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

10 snips

Apr 1, 2026

Guest

Lauren Sidner

Guest

Brian Deese

Lauren Sidner, a policy and regulatory analyst from MIT, and Brian Deese, a former White House economic adviser and MIT fellow, join to unveil a new Electricity Price Hub. They discuss why local electricity pricing was opaque, how the Hub breaks down rates into generation, transmission, and distribution, and what regional, weather, and data-center pressures reveal about rising bills.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Electricity Prices Were Opaque Until The Hub

Electricity price data in the U.S. has been opaque, delayed, and aggregated, hiding local drivers of price changes.
Heatmap and MIT built the Electricity Price Hub to provide monthly, utility-level rates and bills back to 2021, split by generation, transmission, and distribution.

ADVICE

Use The Hub Monthly To Diagnose Local Drivers

Use the Hub monthly to compare rates and bills at zip code, utility, state, and congressional district levels.
The tool breaks rates into generation, transmission, and distribution so analysts can investigate local drivers instead of relying on lagged studies.

INSIGHT

Rates Versus Bills diverge Because Usage Matters

The Hub compiles utility tariffs and state regulator reports and pairs them with EIA usage data to compute average rates and bills.
This revealed many utilities with high rates but low bills or vice versa due to usage differences like climate and household size.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

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.