Trump’s Dirty Energy Double Whammy: Pay More for Fuel & Power—and Use More of It

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How the Trump administration’s policies are driving up costs at the pump and the plug while deepening dependence on fossil fuels, with a focus on nine states: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

While running for president, Donald Trump vowed to slash “energy and electricity prices by half, at least . . . within 12 months, at a maximum 18 months.” Those months have come and gone—and our families and businesses are paying more and more for fuel and power. 

Not only have energy costs gone up on Trump’s watch, but the president’s actions also mean we’ll pay billions of dollars more at the pump and the electric meter for decades to come. And because his policies are resulting in more air pollution, our health costs, too, are rising.

Meanwhile, some $86 billion worth of planned clean energy manufacturing, generation, and battery storage projects have been scuttled—and, with them, the promise of tens of thousands of good-paying jobs—in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks on clean, affordable American power. In the months since Trump launched the war on Iran on February 28, 2026, gasoline prices are up nearly 50 percent nationwide. That has cost the typical household more than $540 in added fuel expenses over just the past seven months, while oil companies bank windfall profits.

Under Trump, we’re not only paying more for gasoline, but we’re also set to burn more of it. His administration has made it more costly to build, buy, and operate electric vehicles, putting American factories and workers at risk. And the administration has repealed commonsense clean vehicle and fuel economy standards. As a result, drivers will pay $1,624 more, on average, to fuel a new car over its lifetime. Nationally, scrapping those rules has put the country on track to consume about 40 percent more gasoline than we would with the clean car standards in place.

And the beneficiaries of these policies? The oil and gas billionaires Trump solicited to help bankroll his 2024 campaign. The rest of us are paying the price.

Trump’s assault on clean energy

Household electricity rates have jumped 15.1 percent since Trump took office, rising from 15.9 cents per kilowatt-hour to 18.3 cents, on average, nationwide. Rates are up 25 percent in Ohio; in Iowa, they’ve surged by a third.

The rate hikes are due largely to the explosion in energy-guzzling data centers; the cost of building new transmission capacity to service those and other facilities; volatile natural gas prices; and investment to harden the power grid against the mounting dangers of extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and other disasters made worse by climate change.

Trump’s policies, though, have sharply curtailed the construction of wind, solar, and energy storage projects—the cheapest and fastest way to add electricity capacity to the grid. And his tariffs have raised the cost of generating and transmission gear—just when we urgently need new capacity. 

The Trump administration has worked to gut clean energy incentives and roll back commonsense clean air standards. It has mandated the use of several dirty and costly coal-fired power plants that had long been slated for retirement. And it’s wasted nearly $4 billion of taxpayer money  to pay companies to cancel new offshore wind farms that would have generated enough clean, low-cost electricity to power more than nine million homes.

Lost American power

Taken together, these policies could cost the country between 390 and 540 gigawatts of new electricity capacity over the coming decade, as much as 40 percent of what had been planned over that time before the Trump administration upended the industry. Even at the low end of those projections, the power lost would have been enough to increase U.S. electricity capacity by a third, above the current 1,200 gigawatts nationwide.

The lost power represents up to $700 billion in foregone investment over the coming decade that could have supported half a million direct jobs, compared to what was on track to be built before Trump took office. Already, under the Trump administration, companies have canceled $36 billion worth of new U.S. factories that would have employed more than 50,000 workers to make solar panels, electric vehicles, advanced batteries, and other clean energy components. 

That’s on top of the cancellation of another $50 billion of investment in new solar and wind power projects and advanced battery storage that, together, would have added 28 gigawatts of new electricity capacity nationwide, enough to power nearly four million homes.

Staggering health costs

Finally, by increasing the amount of mercury, soot, and other harmful pollutants from power plants that burn coal and natural gas, the Trump administration’s policies are projected to result in a cumulative $640 billion in additional costs, nationally, between 2026 and 2035. That’s due to increased incidence of asthma, heart disease, lung ailments, and other maladies that result in an additional 5.4 million missed days of school or work and some 35,000 additional premature deaths across the country, according to NRDC modeling results that use U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) methods  for estimating pollution impacts.

State by state: The rising costs of Trump’s dirty energy agenda

To show how all this directly impacts a cross-section of Americans, the following sections break down these costs and what they mean for people in nine states: Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Read the analyses of these states on the NRDC website.

Article from NRDC. By Bob Deans, Senior Advisor, Communications