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by Robert Bryce
October 9, 2026
Electricity prices across the U.S. are, pardon the pun, rising at shocking rates. There’s a reason, but it’s not the one being reported.
According to the Energy Information Administration, residential electricity prices in June were 5 percent higher than they were in June 2025. The average price of electricity in American homes is now about 18.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. In 2016, that same amount of juice cost U.S. residential consumers 12.5 cents. Thus, over the past decade, consumers have seen their home electricity costs jump by 46 percent.
What’s driving the surge in power costs? According to a June report by Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, the price increases “were driven primarily by investments in distribution and transmission networks, fuel volatility, routine maintenance, and policy mandates rather than load growth.”
Of course, there are different theories for the jump in power costs, and price increases vary, a fact highlighted on a handy new website, bluestateshighrates.com. Regardless of what’s driving those higher prices, the surging cost of power shows yet again that the electrify everything campaign launched several years ago by some of the richest NGOs in the U.S. is, in reality, a regressive energy tax that will hurt the poor and the middle class.
I have been reporting on the electrify everything scam for years.
In 2023, in “The Billionaires Behind The Gas Bans,” I spotlighted the Climate Imperative Foundation, (2025 revenue: $272 million), a new NGO that was largely funded by a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires, including John Doerr and Laurene Powell Jobs. I showed how Climate Imperative is giving millions of dollars per year to groups like the Sierra Club (2025 revenue: $84 million) and Rocky Mountain Institute, that are actively working to ban the use of natural gas in homes and businesses, and that their effort is: “Part of a years-long, lavishly funded campaign that is being bankrolled by some of the world’s richest people.”
In 2023 and 2024, I reported on how Stacey Abrams, a prominent Democrat who served in the Georgia House of Representatives and was the 2018 Democrat nominee for governor, had been hired by a dark money NGO called Rewiring America, (2024 revenue: $37.6 million) to help “share the benefits of electrification.”
Despite Abrams’ claims, I explained that electrifying everything will increase energy costs and “reduce our energy security by concentrating our reliance on a single energy network.” I also said the electrification push “will require putting massive new energy loads on an electric grid that’s already faltering under existing demand.”
That background provides context for a hearing that happened last Wednesday on Capitol Hill. The House Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs, held a hearing captioned “No Flame, More Pain: How State and Local Bans on Natural Gas Increase Costs.” The testimony from that hearing shows that, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to enact more sensible energy policies, several state- and local-level regulations that ban the direct use of natural gas and propane remain in place.
In addition, the Department of Energy recently published data showing that, on an energy-equivalent basis, residential electricity in the US now costs 3.6 times more than natural gas. Further, since 2009, the DOE’s numbers show that residential electricity costs have risen nearly twice as fast as residential gas prices.
Despite the soaring cost of electricity, and the regressive nature of the electrify everything push, the battle has now shifted to the federal courts, and the legality of the natural gas bans will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Let’s take a look.
