By Kevin Hardy, Stateline.org

The last time the Maine Public Utilities Commission considered an electricity price hike, the proposal received fewer than 90 comments from the public.

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Three years later, amid skyrocketing energy prices, more than 800 people weighed in on the plan, showing up to public hearings and even protesting outside.

The commission last month ultimately rejected the proposal that would have raised bills by about $35 per month for customers of Central Maine Power, the state’s largest electricity provider. In explaining the denial, Commission Chair Philip Bartlett cited growing energy costs.

“There’s no question that affordability is increasingly an issue, not just with respect to electricity prices, but across the entire economy,” Bartlett told Stateline. “And people are feeling enormous pressure.”

Rising utility prices are increasingly drawing scrutiny from state regulators and lawmakers nationwide. Given the public outcry, many state leaders are considering rate freezes, additional energy assistance funds or new rates targeting large energy users such as data centers. But states only have so much control; regulators say they can’t change the fundamental market dynamics that will likely continue to push prices up.

Between January and September of this year, average home electricity rates increased 11.7% — more than triple the rate of inflation, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents state employees administering federal energy assistance programs. Average electric bills increased nearly 30% between 2021 and 2025, climbing from $121 to $156 per month.

Many low-income households have long struggled to cover utility bills. Now, advocates say, high prices are affecting a growing swath of the middle class.

Utility prices played a major role in recent Democratic gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia. And in Georgia, Democrats flipped two seats on the board that regulates public utilities — the first time Democrats won statewide constitutional office in nearly two decades.

Most consumers get their electricity from utilities that must seek state consent for rate changes, with appointed or elected state boards approving price structures.

In Washington state, Ann Rendahl, one of three members of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, said state utility regulators always consider affordability when making rate decisions. Now those deliberations have attracted much more public and political scrutiny.

“We’re hearing from more and more people,” she said. “I think it’s becoming more of a concern politically as well as legislatures and governors hear about this.”

Prices have been affected by a multitude of factors: Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has disrupted global oil and gas supplies; extreme weather events; and rising demand driven by the artificial intelligence boom and energy-intensive data centers have all played a role.

Major utility providers say they are focused on keeping electricity affordable and reliable. They point to massive upgrades to the grid as a primary driver of rising prices.

While state attention on the issue is growing, experts see no immediate relief in sight for consumers.

In Maine, a separate rate increase request will likely come before regulators soon. And the Maine Public Utilities Commission recently approved a supply price increase estimated to raise customer bills by $13 to $17 a month.

In Florida, regulators just approved a $6.9 billion rate increase for the state’s largest utility, which opponents said was the largest hike in state history. The typical bill will rise by $2.50 per month to $136.64 next year. But because of other recent rate increases, the average customer will pay hundreds of dollars more each year than they did in 2021, when the typical monthly bill was $101.70, The Associated Press reported.

Amid rising demand, the consultant firm ICF predicts U.S. residential customers could see electricity rates increase 15% to 40% by 2030, with some rates doubling by 2050.

“Like everything else, I think [utility] costs are not going down,” said Rendahl, who is also president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, which represents state public service commissioners.

‘We can’t take it anymore’

While running her successful campaign for governor of New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill, then a U.S. House member, pledged she would declare a state of emergency on her first day to freeze utility rates.

“My priority is relief to New Jersey consumers, and I will bring everyone to the table to deliver it,” she said in September. Sherrill takes office in January, but many experts question how much she can do to lower prices.

Regulators there had already issued $100 utility bill credits to provide relief for all customers, the New Jersey Monitor reported.

“This should be helpful for people, but in no way solves the problem,” Zenon Christodoulou, a member of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, said in August.

President Donald Trump has dismissed broader affordability concerns as “a con job” by Democrats. But Republican state officials have underscored the growing strain of electric bills.

Months before Democrats in Georgia attracted national attention for winning election to the utility board, GOP lawmakers there were raising concerns about the growing data center industry and had proposed legislation to protect ratepayers.

In September, Indiana Republican Gov. Mike Braun directed his newly appointed consumer advocate to dive into rising electricity bills, specifically targeting utility profits. The governor said utility investors, not ratepayers, should bear more of the pain of rising prices.

“We can’t take it anymore,” Braun said in a news release.

Infrastructure updates increase costs

In justifying rising prices, utility companies have pointed to a wave of massive investments in the electric grid. Utilities are on track to spend$208 billion this year, according to the Edison Electric Institute, which represents the nation’s investor-owned electric utilities.

