Make Polluters Pay for the Poles and Wires

This piece originally appeared as an op-ed in Common Dreams and has been lightly adapted for Fossil Free Memo.

We talk a lot about the cost of energy, but not nearly enough about what’s actually driving it. Across the country, electricity bills are climbing, not because of clean energy or regulation, as the industry likes to claim, but because of the climate crisis itself. The storms, the fires, the floods, and the heat are pounding an electric grid that was mostly built half a century ago, and the costs of patching it back together are being quietly folded into our monthly bills.

In Maine, the cost of storm recovery has risen more than thirtyfold since 2020. Every time a nor’easter blows through, Central Maine Power spends millions to rebuild lines and clear debris and regulators approve new fees that show up on customer bills. In California, utilities have spent billions burying lines, trimming trees, and insulating equipment to prevent wildfires sparked by their own grids. According to state filings, utilities’ wildfire-related costs are contributing to 7-12% bill increases for residential customers.

A new analysis from the Center for American Progress and the Natural Resources Defense Council shows utilities in forty-nine states and D.C. have already raised or proposed to raise rates in the next two years, which amounts to nearly $90 billion in additional household costs by 2028. For many families, that’s another thirty or forty dollars a month on top of everything else they’re already struggling to afford.

The reasons for this overlap. The grid is old and failing faster under stress, natural gas prices are spiking again as exports tie U.S. prices to global markets, and massive new data centers for AI, crypto, and cloud computing are sucking up electricity and driving new generation projects. But one of the biggest single drivers remains extreme weather. Each storm and heatwave adds another layer of cost to a grid that was never built for this world.

The Government Accountability Office has warned that climate change will stress every part of the energy system and that failing to adapt will cost billions of dollars more in the long run. Yet the way we pay for that adaptation hasn’t changed at all. Utilities rebuild, regulators sign off, and the public pays. Fossil-fuel companies whose emissions are fueling the disasters that make all this necessary contribute all of nothing.

That’s where climate superfund laws come in. States are starting to realize that the funds from a climate superfund could cover part of the cost of hardening the grid, things like replacing wooden poles with steel, elevating substations that flood every few years, building microgrids so hospitals and schools can stay open during blackouts, and funding new and more reliable clean energy projects. These projects would help to ease the pressure on ratepayers while making the systems themselves more resilient.

It’s easy to think of this as a niche energy issue, but it’s not. The next time your power goes out or your bill spikes higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis showing up as a charge in your mailbox.

Clean energy, the very thing opponents blame for high prices, is actually the best path to lowering them. Wind and solar have no fuel costs; the “fuel” from the sun and wind is free once the infrastructure is built. The same politicians and lobbyists blaming clean energy for your bills are the ones blocking cheaper renewables and fighting climate superfunds at the state level.

If we really want to keep the lights on without bankrupting people, it starts by making polluters pay their fair share for the poles, the wires, and the world they helped break.