President Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Thursday accused Democrats of politicizing the rising cost of electricity for American consumers.
At the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” event in Washington, D.C., Wright said that some developers of data centers “have stopped the rises of electricity prices” where the centers have been built.
He also said that Democrats in New York, who say they’re going to ban the development of data centers, are doing so because the green energy mandates they pushed for during the Biden administration are what “drives up electricity prices, and they want to blame something else for that.”
[NOTE: Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul last week signed an Executive Order to temporarily pause state permits for data centers for up to one year “in order to build a nation-leading regulatory framework that protects ratepayers, the environment, the energy grid and communities across the state.”]
Wright added, “Of course they’re going to double down on stupid and end up with even greater increases in electricity.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright blames Biden for high electricity prices:
The green energy mandates they pushed at the national level under Biden and at the state level that’s what drives up electricity prices. Of course they’re going to double down on stupid. pic.twitter.com/CskxKTWFB9
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 23, 2026
[NOTE: Since his return to the White House, President Trump has actively worked to dismantle Biden-era green energy mandates with executive orders, grant cancellations, and regulatory rollbacks.]
Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, presented a different argument in his 2025 paper titled, ‘Extracting Profits from the Public: How Utility Ratepayers Are Paying for Big Tech’s Power.’
Peskoe wrote: “More demand for energy — with no corresponding increase in supply — means higher prices for everyone.”
Peskoe explained: “There are two ways that data centers can raise rates for everyone. First, the utility is building new infrastructure to provide energy to data centers and spreads those costs to all ratepayers. Second, certain energy prices that the utility pays are set through markets, and when demand goes up — and supply doesn’t go up fast enough to meet it — prices go up.”
A 2026 MIT Sloan School of Management research study that looked at mandates found that Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) mandates “have virtually zero impact on prices, and utility-scale renewables are actually associated with lower retail rates.”
The study concluded that sustainability and reduced costs could be best achieved through a “focus on large-scale solar and wind power projects to capture economies of scale while putting less pressure on the grid” and “modernizing aging distribution networks.”