Members of that group, which provide power to 250 million Americans, are projected to make capital expenditures of more than $1.1 trillion between 2025 and 2029.

Drew Maloney, president and CEO of the institute, told Stateline in a statement that the nation’s electric companies are focused on keeping electricity as “reliable and as affordable as possible” by “making essential investments to lower costs and protect America’s most important machine—the U.S. electric grid.”

But utility companies have “perverse incentives” to drive up capital expenses, said David Pomerantz, executive director of the nonprofit Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group tracking fossil fuel and utility industries.

Utilities are ensured a certain return on their capital investments, which he said can push them to spend heavily on projects that provide questionable benefits. State commissions set a rate of return for energy projects aimed at ensuring utilities can attract investors. That gives states an enormous amount of influence over prices, Pomerantz said.

“At the risk of sounding a little flip about this, it’s actually a lot easier for utilities than it is for, say, grocery prices,” he said. “What they’re allowed to charge customers is usually set by a group of three or five people.”

While politicians increasingly acknowledge the strain of rising utility costs, Pomerantz said it’s unclear whether state leaders will actually lower utility profits to provide relief for customers.

“Democrats and Republicans suddenly realize they have a crisis on their hands, and so the rhetoric has changed a lot in just the last few months,” he said. “It’s good rhetoric, but is anything different going to happen?”

More households struggle with bills

As bills have increased, many residents have fallen behind.

An analysis of consumer credit data from the left-leaning groups Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers found about 1 in 20 households — some 14 million Americans — had utility bills at least 90 days past due in June.

Between March 2022 and June 2025, the report found average overdue balances climbed from $597 to $789.

“It’s a real source of financial anxiety for working people who are trying to figure out how to stay warm in Wisconsin or not die from heat stroke in Arizona,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of Protect Borrowers, an organization originally founded to advocate for student loan borrowers.

Pierce said the growing utility debt speaks to wider financial concerns across the country, as overall household debt balloons.

“Our theory of the case here is that Americans are struggling, which is the same thing Americans will tell you when you talk to them,” he said.

The federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, commonly known as LIHEAP, has faced multiple threats from the Trump administration, which sought to eliminate its funding, fired top agency staff and withheld pledged funds. But amid rising political pressure, the federal government did release those funds last month.

While that’s good news for many households, the buying power of the program has significantly decreased because of rising energy prices, said Mark Wolfe, an energy economist and executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents state LIHEAP directors.

Many liberal-led states have their own supplementary energy assistance programs, Wolfe noted. Lawmakers in some states have sought to boost those programs. Oregon, for instance, this year doubled its assistance fund from $20 to $40 million.

“It happened pretty quickly,” Wolfe said of the rising prices. “So it’s not just poor families who are struggling to pay their electric bill.”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Edward Lotterman

There are thinkers throughout history who offer grand overarching explanations of economic growth.

Karl Marx was an economic determinist who focused on perpetual struggle between economic classes. Philosopher Adam Smith argued that human ingenuity and enterprise should not be throttled by government. Biological scientist Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” highlights the environmental and technological factors behind growth.

Such broad, or macro level, thinking at a is important. But micro-level case studies, those focused on specific individuals or groups, can also give rise to insights, if only by raising questions for further musing:. Why do some economies grow faster than others? Why do some use resources more efficiently, and distribute what is produced more fairly? These issues are the core of economics. Sometimes little examples push us toward broader answers.

Start with specific issues: Why does fruitful innovation occur in one set of circumstances but not another? Why in one location and not another? Where macro thinking provides the theories, micro provides the stories of how the thinking is applied.

Bananas are the first story. I remember my mother reading our little town’s mimeographed weekly and sardonically saying, “Well, Hank’s got bananas on sale for 10 cents a pound. Hank always has bananas for 10 cents.” This was about 1962. Somehow, someone could get bananas from Central America to rural Minnesota to sell for 10 cents a pound. That was an economic miracle. How did it come about?

Well, a century earlier, Henry Meiggs, an enterprising but dishonest forty-niner, hopped on the first ship leaving San Francisco to avoid police and people he had defrauded. He hopped off when it stopped in Chile. Wheeler-dealer to the bone, he soon contracted to build a railroad from the port of Valparaiso to the capital of Santiago and succeeded. This brought him contracts to build other railroads in Peru and elsewhere.

