Rising Electricity Price? Thank Trump
Bigger bills are a direct result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut green-energy subsidies.
By Rahm Emanuel
In the two months since President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Democrats have focused their criticism on Republican efforts to make it harder for families to afford health insurance.
That’s a good strategy, especially since, as the Journal reports, premiums are about to skyrocket.
But Democrats have so far failed to seize on what might be a more pressing economic concern.
Electricity prices have leapt by 10% since January, and the new law’s supply cuts will ensure they keep rising.
Monthly electricity bills are landing with a thud on kitchen tables across America.
Electricity demand is growing for the first time in decades—in large part because of data centers necessary to power artificial intelligence.
Failure to keep up with demand has geostrategic implications.
Beijing, unlike Washington, followed through with the Obama administration’s “all of the above” approach to electricity generation.
China recently added nearly 200 gigawatts to its supply mix from wind, solar, gas and nuclear facilities, adding 93 gigawatts in May alone.
In 2025, the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects to add a mere 63 gigawatts.
Mr. Trump’s political agenda and Washington’s bureaucratic intransigence are burdening ratepayers by preventing energy companies from bringing more electricity supply online.
By eliminating various Biden-era subsidies, the Republican budget law will reduce investment in electricity and clean-fuel production by $500 billion, according to preliminary estimates by the Princeton University-led Repeat Project.
This will strand capital previously invested in projects that won’t now come online.
Prices were already rising.
These cuts only add insult to injury.
More than 11,000 power generation and consumption projects await regulatory approval, with interconnections stalled for an average of five years.
Electricity demand is outstripping supply, and ratepayers are being forced to swallow the costs.
National Republicans could have tackled this challenge the way Texas did, by taking a “build, baby, build” approach to electricity generation of all sorts.
Instead, Mr. Trump and his congressional allies have decided to play politics, stopping new projects when the White House sensed that doing so would somehow “own the libs.”
The administration is canceling a huge wind project off New England that is already 80% complete.
This isn’t surprising—Mr. Trump has long railed against wind turbines near his golf course in Scotland, calling them “some of the ugliest you’ve ever seen.”
The president’s personal pique has been written into laws governing the whole country and its future—a move that is sure only to make monthly utility bills more costly for ordinary families.
Americans aren’t stupid.
They understand that tariffs are taxes by another name.
They’ll also realize quickly that Mr. Trump’s efforts to curtail electricity supply explain their mounting utility bills.
Democrats need to get behind a Ratepayers’ Bill of Rights that promises to double the nation’s grid capacity and train 300,000 new electricians in 10 years.
A two-year regulatory review would ensure that worthy generation and transmission projects don’t languish in limbo.
Utilities shouldn’t be able to charge customers to construct new generation facilities unless they’ve squeezed every electron out of their existing facilities.
Democrats should double the nation’s utility-grade battery storage so that localities can draw power from a wider diversity of generation.
Big new consumers of electricity—data centers that support AI, for example—must pay their fair share of new costs.
These moves would serve to green the nation’s grid, if only because the big opportunities to add power overwhelmingly come from clean sources of electricity.
That’s what happened in Texas when it adopted its build-baby-build approach.
The Democrats’ agenda shouldn’t be advertised as a campaign to save stranded polar bears, rescue the climate or curb carbon emissions.
It should be a ratepayer-first strategy. In 2026, it’s affordability, stupid: Electricity supply up, electricity bills down.
The media is covering utility spikes across the country and savvy Democrats are tapping into the public’s ensuing frustration.
This topic is already hot in the New Jersey governor’s race, and the first spot being aired by Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger includes a mention of utility rates.
That isn’t an accident—AI companies are building data centers all over Virginia, putting Ms. Spanberger’s state at the forefront of the challenge.
But this movie will eventually come to a theater near you.
There’s an old saying in politics: Washington is always the last to know.
The morning after the 2026 midterm elections, even the dimmest pundits aren’t going to be able to avoid noting that electricity prices played an outsize role in the outcome.
Just remember when you’re reading that analysis—you heard it here first.
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