Americans Paying Record Electricity Prices

[FastLane]

YEP.
All that is directly off my bill.
What the fuck is a " Recovery charge " and a " Merchant function charge ".
I have asked the PSC and they can't even give me an answer.

The recovery charge is probably Power Cost Recovery Factor (PCRF), is a variable charge that adjusts to reflect the fluctuating wholesale cost of power.

Sometimes the company uses cheaper generating sources and sometimes their sources cost more to generate. This allows them to adjust for their fluctuating costs.

 

[Walt]

Paying for the build out of power for AI.

Yet that same AI spending is the only thing keeping us from having a bad recession.

 

[Walt]

You post how much electricity costs the consumer, but forget how much the subsidies cost the society.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

You post how much electricity costs the consumer, but forget how much the subsidies cost the society.

The most heavily subsidized electric production systems are solar and wind. Nuclear only requires government underwriting the loans in case the construction of the plant goes bankrupt, etc. Most other forms of electric production can be unsubsidized or nearly so.

 

[Walt]

The most heavily subsidized electric production systems are solar and wind. Nuclear only requires government underwriting the loans in case the construction of the plant goes bankrupt, etc. Most other forms of electric production can be unsubsidized or nearly so.

Several countries on your list subsidies electricity. There are customers who literally pay nothing for electricity.

All countries have a backdoor subsidy where the price of electricity needs to be approved by the government. They all also provide free land rights to the electrical company.

 

[Hawkeye10]

Your chart is years out of date

Entirely Possible.

 

[FastLane]

Repeatedly it would seem.

Every month it would seem

 

[QP!]

Paying for the build out of power for AI....using very expensive intermittent energy.

My rates are going up 10% a year.....why the AI industry is not paying for this is a very interesting question.

No mystery there.

Whether it is regular taxes, tariff rates, or favorable policy shifting burdens and costs away from 'favored corporations' and to the tax payer it is all for the same reason.


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AI Summary:

Several tech executives have given Donald Trump personal gifts or facilitated significant corporate/personal financial contributions to his inaugural committee, often viewed as efforts to curry favor and influence policy.
Specific examples include:

• Tim Cook (Apple CEO): Cook gifted Trump an engraved glass plaque with a 24-karat gold base during a meeting in the Oval Office in August 2025, a gesture tied to an announcement of a major US manufacturing investment and an exemption from specific tariffs. Cook also personally donated $1 million to Trump's 2025 inaugural fund.
• Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO): At Zuckerberg's request, Meta donated $1 million to Trump's 2025 inaugural fund. Zuckerberg also reportedly met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and personally gifted him a pair of Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses.
• Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO): Altman personally donated $1 million to Trump's 2025 inaugural fund and attended related inaugural events.
• Jeff Bezos (Amazon Founder): Amazon donated $1 million to the 2025 inaugural fund. Bezos also had dinner with Trump after the election and attended the inauguration.
• Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX CEO): Musk has remained close to Trump, helping to bankroll his campaign efforts, though the two have reportedly had a tumultuous public relationship at times.
• Other Donors: Other companies like Google, Microsoft, Uber, Qualcomm, and various crypto firms also made significant donations (many of $1 million) to the 2025 inaugural committee, securing access to exclusive events and meetings with the new administration.

These actions are widely seen as strategic moves by tech leaders to improve relations with the administration, influence policy (especially regarding tariffs, antitrust regulation, and AI), and avoid scrutiny. The donations to the inaugural committee are not subject to the same limits as campaign contributions, allowing for larger, unrestricted sums.

 

[QP!]

Nope. This is due almost 100% to the push for "green" energy, specifically wind and solar. Everywhere wind and solar have been pushed and increased in share of the energy market has resulted in a rapid rise in energy prices. This rise is typically between 2 and 3 times the cost of conventional generation. It certainly doesn't help any that data centers and things like bitcoins have been growing exponentially in energy consumption.

What we need to do is abandon wind and solar and start pushing for nuclear backed by natural gas.

How Wind And Solar Sent Energy Prices Sky-High in ‘Green’ Countries

Adding more green energy makes power more expensive, not cheaper—due to unreliable output, required fossil fuel backup, and taxpayer subsidies.

climatechangedispatch.com

Would getting all our electricity from wind and solar power raise the price of electricity?

