We Didn't Just Get Expensive Electricity. We Built A System That Makes It Inevitable.

Authored by William Murray via RealClearEnergy,

Most Americans don’t think about electricity until the monthly bill arrives.

It comes once a month, often quietly, but lately it’s landed like a thud. Heating your home now costs hundreds more a month than it did just a few years ago. You use the same appliances. You flip the same switches. Nothing in your daily life has changed – except the price.

Why?

When one looks inside the electricity system, the experience is less like analyzing an immense machine than being fed into one, resembling the immortal scene in “Modern Times” where Charlie Chaplin’s factory worker is swallowed by the equipment he’s working on.

The American electricity market is not guided by an “invisible hand” of supply and demand, but an accumulation of misaligned rules laid down over decades. Layer upon layer of regulation, subsidy, mandate, and accounting rules to a point where the system became fixed in an upward, inflationary tilt, impervious to efforts to change.

There are at least a half-dozen federal environmental regulations that have more to do with rising electricity prices than tariffs or the data-center buildout, and a good example to start with is called Construction Work in Progress (CWIP).

As a new issue brief makes clear, it helped change who pays for America’s infrastructure.

Chief among these contrivances was the quiet transfer of financial risk from investors to the public. Before the 1970s, utilities had to finish building a power plant before they could charge customers for it. If a company wanted to build something, it had to take the risk. Investors would put up the money. If the project succeeded, they earned a return. If it failed, they paid the price.

But during the inflation crisis of the 1970s, power plants — especially nuclear plants —became vastly more expensive to build. Utilities argued they couldn’t afford to wait years to recover their costs. During a moment of civic weakness, state regulators started allowing utilities to charge customers while the plants were still under construction.

CWIP permanently shifted investment risk away from investors and onto ordinary people. Today, you can open your electric bill and pay for projects that don’t exist yet and may be cancelled in the future.

No banker in his right mind would accept such terms voluntarily. Yet millions of Americans are compelled to do so every month if they’re served by an investor-owned electric company.

This system could have operated below the waterline indefinitely, had it not collided with the renewable energy revolution of the last 15 years. Wind and solar generation increased fourfold between 2011 and 2020, reaching record output by 2024.

These sources have advantages. But they also have a basic limitation: they don’t produce power all the time.

So utilities must build backup systems. Extra transmission lines. Extra capacity.

None of this redundancy is free. Every mile of wire, every idle backup turbine, every overpriced and underutilized battery storage unit will eventually, without fail, appear on a customer’s bill.

And thanks to rules like CWIP, they can charge you while you wait.

Many of these policies came from a sincere place. Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the decades that followed, a network of public-interest law firms and environmental advocacy groups gained enormous influence over how infrastructure gets approved.

Their goal was to protect the public.

But over time, something else happened.

They built a system where stopping projects became easier than building them. Where delay became a strategy. Where lawsuits became routine.

Each delay added to costs. Each cost increase justifies charging customers sooner. Each increase made the next one easier to accept.

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