The country is feeling the pinch of higher bills everywhere and all at once—gas, electricity, healthcare, groceries.
At a recent Lunch with the League, League of Women Voters Climate Committee leader John Smilie laid out that our electricity bill circumstances are more nuanced.
Though energy prices are rising, Crawfordsville residents are paying rates below the state and national average. Past smart investments in solar are saving us money. Nationwide, communities making strong investments in solar, wind, and nuclear can help keep them that way while aging coal and volatile fossil fuels push costs up.
Smilie started his talk by reminding us what we are actually buying when we pay for a kilowatt-hour (KwH) of electricity. Smilie explained that one KwH is roughly the energy your microwave uses if it runs for one hour, and a typical home uses around 900 kilowatt-hours per month, depending on heating and appliances. That bill is not just “power plant costs.” Roughly 35–50 percent pays for generation, 45–55 percent goes to transmission and distribution — the poles, wires, substations, and repairs — and 5–10 percent covers taxes and policy programs. In fact, more than half of what we pay covers the “poles and wires,” and those delivery costs are the fastest-rising part of the bill as utilities replace and harden old infrastructure in the face of more severe storms and wildfires.
Smilie has tracked his CEL&P rate since January 2020, when the variable cost per kilowatt-hour (including tax) was 9.62 cents; by March 2026, it had risen to 12.24 cents, an increase of 27.2 percent. Over the same period, consumer price index inflation was about 27.5 percent, meaning our local electric rate has risen slightly less than overall inflation. When fixed charges are spread across a typical household, the total electricity cost comes to just under 14 cents per kilowatt-hour — compared with roughly 16 cents in Indiana and 16–17.65 cents nationally.
Our kilowatt-hour price is lower because Crawfordsville invested in 28 megawatts of municipal solar, a substantial resource for a community of only about 16,000 people. Bypassing fuel costs helps stabilize generation costs over time and acts as a hedge against spikes in natural gas prices or other fuel shocks, like those caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or severe climate events.
Notably, Smilie showed how, despite recent headlines about “electricity inflation,” we are actually living through one of the lowest‑cost periods in history in terms of electricity as a share of household income. Unfortunately, low-income families spend a high percentage of their household budgets on electricity.
What is driving prices up? According to the national lab data Smilie presented, three main forces dominate: more extreme weather, spikes in natural gas prices, and the massive, overdue replacement and hardening of aging distribution infrastructure. Wildfires and hurricanes have added multiple cents per kilowatt-hour in some states just from the cost of rebuilding lines and poles, with California’s wildfire spending and Florida’s recent hurricanes as notable examples. Natural gas, which fuels about 38 percent of U.S. electricity, has seen dramatic swings with events like recent winter storms and recent wars, and those price shocks ripple straight into our electric bills. At the same time, the producer price index for wires, transformers, and switchgear has risen far faster than basic consumer inflation, making every grid upgrade more expensive.
What about claims that solar and wind are making electricity expensive? Smilie directly addressed that misconception using Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory analysis. Across states, there is no consistent link between higher shares or faster growth of wind and solar and higher retail prices. In fact, some of the cheapest‑electricity states in the country, like Iowa and Oklahoma, are among the leaders in wind power. A few state‑level policies — such as very generous net metering for rooftop solar in California or early renewable portfolio standards — initially added a cent or two per kilowatt‑hour in some places. Early adopters often face a premium cost, but now the underlying technologies of wind and solar are now the cheapest new sources of generation. In other words, clean energy additions are largely holding down the generation component of rates even as delivery costs climb.
By contrast, Smilie showed how forcing old coal plants to stay online is clearly pushing costs up. Utilities were planning to retire many coal units because they are aging, inefficient and expensive to run, but new federal decisions have ordered some plants in states like Michigan, Washington, Colorado and Indiana to remain open. Smilie cited estimates that keeping a single Michigan coal plant running has already cost ratepayers tens of millions of dollars — money spent on extra fuel, maintenance, and compliance for an asset that was supposed to come off the books. These plants also expose customers to fuel price risk from wars and extreme weather, and continue to drive air pollution and climate damage.
A balanced mix of solar, wind, and nuclear can keep both costs and risks down, especially as new loads like data centers and EVs grow. Renewables offer cheap energy but are variable. That’s where the leaps and bounds of battery technology come in.
Batteries are rapidly scaling up to shift solar from midday to evening peaks — and nuclear can provide a steady baseload without the fuel‑price volatility of gas or coal. Smilie pointed to California’s 17 gigawatts of grid‑scale batteries, which now cover roughly 44 percent of peak evening demand, as an early example of how storage partners with solar “like peanut butter and jelly” to meet demand reliably and economically. Emerging technologies, such as sodium‑ion batteries, promise even lower costs and greater safety, accelerating the trend.
At the same time, demand‑side strategies can make the whole system cheaper. Improving “load factor” and how evenly we use the grid over time spreads the fixed cost of poles and wires over more kilowatt‑hours, lowering the average price. Smilie highlighted appliances used and electric vehicles charged at off‑peak times, virtual power plants that coordinate smart thermostats and water heaters, and flexible requirements for large loads like data centers as tools to flatten peaks. With thoughtful policy, including better permitting for renewables and transmission, more use of the tax base rather than just ratepayers to finance upgrades, and closer scrutiny of utility profits, communities like Crawfordsville can keep electricity affordable while modernizing the grid and cutting emissions.
Our choices now can ease our present and future. We can either keep to the familiar as it fades into ineffectiveness or invest in resilient, diversified system built on solar, wind, nuclear, batteries and efficiency. Crawfordsville’s lower‑than‑average rates are the product of its strong municipal solar position and its publicly owned utility.
An old adage with a new twist comes to mind. You may have heard “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” One wonders if some sectors of capitalism need a reminder that you cannot serve both customer and shareholder. You will either abuse the one or fail the other. And if we want to reduce reliance on social safety nets, we’ll need business sectors, like utilities and healthcare, that serve the clients over that other master.