Democrats have figured out that voters are furious about their electric bills and hope to capitalize on the outrage in the upcoming midterm elections. Perhaps blue-state politicians should look in the mirror before scapegoating everything from the removal of federal subsidies for wind and solar to new data center buildout.
BlueStatesHighRates.com, a new interactive index from Always On Energy Research and the Institute for Energy Research, shows that the steepest increases in energy cost sit in the bluest states across the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Eighty-six percent of states above the national average in the continental U.S. are reliably blue states — that voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in the 2020 and 2024 elections. In contrast, 90% of the 10 states with the lowest electricity prices are reliably red.
Nowhere is the effect of blue-state policies clearer than among the 13 states that declared independence in 1776.
Blue states tend to have aggressive renewable portfolio standards and clean energy mandates that require states to source a specific share of electricity from intermittent wind and solar, driving up consumer bills. The same states usually layer on full retail-rate net metering, which credits rooftop-solar owners more than the generation is worth to the grid, shifting fixed costs onto neighbors without panels. Their regulators also allow investor-owned utilities to adopt their own net-zero pledges and commit to retiring the coal and gas plants that ratepayers will need to pay to replace.
For instance, Rhode Island is the 3rd-most expensive state in the U.S. in 2025, posting an average all-sectors rate of 25.86 cents per kilowatt hour. Rhode Island’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) stampedes toward 100% renewables by 2033, the fastest of any state. In the 2026 legislative session, lawmakers rejected Gov. Dan McKee’s (D) proposal to push the 100% deadline back to 2050, which his office argued would triple compliance costs by 2031.
Other politicians, like Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) in New York, have had more success pushing back overambitious climate goals, after a finding that cutting emissions 40% by 2030 would impose costs exceeding $4,000 annually on upstate households and at least $2,300 in annual costs for New York City residents. Budget negotiations replaced the binding 2030 obligation with a 2040 target of 60% reductions.
Overarching most of New England and the Mid-Atlantic is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) — a cap-and-trade program that adds compliance costs to coal, oil, and natural gas generators that spill into customer bills. RGGI prices cleared at $35 per ton of CO2 in June 2026, the highest ever, spurred in part by Virginia’s reentry to RGGI. Almost every RGGI member channels its carbon-tax proceeds into green energy slush funds, except for New Hampshire, which rebated 93% back to ratepayers in 2023.
These factors discourage investment in new natural gas pipelines, which leads to an inadequate supply of natural gas that unnecessarily increases fuel costs and wholesale power prices. New York has proven actively hostile to new pipelines, repeatedly denying water permits to the proposed Constitution Pipeline and Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) projects. The latter only broke ground this April thanks to sustained pressure from the Trump administration, but Hochul skipped the groundbreaking ceremony. So has Massachusetts, which has killed multiple major pipeline expansions.
Contrast with the states among the original 13 colonies whose rates fell below the national average in 2025: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Georgia has no RPS standard, no net-metering mandates, no carbon pricing schemes, and has adopted reasonable data center consumer protections. North Carolina does have a 100% carbon-neutral mandate, but its interim 2030 goal was repealed in 2025 after recognizing the costs associated. South Carolina’s non-binding RPS expired in 2021, and it is phasing out full retail-rate net metering. Virginia’s blue-state policies are the odd man out, but it has more commercial sales than other states, which flattens the all-sectors average.
Now that affordability has become the buzzword, Democratic politicians are quick to pin the blame for high electricity prices on anyone but themselves — despite knowing, mere years ago, that higher prices were the point. In floor debates about New York’s climate law in 2019, then-state senator Todd Kaminsky (D) acknowledged that it would “ask people to make sacrifices.”
Red states let their grids run on what works. Blue states ask their residents to make sacrifices because of their electricity policy choices.
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Sarah Montalbano is an energy policy analyst, and Isaac Orr is vice president of research at Always On Energy Research, a nonprofit modeling firm. BlueStatesHighRates.com is a project of Always On and the Institute for Energy Research.
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