Climate change is leading to higher utility bills — and not just because of rising temps
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Climate change is leading to higher utility bills — and not just because of rising temps
You may have noticed that your electric bill is higher these days than it used to be. Maybe a lot higher. Many utilities around the country have asked for permission to raise rates in the last few years — and gotten it.
State regulators approved nearly $10 billion in net rate increases last year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. That’s more than twice what they approved in 2022. And one big reason for all the increases? Climate change.
We all want reliable electricity, and utilities are charged with supplying it.
But “when we have wildfires, and when we have other natural disasters, the utility reliability suffers,” said Barbara Kates-Garnick, professor of practice at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
As climate change makes disasters more common, she said that utilities are working to make the grid more resilient. “They are saying, ‘I bury the line underground, I’ll insulate it, I’ll make it impervious to the wildfire or the flood.’ Well, that’s expensive.”
Also expensive? Building solar and wind farms, as well as transmission lines to connect them to the grid. Utilities are passing a lot of these expenses on to ratepayers.
In New York, “there was a rate increase last year that would mean that, by 2025, the average household bill would go up by $65 a month,” said Diana Hernández at Columbia University, where she works as managing director of domestic programs at the Energy Opportunity Lab at the Center on Global Energy Policy and associate professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health.
For many people, that’s a lot. “I don’t think that there’s too much disagreement on whether or not these investments are necessary for the utilities to make,” Hernández said.
Where there is some tension, Hernández added, is around what the corresponding rate increases mean for people who are struggling with rising bills.
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