Compared with the cost of consumer goods, which have been rising rapidly over the past few years, electricity prices are climbing even faster, an estimated 13 percent nationwide since 2022…. In 1890, a kilowatt-hour was $9.48 on average nationwide in today’s dollars; by 1950, it had dropped to 41 cents and, by 1990, to 21 cents. But recently, this century-long trend has reversed in many states; utilities are failing to keep prices low.

(1: Reduce mid-day prices:) In places with a lot of solar, including California, some installations are producing more energy than is being consumed, so some power is being wasted. If people shifted more of their electricity use toward the middle of the day, the grid’s overall costs would go down, because demand would decrease in later hours, when prices are the highest.

And the easiest way to nudge people toward using that midday power is to make it cheaper—or even free… This will give people a reason to charge their electric vehicles, use heat pumps to precool or preheat their homes and water, and store more clean electricity in batteries when cheap energy is abundant.

(2: Reduce prices by removing excess construction:) Legislators could trim these profits directly by more closely aligning utilities’ guaranteed rates of return with their actual costs…. Right now, a utility could make tens of millions of dollars on, say, putting a transmission line underground, because those that operate as monopolies (that is, most of them) can charge customers for almost every dollar spent expanding the transmission-and-distribution system—plus a profit. So more spending equals more profits, a perverse incentive called “gold-plating.”

(3: Charge all taxpayers and/or fossil fuel companies for climate-change-related costs:) As wildfires rip across the West, their damages are being borne by utility customers. This is a major reason that costs in California are so high. To take one example, the 2017 Thomas Fire created $2.4 billion in liabilities for Southern California Edison, which sparked the fire; its customers (myself included) are now on the hook for two-thirds of those costs. (The company, like PG&E, posted record profits last year.)… Passing on these climate costs to ratepayers is not the only way of dealing with them. Hawaii’s legislature decided to limit the local utility’s liability for the deadly Maui fires and to use state funds to compensate survivors. Policy makers can also keep utilities from making a profit on wildfire mitigation and other grid-hardening costs, as California has recently done.

1,300 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/12/electricity-costs-climate/685123/.

Good news from Fix the News:

The disaster that wasn’t: how the capital city of Chad didn’t flood. Sometimes tracking stories of progress means reporting on disasters that didn’t happen. Take Chad: after severe flooding hit the capital, N’Djamena, in 2022, the country cleared and repaired 350 km of drains, deployed 12 mobile pumps and trained a lot a lot of municipal teams and drainage crews. 

When even bigger floods happened in 2024, the city remained largely unharmed, and pumps and drainage crews kept water out of neighbourhoods hit hardest two years earlier. Sometimes preparation and policy works, people! World Bank

And a pic from my collection: