The Cost of Politics Is Showing Up on Your Electric Bill

When families in Central Pennsylvania open their electric bills, they need an explanation for why electricity keeps getting more expensive. Come November, voters will surely have this issue top of mind.

And on Janelle Stelson’s website? Nothing. Even with the find feature on and searching the word “energy,” it’s not mentioned once.

The answer is pretty straightforward: energy markets run on supply and demand. When government policies make it harder to build and maintain reliable power generation, supply gets tighter. When supply gets tighter and demand keeps growing, prices go up. That is exactly what Pennsylvanians are feeling now.

Because new baseload energy production requires massive investments, the energy cost crunch can’t break or be fixed overnight. The Obama Clean Power Plan began the federal push to force coal-fired power plants and natural gas plants off the grid. Don’t take my word for it: In a 2008 interview President Obama admitted himself that, “my cap-and-trade program will cause electricity rates to necessarily skyrocket.” The Biden Administration charted a similar course with a new round of regulations aimed at coal and natural gas plants, including rules that would have required major emissions reductions from existing coal plants and new baseload gas plants. EPA has since described those Biden-era regulations as costly rules that raised costs and threatened grid reliability. Ms. Stelson said she supported these policies.

Simultaneously, Gov. Wolf’s push to enter Pennsylvania into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in 2019 created years of uncertainty for power producers. Though this was abandoned in 2024, Governor Shapiro continues to push his cap-and-tax PACER and PRESS plans that do the same thing. The Commonwealth Foundation estimates that the plan’s PACER and PRESS components would impose $157.2 billion in new electricity costs over ten years and more than double residential electricity bills. Carbon taxes and cap-and-tax schemes may sound clever in policy papers, but in the real world they raise the cost of power generation, discourage infrastructure investment, and leave consumers paying the bill. Governor Shapiro has endorsed Ms. Stelson.

Policies matter and the Obama Clean Power Plan, Biden-Harris Clean Energy Plan, RGGI, PACER, and PRESS are what regulatory uncertainty looks like in the real world. Developers do not commit billions of dollars to projects that may take five to ten years to produce revenue if the federal and state governments are threatening to impose new carbon taxes on the power those plants will generate.

A Commonwealth Foundation analysis found that from 2019 to 2025, while Pennsylvania was moving toward RGGI and then litigating over it, proposals for new generation fell 38 percent and natural gas generation proposals fell 65 percent. The same analysis found that Pennsylvania’s project conversion rate dropped from 73 percent before the RGGI period to just 9 percent during it. But in Ohio and West Virginia, energy investment increased. They estimated that Pennsylvania forfeited roughly 3,833 megawatts of generation capacity during the RGGI period, enough to power about 1.9 million homes.

Closing power plants is easy, but replacing them has become unnecessarily hard. A new power plant has to move from proposal to financing, permitting, construction, testing, and finally connection to the grid. That process can take years. When government adds more uncertainty, delays, and costs, fewer projects get built. The result is less reliable electricity supply at exactly the time usage is rising because of consumer demand for broader electrification and greater computational power.

PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator that serves Pennsylvania and much of the Mid-Atlantic, has already warned that demand growth is outpacing new generation. In its 2025 annual report, PJM noted that its 2027/28 capacity auction fell short of its reliability requirement by 6,517 megawatts, the first time the auction had not met that requirement since it was created in 2007. That is not some abstract energy-market footnote; it is a warning sign that there is not enough dependable power being added quickly enough. It hasn’t been until the Biden-era regulations have been rolled back that energy markets are seeing investment again. But again, none of this happens overnight.

Pennsylvania should be leading the way out of this problem, not making it worse. Thanks to the Marcellus Shale, Pennsylvania has abundant natural gas, and the shift from coal to natural gas has already delivered major environmental benefits. Congressman Perry’s assessment is correct – you don’t have to be anti-environment to be pro-production. According to Pennsylvania’s Independent Fiscal Office, the Commonwealth remained the top electricity export state while carbon emissions from electricity generation continued their long-term decline. This is true across the entire United States. New, market-driven solutions have lowered emissions 20 percent since 2005 and the main driver of this has been in electric power generation.  

Pennsylvania’s shift to natural gas happened because of unforced consumer choices, not top-down, cap-and-tax, government intervention. Access to highly efficient natural gas from the Marcellus Shale provided the feedstock for modern combined-cycle power plants, drastically lowering emissions while producing the reliable electricity our grid needs. That is a success story worth celebrating, not punishing. Pennsylvania reduced emissions not by shutting down the economy, but by using cleaner and more efficient baseload generation. Yet Democratic Party energy policy has too often punished that progress.

And higher electric bills do not stop at the kitchen table. Manufacturers use vast amounts of electricity and other energy to make the goods people buy and rely on every day. When energy costs rise, the cost of producing food packaging, steel, plastics, chemicals, building materials, machinery, and consumer products rises too. Those higher costs ripple through the economy and add to inflation. So, families pay twice: once through higher utility bills, and again through higher prices at the store.

Pennsylvania energy leadership is also American energy leadership. Our Commonwealth is the nation’s largest electricity exporter and a major producer of natural gas and coal. We help power the grid, and our production is essential to American energy leadership, geopolitical stability, and national security. When government taxes something, regulates it into uncertainty, or makes it harder to build, we get less of it. That is simple economics.

That is why energy affordability should be a major issue in this congressional race. Voters deserve to know whether Janelle Stelson would support the same energy policies that have tightened electricity supply, discouraged natural gas investment, and increased costs for consumers. Pennsylvania does not need more Washington-based mandates that make reliable power more expensive. We need policies that encourage new generation, speed up permitting, protect baseload power, and recognize the environmental progress we continue to make.

Why has Janelle Stelson aligned herself with failed federal policies that have been proven to make energy more expensive?  The choice is simple: Pennsylvania can build on what works, or face higher utility bills, steeper prices for everyday goods, and less reliable power.

Carl A. Marrara is Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association