Donald Trump pledged on the campaign trail that he would slash electricity prices in half within 18 months of returning to the White House. That self-imposed deadline is today, and—as with many of the president’s promises—he appears to have fallen short of his goal.
From Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 to April 2026, the most recent month for which government data are available, residential electricity rates have risen by an eye-watering 18 percent. From April 2025 to April 2026, rates jumped by 7.3 percent, or about twice the rate of inflation, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Unfortunately, for many consumers, there is not much relief in sight.
Last week, PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, announced the results of its annual capacity auction, which determined the cost to procure power in the region for the 2028–2029 delivery year. The cost of the latest auction hit $16.4 billion, tying the previous auction’s record-high price and all but locking customers into historically high rates.
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency and vowed to unleash abundant energy that would meet surging demand for electricity “to power the next generation of technology.”
A year and a half later, analysts say his administration has yet to deliver results by one of the metrics that matters the most: new gigawatts added to the electricity grid. A single gigawatt can power hundreds of thousands of American homes, and more than nine gigawatts can be needed to power the largest data centers driving artificial intelligence.
Electricity shortages across the United States have utility executives and power grid operators warning that the system is increasingly unstable and vulnerable to blackouts. Those worries were compounded this month when a record heat wave brought the power grid in 13 states and D.C., called PJM Interconnection, to the brink. Major customers were asked to cut their power use, and data centers were given a waiver to fire up their highly polluting backup diesel generators to avoid rolling blackouts.
Days later, PJM revealed that at its annual auction, it had fallen several gigawatts short of securing enough power to meet forecasted need, further destabilizing that grid and underscoring how demand is rising much faster than new generation is coming online — in large part because of data centers.
More renewable power would ease that strain. Yet analysts say the administration’s policies have undercut such projects. As a result, skyrocketing demand from data centers and Americans’ increasingly electrified daily life has added to consumers’ rising electricity bills and angered voters ahead of the midterm elections.
Now, the administration is pouring billions into a strategy to block massive wind and solar projects while funding new fossil fuel and nuclear generation that has yet to make up for this clean power.
Since March, the Interior Department has announced it will spend some $2.7 billion to buy back offshore wind leases, while the Energy Department is offering $17.5 billion in loans for nuclear energy and $800 million to bolster the coal industry. Nuclear power has low emissions but is far more costly and complicated to bring online than wind or solar.
And to date, King added, the administration’s policies have done more to subtract more renewables from the grid than add coal, nuclear or gas to it. “They haven’t facilitated much addition at all.”
Several documented policy decisions ran counter to the price-cutting goal. Tariffs raised the cost of key grid equipment, including a 147% tariff on Chinese goods that was later struck down, and a 15% tariff still in place on some grid equipment. Because utilities pass hardware costs through to ratepayers, more expensive transformers and electrical steel show up on bills.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
Federal permitting delays and recent stop-work orders under the Trump administration have slowed construction of several offshore wind projects while essentially freezing further investment in many others. These tactics prevented the delivery of significant amounts of wind energy to the New England grid this winter from two major projects, Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind.
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The administration’s actions have saddled ratepayers in the region with sharply higher fuel costs for the gas and oil needed to produce power that wind farms could have replaced with zero fuel costs; exposed them to ongoing volatility in prices for those fossil fuels; required millions in ongoing payments for a liquefied natural gas import facility that might not have been necessary with more wind power; and significantly limited the addition of new power supplies that could have supported greater economic growth.
The winter storm that buffeted the region in late January is the latest example of how spiking gas prices can impact consumers’ electricity bills. Data from ISO-New England, which runs the wholesale power distribution network in a six-state system, show that the energy market value (essentially the cost for electricity that will be paid by customers) soared to a record $2.7 billion for the month, 80 percent higher than January 2025 and triple the total from January 2024. These costs topped past highs set during the 2014 polar vortex and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It was due largely to a sharp rise in the price of natural gas, which is used regionally both to generate electricity and provide home heating. Now the ongoing war with Iran is pushing fossil fuels prices higher, with the full impact on consumers still unfolding.
Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis:
A year into the administration’s effort to prevent the closure of coal-fired power plants using emergency orders, an IEEFA analysis has found that ratepayers are already facing at least $300 million in extra costs through mid-May.
These costs are rising by more than $30 million per month, and could soar much higher if extensive repairs are made at some units. At the same time, coal mining has barely benefited: The total amount of coal used by the plants under the emergency orders amounted to less than 1% of the coal used by all U.S. plants to produce power in the same period.
The extraordinary approach used by the Department of Energy (DOE) has been to issue more than 20 emergency orders under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. The act is intended to ensure “electricity generation and transmission during critical situations like war or energy shortages.” However, as wielded by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas industry executive, the 90-day orders have been used almost exclusively to prevent the retirement of aging, uneconomic coal units—some of them currently inoperable—by the electric utilities that own them. Yet the plant owners, state regulators, and power grid operators all refute the DOE’s characterizations of power emergencies, citing years-long planning to provide replacement power and the cost and unreliability of the units being closed.