Yes—wind and solar are cheap and getting cheaper, but they do make the grid more complicated in ways that, today, would make electricity more expensive if we relied on them exclusively. May 30, 2023

climate.mit.edu

Wind and solar are not reliable and stable generation sources. This is basically an unresolvable problem with both. The LCOE is meaningless in determining the need for energy which is continuous. Wind and solar cannot be used for base loading. Storage on the scale necessary to make wind and solar stable is economically unaffordable.

The result is, as wind and solar grow, the need for back up sources, storage, a massively more complex grid, all combine to make the price of electricity skyrocket.

As always Terry cherry picks studies, many funded by the oil and gas industries while ignoring the other studies that give more accurate and balanced info.

Your electric bill is soaring—don’t blame clean energy​

Here’s what big utilities don’t want you to know....


CLEAN ENERGY ISN’T DRIVING POWER PRICE SPIKES

...Some states with heavy renewable generation have among the lowest electricity price increases, or even price decreases, while states with little renewable deployment — but older infrastructure or heavy reliance on fossil fuels — saw prices increase...

Solar deployment and policies have had a mixed effect on electricity prices, researchers find​

While large-scale solar and wind deployment “may have reduced” retail electricity prices over the past five years, net energy metering and renewable portfolio standards generally increased prices, the researchers found. But states with the highest renewable generation in 2024 had among the lowest prices.

 

[QP!]

About your two sources...

1) Your first source climatechangedispatch.com, is one of the most unreliable, unbelievable sources around on this subject, to the point that it is downright laughable ...

According to Media Bias/Fact Check: "We rate Climate Change Dispatch as a Conspiracy and Quackery level Pseudoscience source for the promotion of false or misleading information."

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2) As for your second source, MIT... it is a vastly more credible, serious and believable source.



Unfortunately for you, not only does it NOT back up your claims... it mostly
REFUTES THEM...

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Terry ALWAYS does in the same way @FastLane does.

They cite sources, thinking no one will read them, or that they have not read or understood themselves that flat out refute what they are saying it says.

It is laughable how stupid or dishonest or both they are.

 

[Truth Detector]

The average retail price for electricity gained 7.4% in September to a record 18.07 cents per kilowatt-hour, the biggest gain since December 2023, according to data released Tuesday.

American households are paying more than ever before for electricity after prices surged the most in almost two years, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-paying-record-electricity-prices-172900573.html

You can thank Democrats and Biden for that you brainless race hustler.

 

[Truth Detector]

More fallout from trump economic policies I imagine.

Wrong as usual brainless wonder dunce. That's all on Democrats and Biden's green energy failure.

 

[Truth Detector]

Paying for the build out of power for AI....using very expensive intermittent energy.

My rates are going up 10% a year.....why the AI industry is not paying for this is a very interesting question.

Dumber than Dumb.

 

[Truth Detector]

A ton of this has to do with the Ukraine war, we are exporting a ton of LNG to Europe so they can avoid buying Russian stuff... This is creeping into our supply and demand is getting high in certain areas due to cold.

Wrong. It's thanks to the green energy dogma and policies of the last administration.

 

[QP!]

As with any new or emerging technologies, they are expensive at first but as their use becomes more common and production levels reach a certain point, the cost drops drastically.

In the early 1980's, a big, bulky IBM desktop PC with few KB of RAM, a 640K hard drive and a four color monitor cost over $2,000.

Today, I'm trying this post on an 8" tablet with 8 gigabytes of ram and 32 gigabytes of storage, for which I paid less than $200.

Re: your ignorant comment... "As for the "environmental cost of fossil fuels..." I, and the majority of people don't give a flying fuck about that."

If by "...the majority of people..." you mean the same ignorant, thick-skulled knuckle-draggers who support the criminal con artist in the WH, that may be true.

But when one expands the definition of "...the majority of people..." to include decent, reasonable and normally intelligent people across the spectrum, who don't guzzle your brand of orange Kool Aid, one gets a much different picture....

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You make of that what you will.

Terry and i have had this discussion many times with regards to new technology and scaling.

In each case he claims since a new and emerging technology is not cost effective today that means it will not be tomorrow.

He honestly cites, as proof EVs cannot be competitive the early 1900's EV's losing out to ICE and he says 'tried and tested and failed so we know they cannot compete'.

It is idiocy he cannot save himself from. He refuses to consider ICE had the early benefit of Oil and Gas infrastructure roll out giving it the advantage of being able to travel distances whereas EVs are only getting that now.

