A New Look at Why Electricity Prices Have Gone Up in Your ZIP Code

Electricity prices rose faster than overall inflation last year. Yet at the local level, it’s been difficult to know why. Is it data centers? Renewables? Aging infrastructure? Or something else more mysterious? Everyone in the political system — including senior Trump officials — wants to blame their favorite energy bugbear. But if we actually want to fix the problem, getting the real answer matters.

Now, Heatmap and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research are teaming up to answer this critical question. On this episode of Shift Key, Rob announces the launch of the Electricity Price Hub, a new public data platform that provides monthly, utility-level estimates of residential electricity rates and bills across the United States going back to 2021, broken down by generation, transmission, and distribution costs.

Joining Rob to discuss the tool are Brian Deese, an MIT Institute Innovation Fellow and the former director of the White House National Economic Council under President Biden, and Lauren Sidner, a senior advisor at MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy who previously served as a senior advisor to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry.

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned:

What Americans Really Pay For Electricity, by Brian Deese and Robinson Meyer

Factors Influencing Recent Trends in Retail Electricity Prices in the United States

Rob’s piece on power prices from last year: How Electricity Got to Be So Expensive

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

Heatmap Pro brings all of our research, reporting, and insights down to the local level. The software platform tracks all local opposition to clean energy and data centers, forecasts community sentiment, and guides data-driven engagement campaigns. today to see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement. Book a demo today to see the premier intelligence platform for project permitting and community engagement.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(145)

Why This El Niño Looks Like a Monster

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean’s surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño.El Niño is a normal part of the climate system, but even in a normal...

12 Aug 47min

The Big — But Fixable! — Problems in America’s R&D Ecosystem

At this point, when you hear “venture capitalist,” you probably think of … software. Or artificial intelligence. Or cryptocurrency.The Engine Ventures, which spun out of MIT a few years ago, is differ...

6 Aug 57min

Permitting Reform, Data Centers, and More With Senator Heinrich and Secretary Granholm

The Democratic Party’s climate and energy policy is at a difficult moment. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has attacked solar and wind energy, started an inflationary war, and ...

3 Aug 33min

What a Permitting Reform Deal Could Look Like

There’s really one one good thing that could happen this year in Congress for clean energy: permitting reform. If lawmakers reached a bipartisan deal on the country’s permitting system, they could mak...

29 Juli 1h 18min

What Barbecue Sauce Has in Common With Carbon Removal

Charm Industrial is a climate tech company that takes biomass and converts it into a heavy, carbon-rich oil that can be injected underground, transmuting and storing the greenhouse gas far from the at...

24 Juli 1h 3min

The Company That’s Raised $60 Million to Geoengineer the Planet

For more than 30 years, a heterodox group of scientists have proposed injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth, thereby cooling the atmosphere and reversing...

15 Juli 1h 1min

The New Paper Arguing Biden’s Power Sector Emissions Cuts Are Largely Intact — Even Under Trump

Wait, is the climate policy landscape … in better shape than it looks?Just over a year ago, President Trump passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It repealed many of the Biden administration’s most a...

6 Juli 49min

Why Meta’s Longtime CTO Is Investing in Climate Tech

It has been a hard few years for climate tech. But we recently got a bright spot: Earlier this month, Gigascale Capital announced it had raised $250 million to build the physical infrastructure drivin...

30 Juni 54min