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Energy regulators and industry leaders voiced concern in Washington last week that rising electricity prices erode public trust, and they offered a range of solutions, from adjustments in system planning and ratemaking to simply responding to market demands.

“We are losing some of that trust in our regulated systems by our end user customers that are really feeling the impacts of the affordability challenges,” Virginia state commissioner Kelsey Bagot said at panel that concluded the winter policy summit of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). “The way that we can make sure that people feel like they can trust the decision makers … is transparency in the decision-making process.”

“Aging infrastructure, higher demand and an affordability problem is what we have,” said Maine U.S. Senator Angus King (Independent), who was an energy project developer before holding office.

“It is going to make an enormous difference to people’s lives in the rest of the country, and to our ability to compete internationally,” he said.

Several speakers said regulators should protect consumers through proper cost allocation of transmission projects, both from new construction to serve growing, large loads and replacement of aging infrastructure.

“There is little transparency in transmission costs, asset condition and replacing end-of-life assets,” said Philip Bartlett, chair of the Maine Public Service Commission.

He recommended that work on asset conditions be done within ISO New England. “There needs to be accountability,” he added. “If we lose the public, it will be very hard to meet the challenge.”

Load growth, extreme weather and volatile natural gas prices can all cause price differentials, explained Jeff Dennis, executive director of the Electricity Customer Alliance, a public policy group.

A lack of transmission is seen in congestion costs that increase bills, he added, but piecemeal local transmission projects could drive up costs as well.

King suggested that transmission and distribution costs are now close to 50% of electric bills in New England, compared to being 20% or 30% in a period reaching back ten to 20 years.

The cause and scale of affordability problems was hard to quantify. Retail power prices are up in the past five years, with residential customers seeing the largest increase, said Chris Namovicz, electricity team lead at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).  Household expenditures are flat because of demand elasticity, he added.

Namovicz said no single cause can be assigned to higher rates, but “trends come down to the costs of natural gas or natural gas turbines getting rolled into the price.”

The average retail residential price of power in November was up 5.5% over the same month in 2024, the EIA said earlier this month.

Renewable tax credits obtained by some generators are passed through the marginal cost of dispatch, Namovicz said. Many of those credits will be eliminated for construction of wind and solar facilities that begin later this decade because of changes to the tax code in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Prices do not seem to move in lock step in the states. Pradip Chattopadhyay, a member of the New Hampshire Public Service Commission, said rates in his state shot up in 2022 with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Prompt month natural gas futures prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for delivery at Louisiana’s Henry Hub nearly doubled that year.

But from 2023 to 2025, Chattopadhyay found that New Hampshire residential rates declined by 4.2¢/kWh, according to EIA average price data. Rates in other New England states either declined by a less amount, or rose, he said.

Some regulators were more forthcoming at the federal-state issues panel, held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), at the end of the policy summit that was not formally part of the NARUC event.

Stacey Paradis, a member of the Illinois Commerce Commission, said that because of load growth from electrification, manufacturing and data centers, the most important issue faced by regulators is load forecasting.

“The biggest challenge is data transparency, so that large load customers are not making the same request in several states,” she said. ‘What we have seen is not double counting, it is taking into account the triple, quadruple and quintuple counting of new loads coming in between the NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) and the different states and multiple RTOs (regional transmission organizations).

“Who and where can someone look at all that data at one time?” she asked. “That is an opportunity for collaboration.”

Planning needs were expressed in many ways.

“We also need to think about the stranded cost issue,” Chattopadhyay said. “It is possible some large loads may go bankrupt. Other ratepayers should not have to bear the burden of cost recovery.”

Some solutions to affordability issues were more conventional, such as adding generation, natural gas storage, battery storage, reconductoring, dynamic line rating and peak shaving.

“Renewables can be baseload if you have storage,” King said “Storage is the real green new deal and part of the fossil free future.”

Sid McAnnally, CEO of One Gas, said the country “just saw something close to the national peak day” during Winter Storm Fern.

“There has to be a balance,” he said. “We have to bring all of the generation sources at our disposal on line.”

FERC member David Rosner said “getting new supply on the system will be fundamentally the way that we lower prices.”

King added that the country will have to deal with demand growth soon by adding new generation, and that “the problem is permitting reform.”

He accused the Trump Administration of arbitrarily killing wind, transmission and solar projects.

The administration has stopped offshore wind farm construction, ended many green energy loans, grants and loan guarantees and subjected many alternative energy projects that need the input of of a federal agency to a secretarial level of approval. These actions have often been challenged in federal courts.

“We are not interested in permitting reform until the administration takes its thumb off the scale,” King said.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed two bills this session to streamline environmental reviews, limit litigation and speed up project approvals, but neither have been taken up by the U.S. Senate.