If you want the real cost of green energy mandates, skip the politicians and listen to the economist who served former President Barack Obama.
Michael Greenstone, former chief economist of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and his University of Chicago team studied Renewable Portfolio Standards, the renewable mandates now covering most of the country. Using a rigorous statistical comparison of states before and after adoption, drawing on government data, they found these policies raised retail electricity prices 11% after seven years and 17% after twelve. And this trend is accelerating.
Consumers in the 29 mandated states paid an additional $125 billion. That’s real money.
The carbon reductions came at $130 to $460 per ton, far above the $5 to $15 in actual carbon markets and well above conventional estimates of the social cost of carbon.
This is not partisan spin. It is empirical work by a Democratic economist showing that mandates are an expensive, inefficient way to cut emissions.
The map confirms a pattern. Roughly 86% of states with above-average electricity prices vote reliably Democratic, and these states are far more likely to have expensive portfolio standards, while nearly all the cheapest states vote Republican. The most expensive states enforce aggressive renewable or carbon-free mandates.
California’s average retail price is more than double the national average, about 27 cents per kilowatt-hour versus under 13 cents nationally in recent EIA data, with residential rates often exceeding 30 cents. New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island rank among the costliest. By contrast, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Louisiana post some of the lowest rates.
Geography is the usual excuse. It fails. Affordable states let cost and reliability determine the resource mix.
Mandate states impose ideology targets that force the premature retirement of coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants, the dispatchable sources that run around the clock. The result is higher prices and reduced reliability.
Weather causes most outages, as critics note; about 80% of customer-minutes lost stem from storms no policy can eliminate. Strip out weather, however, and the ranking reverses: Low-mandate states maintain high reliability, while high-mandate states face growing risks of rationing even on ordinary hot days.
California ordered rolling blackouts in August 2020. In September 2022, it narrowly avoided them by issuing an emergency alert to millions of phones, ordering residents to cut power use; demand fell roughly 2,000 megawatts within minutes. A grid that must text customers to turn off appliances and unplug their EVs is a rationed system, not a modern one. Some would say approaching a third-world grid.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warns that tens of gigawatts of dependable coal, gas, and nuclear capacity are scheduled for retirement this decade, with insufficient firm replacement. Regions in the Northeast and West face elevated blackout risk under extreme conditions.
Wind and solar cannot produce on demand. Every mandated intermittent plant, therefore, requires full-time backup. Ratepayers fund two systems yet receive the reliability of one. If they don’t, they are often short of power when they need it the most.
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None of this argues against cleaner air or climate stability. It shows that technology-specific mandates have failed on their own terms: Higher bills, a less reliable grid, and carbon reductions purchased at indefensible prices. While China builds coal plants at astonishing levels, making any carbon reductions near-meaningless virtue signaling at great expense.
The low-cost, high-reliability states performed no miracle. They simply allowed engineering and economics, not climate ideology, to select the power mix. Every state can make that choice. When Obama’s own economist shows the mandate fails the arithmetic, the remedy is not a larger dose. It is a different prescription.
Frank Lasee is President of Truth in Energy and Climate.