The headlines this year spell out a stunning affordability crisis spurred by fossil fuels. “Virginia mom’s nearly $500 heating bill is due next week: ‘It’s insane’” was a February story of how volatile gas prices squeezed families this winter. “‘Almost as much as my rent’: Dominion customers shocked by surging energy bill” told a similar story of a struggling single mother of two who was stunned when her January utility bill, which is normally $250, more than tripled to $797.
“Electric bills in West Virginia now top mortgages despite Trump’s promises” was an April PBS story of a woman hit with a $940 bill in February—larger than her fixed-income check—owing to “increased demand, extreme weather … aging infrastructure and rising natural gas prices.”
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Meanwhile, a foreign war spiked gasoline and diesel prices to over $4 a gallon in much of the country for the second time in five years. The first time, it was Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine that sent global oil and gas prices soaring. This year, it is Trump’s war with Iran, which has wreaked havoc on gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel prices, as well as on fertilizers made with fossil-fuel-derived petrochemicals.
But an overseas story points to an easy domestic solution that needs to be taken more seriously to save our wallets. Look at Spain, whose decision to expand solar and wind power after “Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 has shielded Spanish households from the latest rises in fossil fuel prices caused by the Iran war,” the Guardian reported earlier this month.
This makes sense. Thanks to tech advances, the cost of solar, wind, and battery storage has plummeted this century, so renewables can prevent the price spikes we see with fossil fuels.
Gas price volatility is a double whammy for U.S. families because of our double dependence on gas. For starters, many homes are heated with gas. But at the same time, gas power generation drives short-term electricity prices in most states. So when we get a spike in gas demand, as the East Coast did during a January cold spell, the price of gas can double, which raises both home heating and electricity bills.
And while the fracking revolution was supposed to bring us endless cheap domestic gas, in December, Forbes explained, “Time to update your priors: Natural gas is expensive.” In 2025 alone, U.S. gas prices rose 50%!
None of this should have come as a surprise. The Energy Information Administration (EIA), which is the primary statistical agency for the U.S. Department of Energy, had warned in January 2025 that U.S. gas prices would soar over the next two years, largely because we are exporting our relatively cheap domestic gas to other countries where it is more expensive. So fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are reaping massive profits from committed international buyers, while we pay more at home despite this huge amount of fracking.
Even worse, shipping gas overseas requires first liquefying it to −260°F, an energy-intensive process that spews toxic pollution locally—think of coastal Louisiana and Texas—while increasing emissions of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas that is contributing to our planet’s rapid warming and destabilizing weather patterns. And yet Trump is accelerating the buildout of liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals, and the EIA projects that LNG exports will soar more than 50% by 2027 compared to 2024 levels. So don’t expect gas prices to go down anytime soon.
Plus, what’s a global crisis without mentioning data centers? The frantic rush to build hyperscale data centers, many in our own backyards, which is supported by the world’s largest petrochemical companies, also means higher gas demand and higher electricity bills for the foreseeable future. Bloomberg News reported last September that in the past five years, wholesale electricity costs soared as much as 267% in areas near data centers.
Data-center-driven demand for more power has tripled the prices for new gas turbines. Lead time for procuring and building big gas plants now exceeds five years. So, the Financial Times warned in October that the cost of power from newly completed gas plants in 2030 would be as high as that from large nuclear plants and more than double the price of either solar power with battery storage or wind power.
New gas plants are so unaffordable that even Texas had to create a $10 billion Energy Fund three years ago to subsidize them. “The only thing that has really driven movement on gas generation in this state has been a subsidy,” the CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas told state lawmakers. The problem for gas, as experts told Politico in June, “is that renewables remain relatively cheap to build.”
Cheaper and faster. “Renewables are here today,” NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum told investors last year. “You can build a wind project in 12 months, a [battery] storage facility in 15, and you know, a solar project in 18 months.” That’s why these three technologies represented more than 90% of U.S. utility-scale electric-generating capacity additions in 2024 and 2025, and they are projected by the Department of Energy to be 93% this year. This is the good news that has kept utility bills lower than they might have been in many regions of the country.
Perhaps most remarkably, in 2025 “Texas saw the largest rise in utility solar generation of any US region, where solar met 81% of the [electricity] demand rise.” And Texas is on track to add over half of all planned U.S. battery storage capacity this year.
Unfortunately, at a federal level, Trump has embraced policies aimed at blocking the expansion of cheap solar and wind, while promoting fossil fuels that will worsen the affordability crisis and spew more toxic pollution into the air.
That means the battle for cleaner power and lower energy bills will increasingly be fought at the state level, where the best lawmakers are still speeding the deployment of clean energy. At the same time, citizens and politicians must work together to oppose new LNG terminals and new data centers running on gas.
Joseph Romm is a former Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media.