As the go-to guy for Latin American governments wanting railroads, he agreed to build one for bicoastal Costa Rica. It was to carry coffee from the highlands for shipment to Europe from an Atlantic-facing port rather than around South America, pre-Panama Canal, from a Pacific port. But the railroad had to cross disease-infested lowlands on the Caribbean coast. An aging Meiggs got his sister’s four boys to help. Three of these four Keith brothers were among the 4,000 workers who died of yellow fever and other tropical illnesses before 25 miles of railroad were completed.

However, the survivor, Minor C. Keith, was as enterprising as his uncle. Among other things, he planted banana seeds obtained from Caribbean growers. After a government bankruptcy, he ended up owning the unprofitable railroad himself along with millions of acres of land. He saw that shipping bananas might raise revenues from these assets. Refrigerated steamships, then new, could move fruit from the Atlantic port of Limon north through the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans in three days. From there, iced railroad cars could get the fruit to U.S. cities and rural areas alike. Volume disbursed cost and ensured profit. Bananas had cost only five cents a pound when my mom was a kid.

Much of this network was constructed after Keith and a French Caribbean planter merged operations to form United Fruit, now Chiquita International. United deserved its dark reputation for brutal treatment of workers and corrupt domination of politics across Central America. But it was a marvel of logistics.

Would the northern U.S. and Canada ever have had tropical fruit without Keith? Certainly yes. But perhaps not as cheaply nor available as soon. Could Guatemalan or Costa Rican businesses have raised and exported the fruit themselves? Perhaps. But without knowledge and ability to integrate growing, harvesting, rail transport, ocean shipping, unloading and then distribution, they could not have succeeded like Minor C. Keith.

Now consider post-World War II industrialization in Brazil. A frustrating country politically with a dynamic economy, it’s seen dramatic spurts of growth mixed with doldrums. World-class Brazilian sectors include sugar, orange juice, soybeans, airliners, heavy construction, iron mining and more. But Brazil has failed to achieve the broad-based development of Taiwan or South Korea. An adverse political culture still holds it back.

The blockheadedness of World War II German U-boat captains gave Brazil’s economy an early kick.

During the war, the South Atlantic was full of cargo ships. Argentina always sold large amounts of wheat and beer to Britain. After the Italian Navy closed the Mediterranean to commercial shipping, wheat, meat, butter, cheese and wool from New Zealand and Australia had to come around the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa, rather than through the Suez Canal. With North Atlantic cargoes from the U.S. or Canada facing a gauntlet of German U-Boat torpedoes, supplies from South America were vital.

Among these ships were some from neutral Brazil, most were not. U-Boat captains paid little attention to niceties. The shipping lane from Argentina to England ran right along the Brazilian coast. So people in Rio de Janeiro worshiping the sun on Copacabana and Ipanema beaches soon started seeing ships torpedoed before their eyes. The public outcry was huge and tipped the balance toward Brazil’s declaration of war on Germany in 1942.

Brazil immediately joined the U.S. Navy in anti-submarine operations in the South Atlantic and Caribbean, freeing up U.S. forces. Eventually a 25,000-strong expeditionary force of Brazilian ground and air units arrived in Italy to fight in the U.S. Fifth Army commanded by Gen. Mark Clark. Some 460 died. Its bloodiest fight was in April 1945, six miles west of where future Kansas senator Bob Dole was badly wounded the same day.

In return, Brazil became integrated into the U.S. industrial war machine. We built them a large integrated steel mill and supported a plant to overhaul aircraft engines. That eventually became a truck factory. New airports and air navigation systems were built. Ports were improved, machinists, electricians and other technicians were trained. Brazil’s industrial training system that taught Brazil’s president Luis Ignacio da Silva how to operate a lathe was based on U.S. military tech training.

After the war, Brazil entered four decades of rapid growth. Its war experience and relationship with the U.S. was not the only cause, but it was a major one.

The next example is the case of John Moses Browning, a Utah gun designer, and Herstal, a small Belgian town. This is on a far smaller scale than global trade, but it shows how fortuitous accidents can benefit a particular city or firm.

Browning, considered the most brilliant gun designer in history, never manufactured firearms himself. He sold his patents to Winchester, Colt and other firms. Thomas G. Bennett, son-in-law of Oliver Winchester and president of that firm, bought many Browning designs, including those for nearly all successful models entering production between 1880 and 1900.

As the 1890s ended, Browning designed a superb shotgun, the first successful semi-automatic. He wanted a per-gun royalty rather than a lump-sum patent fee as before. Bennett refused, then disparaged Browning to reporters. At the same time, Browning hit an impasse with Colt over rights to a semiautomatic pistol.

