Former President Donald Trump has a new campaign message: (Cheap) power to the people. Presidential challengers have long seized on higher gasoline prices to rally voters. Now Trump is trying to focus voter attention on rising utility bills — part of a broader attack on President Joe Biden’s record on inflation, as Brian Dabbs and I write today. Trump has promised to halve energy prices within the first year of retaking the Oval Office — an unachievable goal, according to energy economists. That would mean rolling back electricity prices to levels last seen in the 1990s. Why is Trump focusing on power prices? Americans have seen electricity prices soar about 20 percent since the end of 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and prices have risen over the past year in most key battleground states. The reality check But economists say Trump, who wants to cut taxes for fossil fuel producers and roll back federal support for renewable energy, would have little influence over power prices, especially in the short run. “They could say we're just going all in on fossil fuels and to hell with the carbon emissions. That would probably have some effect, but relatively small,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Electricity prices have been rising for decades — including during Trump’s first term, albeit at a slower rate. The federal government plays a limited role in how much customers pay for power every month, and the factors driving energy prices are mostly out of a president’s control. Trump tried to rescue “beautiful, clean coal” during his first term — an effort that ran aground and would have increased power prices for millions of customers. Generating capacity from coal-fired power plants declined despite efforts by his Energy secretary, Rick Perry, to subsidize struggling coal plants in the name of national security. Don’t forget climate change While Biden’s green energy agenda is a prime target for Trump’s campaign messaging, economists and clean energy groups say climate change itself is making electricity more expensive — from spending by West Coast utilities in response to wildfires to the piling up of costs in Texas and the Southeast in the wake of fiercer storms. And top executives at the nation’s largest utilities have said clean energy subsidies like those in Biden’s landmark climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, are helping reduce electric costs, not increase them. For instance, Michigan's largest utility, DTE Energy, revised its 20-year energy plan in 2022 after the Inflation Reduction Act became law and found it lowered projected costs by about $500 million. “The IRA just makes the plan so much more affordable for our customers,” Trevor Lauer, DTE Energy's vice chair, said at the time.
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