Carl Pope

How can the fastest growing source of U.S. electricity – renewable energy — be providing the cheapest power in history, while at the same time there is a national affordability crisis leaving 80 million Americans struggling with their utility bills?

Our utility network is in transition, with the old fossil fuel system losing market share and the new renewable power grid soon to provide more than half our power.

Utility bills in the US are rising faster than inflation, and it’s a troubling sign we are moving too slowly towards the low-cost renewable future.

The traditional, high priced fossil fuel past is unable to respond to increasing demand, fluctuating fuel prices, and regulatory tolerance of utility price gouging. As a result, that’s driving overall prices up

Coal costs are up 93%. Gas prices are expected to double in the next year. The cost of a new gas turbine power plant has tripled. Utility expenditures on outmoded and overpriced transmission wiring have tripled.

The cost of scraping or drilling for fossil fuels keeps going up. The price for extracting, delivering and using coal or gas to fuel our economy is simply too high to deliver affordable power to all the Americans who need it.

But powerful economic and political forces continue to profit from this outmoded coal and gas power system; they don’t want to give up the (often) outrageous profits that utilities make from expensive old plants. And this clinging to outmoded and overpriced fossil power is the source of the affordability crisis in the overall power sector.

The markets are speaking for themselves, with renewables providing major cuts to energy costs. In the innovative, free fuel, clean energy share of our utility bills, technologies to store electricity from a day of abundance to one of short-fall have seen their costs cut by 90%. Replacing existing power transmission lines with more efficient conductors, which is one of the most important of new power distribution opportunities, can double the capacity of an existing high voltage transmission system at the same time the system continues to operate.

Looking ahead, wind, solar and storage combinations are going to meet at least 85% of the new capacity our economy requires; gas at most can only do 15% of the job. This energy transition is not only underway; it is the only path which remains.

The future is clear. We now have the knowledge and the capacity to obtain all of our power using free, local and universally available fuels: sun, wind and water. We will soon be harvesting half of our power from those technologies.

What’s more: we have the new technologies needed to transmit electricity from the generating wind and solar power plant to load centers at a fraction of the historic cost; BNEF reports that the cost of fixed-axis solar fell by 21% in a single year.

We have developed steadily more affordable battery and other storage technologies to ensure that whatever the weather, we can store enough power from yesterday to meet the needs of tomorrow; these costs have fallen by 90% over the last 15 years, according to the US Department of Energy.

Unfortunately for Americans and their utility costs, energy insiders continue to cling to the past.

Coal has become a particular burden for ratepayers. Efforts to keep coal alive in the power sector is costing consumers a fortune. There are 211 coal plants in the US overcharging power customers $3 billion because coal is hugely more expensive to operate than replacing it with new wind or solar.

Subsidizing just two coal plants in Ohio cost customers more than $80 million in just the first half of 2025, according to the Ohio Manufacturers Association.

Ohio’s legislature originally approved this coal subsidy, but after two leaders of the House were convicted of bribery by the owners of the two plants, the state has moved to end it.

A recent analysis showed that 80% of US coal plants cost more to operate than it would cost to build new wind or solar in the same area.

Gas — short-term– is not as lethal for a household’s bill, but it locks a community into competing with overseas LNG costs which are expected to double in a single year. And that means paying excessive prices for every new piece of equipment because the gas turbine supply chain has largely withered.

Other efforts by fossil fuel interests to revive the role of gas are foundering.

When Texas offered premium prices for stand-by gas plants, companies flocked to bid. But as natural gas prices steadily climbed it became clear that gas was simply not competitive. Ten months after bidding to build the Texas stand-by gas turbines, the successful bidders were racing to exit what they had realized was simply not a viable business.

Perhaps the most revealing exposure of just how uncompetitive gas has become is how Texas is handling the Permian oil field.

In 2023, renewable power became so much cheaper than gas that the state of Texas announced it would replace fossil fuel generators, rigs, compressors, processors and pipelines in the Permian oil basin with electric equipment powered by Texas wind and solar power.

This required $5 billion of new transmission facilities from West Texas to the Permian: in effect Texas is decarbonizing an oil field, because renewable electricity is that much cheaper than gas.

New studies show that if Texas followed President Trump’s advice and relied primarily on gas for its growing generation needs, consumer prices would leap by 14%. Even more alarming, 20% of Texas power customers would be hit with black-outs and load shedding.

Today, we have a consumer affordability crisis that is afflicting a sector of the market that is steadily demanding more subsidies.

As clean energy prices drop almost monthly, common sense says that faster embrace of change is the need of the moment.

An accelerated shift from expensive fossil fuels to ever cheaper renewable power is the cure for what ails American power production. The market is taking notice – and it’s already taking action. Will our leaders in Washington?