Thirteen states from Vermont to Hawaii have written a hard deadline into law: 100 percent carbon-free (CO2-free) or “clean” electricity, most by 2040 or 2045. Lawmakers sold these mandates as a bargain: cheaper power alongside cleaner air. Voters in those states are struggling with ever-increasing electricity bills. Which are increasing faster than non-mandate states.
The metric politicians lean on to make that case is the “levelized cost of energy” (LCOE), which ranks wind and solar as the cheapest sources of generation on the grid. The U.S. Energy Information Administration itself cautions that the ranking is misleading because LCOE reflects the cost to build and run a single generator. It says nothing about whether that generator can deliver power at 6 p.m. on a windless February evening, exactly when a grid needs it most.
Energy analysts, Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, answer the question EIA’s own number dodges. Their “Always On Levelized Cost of Energy” (AOLOC) model adds back everything a bare LCOE figure leaves out: backup generation, transmission, overbuilt capacity and the power curtailed to keep intermittent resources reliable.
Run through Minnesota’s grid, the model puts wind’s real cost at roughly $272 per megawatt-hour and solar’s at $472. Treat those as modeled estimates, not quoted market prices, but they are the most honest attempt anyone has made to price what these mandates actually cost.
Set those figures next to new natural gas plants, a resource that needs no matching backup fleet and can be built wherever demand is, saving transmission buildout, rather than wherever the wind happens to blow, which needs vast amounts of expensive transmission.
Twelve more states carry the same 100 percent commitment on their books. Together, representing more than a quarter of the nation’s electricity use, they all lean on the same LCOE sales pitch that Minnesota did.
A nationwide review of utility rate filings by Orr and Rolling already shows the pattern in the data: states with these mandates sought rate increases 32 percent larger than states without them from 2020 through 2025, with prices climbing at nearly double the pace of non-mandate states, despite slower population growth.
Reliability is eroding on the same timeline. MISO, the grid operator serving Minnesota and fourteen other states, already counts wind and solar for only a small fraction of their rated capacity during the hours the system is under the most strain when it is very hot or cold, because they cannot be counted on to deliver when needed.
That is not a regional quirk. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s latest long-term outlook puts 13 of the 23 grid regions it tracks nationwide, including MISO, PJM, ERCOT, and much of the West, at elevated or high risk of a shortfall within five years, as retiring plants outpace the firm generation meant to replace them.
Wind and solar cannot fill that gap on command, and NERC warns the shortfall will force emergency responses, such as rolling blackouts, and no governor wants to explain that to constituents.
None of this argues against cleaner electricity. It argues against buying it blind. Before a state locks in a mandate and before a utility retires one more dispatchable plant, regulators should require a single disclosure: the full cost of the replacement power, including backup, transmission, storage, subsidies, and curtailment, not just the price of the generation.
Voters were promised a bargain. They are learning that this was a false promise. Electricity is far too important to ignore facts and charge ahead with ideology-driven, expensive, often dangerous net-zero mandates.
Something is missing from the Democratic Party’s 2026 message, and its absence speaks louder than any speech. Climate change, the issue party leaders once called an existential emergency, has gone quiet. Journalists even have a name for it: climate hushing.
An analysis of congressional press releases by Inside Climate News found that Democratic mentions of climate change have plummeted since 2025, while talk of energy affordability has surged. Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, once a green energy champion, now sells herself as a fighter against high utility bills, and her pivot is being called a blueprint for the party.
Behind closed doors, the shift is even starker. At a recent Senate Democratic strategy retreat, the polling presentation did not ask a single question about climate change. One attendee, Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Whitehouse, called it a massive blind spot.
Give the strategists credit. They read the same election returns everyone else did. The party’s own review of the 2024 loss reportedly found that green transition messaging frightened workers in traditional industries who feared for their jobs. Voters punished Democrats for the high cost of living, and nothing raised that cost more visibly than energy.
But notice what the party retreated toward. They did not change the subject to something safe and unrelated. They ran straight at affordability, the exact ground where their climate record is weakest. You do not flee toward your own weakness. You flee toward it only when you have no choice, because the voters are already holding their ever-increasing electric bills.
And those bills tell the story. The average American residential electricity rate has climbed about 25% in four years, from just over 15 cents per kilowatt hour in 2022 to nearly 19 cents this spring. In the last year alone, rates jumped more than 7%.
Federal forecasters expect another increase in 2026, with the sharpest pain along the East Coast, where climate mandates are most aggressive. These are not acts of nature. They are the predictable result of policies that shut down reliable power plants and force expensive, weather-dependent replacements onto the grid. Like adding an undependable car to your family’s budget. It just increases your costs if you want reliability.
The price tag reaches well beyond the monthly bill. When Congress passed the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act, budget scorekeepers pegged its energy subsidies at around 370 billion dollars over ten years. The real number keeps climbing.
The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the clean energy tax credits alone will add 825 billion dollars to the deficit, and the Cato Institute puts the full range as high as nearly 2 trillion dollars over the same window. That is a wealth transfer from ordinary ratepayers and taxpayers to well-connected developers, and it buys higher prices, not lower ones.