I point out to Terry that the main issue with both ICE and EV's prior to the 'gas station' infrastructure, coupled with roads build out was that people with horse and buggy saw them as unreliable, short distance and impractical, often stranded on the side of the road.

If Terry lived in that age he would have argued ICE will never work even as the gas stations rolled out as he would only point at the past.

 

[Crepitus]

Entirely Possible.

It's speculation from 2013 about 2015. More than a decade out of date.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

Several countries on your list subsidies electricity. There are customers who literally pay nothing for electricity.

All countries have a backdoor subsidy where the price of electricity needs to be approved by the government. They all also provide free land rights to the electrical company.

The customers pay one way or another. Higher taxes, VAT on electricity, something. The electricity isn't free, the land isn't free, and solar and wind dramatically raise the cost of it.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

Terry and i have had this discussion many times with regards to new technology and scaling.

In each case he claims since a new and emerging technology is not cost effective today that means it will not be tomorrow.

He honestly cites, as proof EVs cannot be competitive the early 1900's EV's losing out to ICE and he says 'tried and tested and failed so we know they cannot compete'.

It is idiocy he cannot save himself from. He refuses to consider ICE had the early benefit of Oil and Gas infrastructure roll out giving it the advantage of being able to travel distances whereas EVs are only getting that now.

I point out to Terry that the main issue with both ICE and EV's prior to the 'gas station' infrastructure, coupled with roads build out was that people with horse and buggy saw them as unreliable, short distance and impractical, often stranded on the side of the road.

If Terry lived in that age he would have argued ICE will never work even as the gas stations rolled out as he would only point at the past.

Here's another good opinion showing why solar and wind are a fail using California as the basis. As the video points out, at 100% renewables--California's goal by 2045--battery storage required for something approaching grid stability will cost them over $3.5 TRILLION dollars. That will bankrupt the state, and that's just for storage capacity at $100 a kwh. Right now, batteries are running about $225. At that actual market value, let's say $200 a kwh, now you're talking over $7 trillion in costs.

EV's are just as big a loser. The market has flattened. The early buyers and buy in have peaked and the market isn't expanding like the greentards predicted. Instead, people are sticking with gasoline vehicles and even many EV buyers are switching back.

Look at the Baker Electric of circa 1912. There were over 10,000 of these early EV's in NYC with charging stations everywhere. They died off in favor of gasoline ICE vehicles. The EV simply isn't practical outside an urban environment.

The practicality of both over horses was clear even back then. For farmers, the tractor made a huge difference. It was more efficient than a team of horses, and cheaper and easier to maintain. It made sense.

Horses were unreliable. They require feed and water periodically throughout the day. They can't work continuously and need periods of rest. They have limited lifespans and create mounds of waste. For cities, removing the hundreds of tons of manure a day they created was as much a health issue as a physical work one. As ICE vehicles became more available the price fell while the cost of a horse came closer and closer to that of the vehicle. It made sense to change.

EV's aren't that way. They cost more than ICE vehicles and aren't practical for many uses that ICE vehicles are regularly employed at. If they were more practical, they'd have taken over the market. That's been tried and tried again and never worked.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

As always Terry cherry picks studies, many funded by the oil and gas industries while ignoring the other studies that give more accurate and balanced info.

Your electric bill is soaring—don’t blame clean energy​

Here’s what big utilities don’t want you to know....


CLEAN ENERGY ISN’T DRIVING POWER PRICE SPIKES

...Some states with heavy renewable generation have among the lowest electricity price increases, or even price decreases, while states with little renewable deployment — but older infrastructure or heavy reliance on fossil fuels — saw prices increase...

Solar deployment and policies have had a mixed effect on electricity prices, researchers find​

While large-scale solar and wind deployment “may have reduced” retail electricity prices over the past five years, net energy metering and renewable portfolio standards generally increased prices, the researchers found. But states with the highest renewable generation in 2024 had among the lowest prices.

Your 'rah rah' pro-solar sources notwithstanding. This is actual, not speculation like your articles use.

California is paying other states to take its solar energy

California has been paying utilities in other states to take its surplus electricity to avoid grid overload according to a report.

www.newsweek.com

California Is Throwing Away Excess Solar Power, Raising Electricity Prices

California has the third highest residential electricity prices in the country at almost 30 cents per kilowatt hour and they…

www.instituteforenergyresearch.org

Battery storage on a mass scale is unaffordable and probably unattainable with available resources to make them. So, that isn't in the cards either.