Fortuitously, Browning once had met Hart Berg, a German engineer trained at the University of Liege in eastern Belgium, who worked at Colt. When Browning’s new designs were ready, Berg was at Fabrique Nationale, a small, nearly bankrupt gun manufacturer in Herstal, a small town near Liege. Browning made the first of 65 Atlantic crossings and quickly signed a contract.

By the time a large banquet was held in early 1914 to celebrate the sale of the millionth Browning pistol, employment at FN Herstal was 4,200, six times what it had been in 1902, and the factory covered 30 acres rather than four. Some 1.3 million units of that model of shotgun would be sold over seven decades along with millions of later pistol, shotgun and rifle designs.

The effects on the world economy were trifling. Browning’s guns would have been made in any case by someone somewhere. But for eastern Belgium, the thriving of a company offering thousands of good jobs was important. A nearly random set of events led to a striking outcome. Minnesotans today can see parallels with Mayo and Rochester.

Sweeping forces may drive overall economic change, but little case studies like these are highly instructive.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

When American conservatives abandon free-market principles, there’s no telling what follows. The Heritage Foundation has been illustrating this the past few months.

One of the largest conservative think tanks in D.C. has been bleeding talent. Three members of its board of trustees resigned. Longtime conservative movement leaders such as Chris DeMuth and Stephen Moore cut ties.

Then, on Monday, three of Heritage’s research divisions moved almost as entire units to Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the conservative group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. The heads of the legal, economics and data analysis teams at Heritage defected to AAF, and they took many of their employees with them. This nearly doubles AAF’s staff, and the organization says to expect more hires. AAF also says it has raised at least $12 million in the past two weeks to support the new staffers and the projects they will be working on.

The proximate cause of these shifts was a video in October by Heritage President Kevin Roberts defending Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of antisemitic and racist influencer Nick Fuentes. If this sounds like an esoteric reason for such upheaval, that’s because it’s not the only reason. For years now, Heritage has been straying from free-market principles it once championed, causing much consternation among scholars who genuinely believe in those ideals.

Departures are not limited to the last few months. Some, such as financial regulation expert Norbert Michel and tax policy expert Adam Michel (they’re not related), now work for libertarian organizations. Others, such as budget scholar Paul Winfree, left to found new groups. Many of Heritage’s scholars who supported free trade left sporadically over several years.

Since its founding in 1973, Heritage had supported free trade. In 1993, Heritage hailed NAFTA as the realization of Ronald Reagan’s vision, since he had negotiated the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement that preceded it and supported free trade with Mexico as well. The group continued to support free trade during Trump’s first term.

When Roberts became president in December 2021, he brought a hostile attitude to free trade and a lower opinion of free markets generally. While he talks about the need for unity among conservatives and extolls the big-tent nature of Trump’s coalition, it has long been clear that there’s more room in Roberts’ tent for populist skeptics of free markets than those who are enthusiastic about them. Monday’s mass exodus confirms that.

Many of these fellows previously reasoned that they could be more helpful to the free-market cause by holding the line within the organization than by leaving. When the day-to-day battles became more about whether they’d face consequences for posting “Nazis are bad” online than about the finer points of budget policy, this position became untenable.

Support for free markets historically has been part of the glue that held the conservative movement together. That was the conviction of conservative leaders such as William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan and Heritage founder Edwin Feulner. They believed any long-term political movement needed to embrace free markets as foundational.

Monday’s most striking move might have been former attorney general Ed Meese, one of Reagan’s closest advisers as California governor and later president, throwing his full support behind the defections. AAF will now host a Meese Institute for the Rule of Law.

“Conservatives must resist the temptation to abandon their defense of free enterprise in pursuit of short-term victories,” Feulner and Pence wrote in an article together for National Affairs that ended up being Feulner’s last published work before his death in July. Heritage’s descent into chaos shows what can happen when that temptation is indulged.

— The Washington Post

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January nights are full of starry delights, and we have so many hours to enjoy them, provided the weather cooperates. As 2026 kicks off, you can even begin your stargazing adventures as early as 5:30 p.m.