Here is the admission hiding inside the silence. If the green transition were actually making energy cheaper, climate and affordability would be the same message, and there would be nothing to hush. The party could brag about both in the same breath. The fact that its own strategists had to choose between them, and chose to bury climate, is a confession that the two pull in opposite directions.
Some Democrats insist this is a recast, not a retreat. They argue that cheap solar and wind are the affordability answer, and that voters can be won by promising climate policy will lower bills.
But that claim collapses on contact with its own logic. If renewables were truly the cheapest power, they would not need mandates, subsidies, and regulatory waivers to force utilities to buy them. You do not have to compel people to choose the cheaper option. The mandates exist precisely because the market, left alone, would choose otherwise.
The honest lesson is one conservatives have argued for years. Reliable, affordable energy and heavy-handed climate central planning cannot coexist. Americans want to keep the lights on and the bills low, and they have figured out which policies deliver that and which do not.
Democratic strategists have figured it out too. That is why they have stopped talking. The quiet is not a change of heart. It is a change of subject, and it amounts to an admission that the policies were too expensive and too restrictive to defend out loud. The rest of us should say plainly that we do not want less reliable and more expensive electricity.
In the first five months of 2025, solar and wind dominated new U.S. electricity generation. Of the 15 gigawatts (GW) added, solar was 11.5, wind was 2.3, and gas was just 1.3, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Industry voices like Stephanie Bosh of the Solar Energy Industries Association hail this as proof that solar delivers power “faster and cheaper than any other source.” Is this true?
As we accelerate toward a grid increasingly reliant on wind and solar, a closer look reveals a troubling reality: these intermittent sources are driving up electricity costs, not slashing them, through a web of hidden expenses that threaten reliability and affordability.
Solar and wind’s part-time nature is the root issue. Solar generates nothing at night, little in the first and last hours of daylight, and falters under clouds, rain, or snow. Wind generation varies unpredictably. This intermittency doesn’t just displace fossil fuels like natural gas and coal—it forces them into inefficient backup roles.
Calling fossil fuels backups is a misuse of the English language that only serves the wind and solar industrial complex. It’s equivalent to calling the starting pitcher a backup in favor of a pitcher who can only play when the wind blows or the sun shines.
Hydrocarbon, coal and natural gas plants, with fixed costs (capital, maintenance, and employees) comprising 60-75% of operational costs, must raise prices on reduced sales volumes to break even. As renewables flood the market during peak production, they suppress wholesale prices temporarily, where subsidized low-bid renewables set the prices for all. In other grids, they get windfall profits, getting the highest price paid for electricity.
Yet, in the “pay-as-clear” system, evening ramps or scarcity periods spike prices, as expensive peaker plants — needed more frequently for renewable gaps caused by the addition of wind and solar — set the highest price, which is paid to all.
Consider the evidence from high wind and solar regions. California’s residential rates are 30-35 cents/kWh—nearly double the U.S. average of 17 cents — despite 50% wind and solar. Germany’s prices top 36-41 cents/kWh with 55% from wind and solar; Denmark and the UK follow suit at 37 and 29-32 cents, respectively.
These ambitious transitions expose the myth: wholesale dips from renewables are overshadowed by retail hikes from taxes, subsidies, grid upgrades, peakers, and using full-time coal and natural gas part-time.
In California, demand from EVs and data centers exacerbates this, and intermittency demands more peakers. These peaker plants run inefficiently, emit more when ramping up, and charge more because they are only used some of the time, causing costly price spikes. They set the price all generators are paid with the take-and-pay system.
In a grid of only hydro, nuclear, gas, and coal — dispatchable sources—peaker needs plummet. These can load-follow predictably, handling demand peaks without the supply volatility renewables cause. Hydro ramps quickly; nuclear provides steady baseload, natural gas and coal are dispatched to match demand. The system worked and was cost effective.
Pre-renewable grids used peakers sparingly, at 4-10%, versus 20% or more in solar-heavy systems like California, where the solar “duck curve” (charting solar generation creates a graph that looks like a duck, no production at night, the belly of the duck, ramp up during the day, the neck of the duck, with a sharp drop as the sun sets, the downward beak of the duck) requires rapid evening ramps of 10-20 GW.
Adding renewables means building more costly, underutilized peaker plants, inflating bills. Cancelling out much of the CO2 emission reductions that are the stated reason for adding costly disruptive wind and solar.
Transmission costs compound the problem. Wind thrives in remote plains or offshore; solar thrives in distant deserts. Connecting these to cities demands expensive high-voltage lines that cost $1-3 million per mile. Thousands of more miles than are needed for nearby hydrocarbon or nuclear plants.
U.S. estimates peg a price tag of $450 billion by 2035 for renewable integration, adding at least 2 cents/kWh to rates. In Germany, €70 billion in upgrades add 3 cents/kWh. Claims of renewables being “cheaper” rely on levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), ignoring transmission and peaker costs. Solar’s $30-50/MWh jumps 30% or more when transmission and backups are factored in.
FERC projects 84% of 133 GW additions by 2028 will come from wind and solar, making our grids less reliable and more expensive.
Policies like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which stripped tax subsidies and credits may slow growth, but the trend persists. We need honest accounting. We cannot ignore the wind and solar reality: more blackouts and ever higher prices.
