Untangling the rise in electricity prices

It’s a big week for electricity price data - the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory updated its Retail Electricity Price Trends and Drivers with 2025 data and new analysis, and a Heatmap/MIT/CleanEcon collaboration launched an Electricity Price Hub with electricity bill and price data down to the utility level. Both illustrate how fragmented price patterns continue to resist a coherent story: the most dramatic price increases continue to be geography-specific, like outsize generation costs where PJM load growth has hit supply constraints. LBNL’s update does flag a few trends that will likely continue to shape prices going forward: investor-owned utilities requested their largest revenue increases since the 1980s in 2025 (and regulatory approval rates for such increases have gone up significantly since 2020, particularly in New England and the Southeast); and equipment prices increases for transmission and distribution inputs continue to far outpace inflation.