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Why are electric bills so high? And how public power brings them down

Build public power: a national grid planned and coordinated by the Department of Energy, with states and local public utilities handling the work on the ground, so your electric bill pays for electricity, not shareholder returns.

Why are electric bills so high?

If your electric bill keeps climbing, you're not imagining it. The federal Energy Information Administration expects the average household to pay 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2026, a nearly 5% increase from 2025, and says it expects prices to keep rising.[1] In the first half of 2026 alone, utilities asked regulators for $18.6 billion in rate increases, according to the consumer group PowerLines.[2]

The grid itself is stuck, too. New power plants and batteries wait in line to connect to the grid. For projects that came online in 2025, the median wait from request to operation was more than five years.[3] Meanwhile, the grid is planned in pieces, utility by utility and region by region. A Department of Energy modeling study of what happens if the country plans transmission together estimated it could save $270 billion to $490 billion through 2050, with roughly $1.60 to $1.80 saved for every dollar spent.[4]

Public power already works

Towns and cities across the country already own their electric utility. The American Public Power Association, the trade group for those utilities, counts 1,998 of them serving more than 55 million Americans. In 2024 their residential customers paid an average monthly bill of $123.78, compared with $139.42 for customers of investor-owned utilities. In 35 of the 45 states with comparable data, public power had the lowest average residential rate.[5]

The federal government already does this too. The Bonneville Power Administration supplies about a third of the electricity generated in the Northwest, and it runs on what customers pay, not on yearly money from Congress.[6]

Under our plan, the Department of Energy plans and coordinates one national grid and builds the long-distance lines that connect it. States and local public utilities handle the local setup, from the substations to the meter on your house. And towns that want to take over their utility get federal help to do it.

The objection: "Government can't run utilities"

It already does, for tens of millions of people, and by the public power trade group's figures it charges them less on average.[5] Public utilities don't have shareholders to pay. Nobody is proposing that a federal office read your meter. The national job is planning and building the big lines that a patchwork of private utilities hasn't built.

Sources

  1. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook, as reported by Utility Dive, May 15, 2026. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/data-centers-electricity-residential-rates-eia/820342/
  2. PowerLines, "Utility Bill Affordability Report," Q2 2026, July 14, 2026. https://powerlines.org/?p=1491
  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, "Queued Up: 2026 Edition." https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/publications/us-interconnection-queue-data-0
  4. U.S. Department of Energy, National Transmission Planning Study announcement, October 2, 2024. https://www.energy.gov/node/4845558
  5. POWER Magazine, "Public Power's Affordability Edge Faces Its Hardest Test in Years," June 29, 2026 (citing the American Public Power Association's 2026 statistical report). https://www.powermag.com/public-powers-affordability-edge-faces-its-hardest-test-in-years/
  6. Bonneville Power Administration, "About BPA." https://www.bpa.gov/about

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