage in 2024 resulted in approved residential price increases across three utilities, ranging from 1.2 to 3.2 cents/kWh for one to one-and-a-half years (Florida PSC, 2025a, Florida PSC, 2025b, Florida PSC, 2024). In Maine, the state’s largest utility funds storm recovery costs via a rate rider, which grew from about 0.1 cents/kWh in late 2020 to 1.8 cents/kWh in late 2024 (Maine PUC, 2025) (see SI-9 for additional examples). Regarding longer-term impacts, investments to protect against wildfires have been especially prominent in California. Between 2019 and 2023, California’s three large IOUs were authorized to include $27 billion in wildfire-related costs in retail prices (Sieren-Smith et al., 2024, Singh et al., 2025). By June 2024, wildfire-related costs constituted an average of 17 % of total IOU revenue requirements (The Public Advocates Office, 2025)—up from 1.7 % in 2019 and, if directly translated into one-year cost impacts, equivalent to a 4 cent/kWh increase. Other Western states are also confronting wildfire mitigation costs, although to a lesser extent (see SI-9). In 2024, one Oregon utility recovered wildfire-related expenses through a 0.6 cent/kWh surcharge (PGE, 2023) while another includes a 0.7 cent/kWh surcharge on its residential rates (Pacific Power, 2025). A Colorado utility has proposed a wildfire-mitigation program that could increase residential prices by about 1.4 cents/kWh by 2028 (Xcel, 2025).