You really have to bundle up, but the show is worth it. I just love stargazing this time of year! What’s ironic is that on Jan. 4, Earth reaches perihelion, its minimum distance to the sun as it orbits our home star. So, even though Earth is over 1.5 million miles closer to the sun than average, we in the northern hemisphere don’t benefit. Our part of the globe is angled away from the sun’s strongest rays because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

We start the month with a whole lot of moonlight. The full moon is on the 3rd, and in many circles it’s traditionally known as the full wolf moon. Also, because it’s a little closer to Earth on average, the full moon this month is arbitrarily known as a “supermoon”. For sure, it’ll appear a little larger than usual and will really shut down serious stargazing with all its light. By mid-month, dark evening skies resume as the moon rises much later and wanes.

The Quadrantids meteor shower, one of the best of the year, peaks the night of Jan. 3-4 and will be visible after midnight. Usually, you might see up to 20 meteors or “shooting stars” an hour. Unfortunately, this year the Quadrantids will be overwhelmed with moonlight but you may see a few meteors, especially in the countryside.

(Mike Lynch)

We have only two planets available for viewing in the evening, Jupiter and Saturn, but they’re the best ones for viewing, in my opinion. You absolutely can’t miss Jupiter, the behemoth planet of the solar system, beaming away in the early evening eastern sky. By far, it’s the brightest star-like object in the sky, positioned in the constellation Gemini. On Jan. 3, Jupiter will be just to the lower left of the full moon in a very tight celestial hug! On Jan. 10, Jupiter reaches what astronomers call opposition. It’ll be available for viewing all night long, rising in the east at sunset and setting in the west around sunrise. The 88,000-mile-wide planet is also at its closest approach to Earth for 2026, only about 393 million miles away, which for Jupiter is considered close by. Through even a small telescope or a good pair of binoculars, you’ll easily see Jupiter’s four brightest moons appearing as faint stars dancing around Jupiter from night to night. With a telescope, you can also see Jupiter’s brightest cloud bands striping the huge planet. You might get a glimpse of the famous Great Red Spot, a storm that’s been raging on Jupiter for hundreds of years.

Saturn, while not nearly as bright as Jupiter, is also a great telescope target. As evening twilight fades, look for Saturn in the southern sky about halfway from the horizon to the overhead zenith. While it’s not all that bright, it’s the brightest star-like object in that neighborhood of the sky. As unassuming as it appears to the naked eye, it’s fantastic with even a small telescope. You should have no trouble seeing its ring system, although the angle between the planet and the ring system is still pretty narrow from our view on Earth. As 2026 progresses though, the angle will continue to slowly open up .

Throughout January, the absolute best stargazing in the early evening will be in the east-southeast. Not only will Jupiter light up that part of the heavens but there’ll be a barrage of bright stars that make up the magnificent winter constellations. My nickname for them is “Orion and his gang.” Orion is the most brilliant of the group, in the middle of the winter shiners.

At first glance, the mighty hunter Orion resembles a crooked bowtie, but without too much imagination, you can see how that bowtie resembles the torso of a massive man. Orion’s brightest stars are Rigel, which marks one of the hunter’s knees, and the red giant star Betelgeuse at his armpit. The three bright stars that make Orion’s belt are lined up perfectly and jump right out at you. Three fainter stars in a row just to the lower right of the belt form Orion’s sword. The middle star in the sword will appear fuzzy to the naked eye. That’s because it’s not a single star. It’s the Orion Nebula, a giant cloud of hydrogen gas giving birth to new stars. Even with a small telescope, it’s possible to see four newborn stars and maybe even a few more within the nebula.

Elsewhere in Orion’s gang is Auriga, the chariot driver with the bright star Capella. There’s also Taurus the Bull, with the little arrow pointing to the right that outlines the bull’s face and the bright reddish star Aldebaran marking the angry red eye of the beast. Not far away are the Pleiades, a beautiful shining star cluster that resembles a tiny Big Dipper. The Pleiades star cluster is made up of over one hundred young stars, probably less than 100 million years old. The Pleiades, also known as the “Seven Little Sisters,” are the daughters of the deposed god Atlas.

Rising in the low southeast is a really bright star, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky at any time throughout the year. It’s not as bright as Jupiter but it’ll certainly get your attention! If you draw a line through Orion’s belt and extend it to the lower left, it will point right at Sirius, a star a little more than eight light-years away.

In the low northern sky, the Big Dipper appears to be nearly standing on its handle. The Big Dipper is not an official constellation but instead makes up the bright derriere and tail of Ursa Major. To the upper right of the Big Dipper is the Little Dipper hanging by its handle. Polaris, the North Star, shines at the end of the handle. The Little Dipper is also known as Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.

Don’t nocturnally hibernate. January stargazing is too good to miss.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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