Trump’s Affordability Message Is Running Up Against His Energy Agenda

The Trump administration is facing an unprecedented spike in electricity prices — one that is already costing Republicans at the ballot box.

Increases in residential electricity prices were as high as 25% in some parts of the country over the last three years, in large part due to increased demands from data centers and investments in upgrading the aging electric grid.

Democrats on the campaign trail this fall seized on these price increases with success. Voters even ousted Republicans from Georgia’s utility board, a surprise upset in a little-watched local election.

But there’s no indication that President Donald Trump — who has abandoned Republicans’ long-held “all of the above” energy approach by moving to kill and undermine renewable projects — is changing his agenda in response to the shift in political winds.

“Since a year ago, I think every single member of Congress and interest group has accepted the reality that load growth is high and that we’re going to have challenges meeting it reliably and affordably,” said Rob Gramlich, the president of the Washington consulting firm Grid Strategies, adding: “Most people say we’re going to need a lot of generation of all types.”

“The problem is, the president has not acknowledged that,” he said.

Since Trump took office, energy policy has become a lightning-rod issue embraced by politicians across the country.

Last January, experts on both sides of the political spectrum predicted to NOTUS that the coming electricity price issues were going to trouble the incoming administration. A year later, the same people spoke with NOTUS a second time, warning that their predictions have already come to pass.

And they’re not seeing the Trump administration act on it in the way they had hoped.

“The rhetoric went from ‘renewables shouldn’t be subsidized’ to outright hostility towards certain energy types. That caught me off guard a little bit, and that was frustrating,” Neil Chatterjee, a Republican and a former commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said, adding that he had hoped the administration would recognize the importance of an “all of the above” energy approach to address the power needs of artificial intelligence data centers.

Trump’s Cabinet does appear to be feeling the heat of rising prices. During a White House press call in late November announcing the Department of Energy’s latest AI initiatives, Energy Secretary Chris Wright repeatedly tried to draw a line between the administration’s investment in AI and the affordability of electricity.

“We’re going to stop the rise of the price of energy. First, it will plateau and ultimately will push downward pressure on the prices of electricity,” he said during the announcement about a massive government effort to integrate AI.

He did not offer specifics.

“If you read the tea leaves, Chris Wright, he’s very ideological about a lot of things, so it’s interesting to see within the administration, the people like him tasked with implementing AI dominance. They are seeing the writing on the wall,” said Jackson Morris, the director of state power sector policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They’re like, if everybody’s bill doubles, we’re not going to be able to build out data centers because politics will be so toxic.”

Meanwhile, Democrats have been relentless in their political message, blaming Trump for spiking prices. In mid-December, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, alongside Sen. Ed Markey, hosted a press conference blaming Trump policy choices for increasing energy prices. The previous week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse participated in another press conference with the same theme.

That said, neither Republicans nor Democrats are fully diagnosing the problem, experts say.

The country is facing dramatic increases in energy demand for the first time in decades, spurred in significant part by data centers powering AI development. At the same time, the electricity grid is so old that it needs significant upgrades and repairs.

Paying for both simultaneously is driving up costs, all while it becomes increasingly difficult to quickly build new infrastructure in the United States.

“To actually implement solutions, there are regulatory processes that are wonky and not particularly conducive to political conversations,” said Jeff Dennis, who worked on transmission issues at the Department of Energy during the Biden administration and now is the executive director of the Electricity Customer Alliance.

There’s a growing bipartisan consensus that the country’s grid needs more of every kind of energy source very quickly.

But with the politicization of spiking electricity prices, that consensus is largely going unheard where it matters.

“I was disappointed,” said Chatterjee, who is now leading government affairs at the residential solar tech company Palmetto, when asked how he felt about the Trump administration’s approach to the electricity price problem.

“If the Trump administration doesn’t reverse course, they’re doing the exact same thing the Biden administration did, just for different resources,” Chatterjee said. “So the Biden administration propped up clean energy and, you know, tried to enforce the retirement of fossil fuels. Now these guys are going after clean energy projects and trying to promote fossil fuels at a moment in time where we need every available electron.”

The Trump administration has all but halted the development of renewable sources of energy on federal lands, revoking and pausing permits for offshore and onshore wind power and slowing to a standstill the permitting process for solar projects. It has simultaneously accelerated permitting for administration priorities in fossil fuels and mining and taken emergency actions to force coal plants to remain operational.

“Ironically, the very resources that can most quickly provide additional electricity and capacity for these new loads is the same universe of resources that President Trump has done everything he can to stall,” Morris said.

Still, there might be a case for optimism for the policy wonks.

While Wright has publicly been pushing an anti-renewables narrative in public settings, a recent under-the-radar action from the Department of Energy has given hope to those on both sides of the aisle.

The agency asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to address the problem of large loads like data centers in a letter that both acknowledged the problems that AI was beginning to pose for the grid as a whole and pushed for an urgent regulatory effort to fix them — but without prescribing a political solution.

“I was pretty impressed. This was not DOE kind of putting its thumb on the scale for a particular form of generation. This was not DOE kind of propping up fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy. This was like an actual attempt at a real solution,” Chatterjee, the former Republican FERC commissioner, said.

“We opened up the content of the letter and shockingly, from a purely consumer perspective, literally, it was not crazy. It was actually kind of intriguing, in terms of what it was looking at,” Morris, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said.

The open question on everyone’s mind is: Can this little-known agency avoid the politicization that’s sunk into the issue on the national level?

“I worry that political narratives don’t always capture the opportunity,” Dennis said.