The Real Cost of Electrifying Everything

In the U.S. Electrification Is Not a Climate Plan—It’s a Lobbyist’s Dream

From Washington to Sacramento to Wall Street boardrooms, the new orthodoxy is clear: electrify everything. Cars, stoves, furnaces, tractors, and lawnmowers. If it runs on fuel, someone is drafting a mandate to make it plug in. The justification? Decarbonization. Climate targets. “Equity.” But like most political crusades born in D.C., this one is colliding headfirst with reality.

Electrification sounds clean, modern, and efficient. But forced implementation without structural readiness exposes deep flaws in America’s energy system. We don’t have the grid, the materials, or the political cohesion to pull this off without massive costs. And as always, it’s the working and middle classes who are asked to pay the price for elite dreams.

The math is straightforward. Electrification doesn’t just increase power demand; it reshapes it. Peak loads shift. Storage becomes essential. Aging transformers strain. Neighborhood substations overheat. The infrastructure powering our homes was never designed for a future where every vehicle, appliance, and heating system runs through the grid.

Electric vehicle mandates alone could add tens of thousands of megawatts of new demand to aging local systems. Even New York City’s own planning documents quietly admit that many neighborhoods can’t support multiple EV chargers per block (NYC DOT EV Charging Needs Assessment, 2023). This isn’t a transition—it’s a grid failure waiting to happen.

I’ve seen this firsthand. In Central London, which is one of the most built-out grid systems on the planet, there is no longer such a thing as off-peak electricity. Every hour is peak hour. Prices reflect it. As the grid strains under round-the-clock electrification pressure, energy costs have skyrocketed. And who pays? Cab drivers. Small business owners. Ordinary consumers. The working class bears the brunt while bureaucrats brag about climate milestones. Are we really going to import that model to the United States?

It’s one thing to argue for electrification. It’s another to impose it by regulation while ignoring the entry costs. EVs, heat pumps, electric panels, induction stoves - none of these are cheap. For affluent homeowners, they’re lifestyle upgrades. For everyone else, they’re unaffordable mandates.

Even with subsidies, the cost curve is steep. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that many households are backing out of green energy conversions due to high installation costs and grid instability concerns (Green Electricity Costs a Bundle, Wall Street Journal, 2025). At the same time, utility rates are climbing, driven by the very infrastructure upgrades these policies demand. Who gets hit hardest? Fixed-income seniors, rural households, and middle-class families already strained by inflation and high interest rates.

Now state regulators, especially in California, are pushing to ban natural gas appliances outright. That means scrapping perfectly functional stoves, water heaters, and furnaces in favor of electricity-hungry alternatives. Never mind that natural gas remains one of the most affordable and reliable energy sources in the country.

We’ve seen this play out before. Remember biomass? It was once championed as clean and renewable. Later exposed as carbon-intensive and inefficient, it’s still propped up by subsidies and wishful thinking. Once again, policy is chasing optics, not outcomes.

And it doesn’t stop at home. Electrification requires a massive expansion in raw materials: copper, lithium, nickel, rare earths, transformers, charging infrastructure. These inputs are already scarce, and we’ve outsourced much of the supply chain to geopolitical adversaries like China (The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions, IEA, 2021). We’re inflating demand precisely where we have the least leverage.

Meanwhile, taxpayer dollars - via the Inflation Reduction Act and state-level carve outs - are underwriting this distorted market. Politically connected green-tech firms win contracts. The public shoulders the risk. This isn’t decarbonization. It’s a subsidy pipeline with a moral halo.

This doesn’t mean we reject innovation. It means we demand competent innovation. Real change must be built on engineering readiness, not activist wish lists. Technology must earn adoption by performance and price—not by mandate and moral pressure.

So what’s the conservative answer? Lead with what works: natural gas and nuclear energy. Both are proven, scalable, and clean compared to coal. Yet Democrats and environmental lobbies have spent years kneecapping nuclear progress. The GOP should be the party that reclaims nuclear energy as a patriotic, pro-growth solution. Permit reform, new reactor designs, and clean baseload generation must become central planks of conservative energy policy.

And natural gas, which we have an abundance of, should not be vilified. It keeps energy bills low and the lights on. It is also the primary reason U.S. emissions declined more in the 2010s than in many countries pursuing wind and solar mandates. Electric power is now the second-largest source of carbon emissions in the United States, behind only transportation. In 2023, the sector emitted 1.4 billion metric tons of CO₂, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (Carbon Emissions from Energy Consumption, U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2024). While emissions fell modestly last year, that drop came not from electrification mandates—but from a generation shift away from coal. The real driver? A growing share of power from natural gas and solar. The data is clear: natural gas is already doing the heavy lifting on decarbonization. Yet instead of building on that success, policymakers are pushing grid-heavy mandates that risk doing the opposite - raising both emissions and costs.

It’s no secret anymore: governments want electrification, not consumers. This is a top-down agenda driven not by demand but by lobbying pressure. The Biden administration has been the most electrification-obsessed White House in history, and it shows, to the detriment of both the environment and working Americans. Republicans now have a clear opportunity to offer a better path: a modern energy strategy that is cleaner, cheaper, and freer. It is a strategy that resists green corporatism and prioritizes long-term national resilience. But that begins with telling the truth. Electrification isn’t a silver bullet. It’s a costly experiment. And if the left is allowed to run it unopposed, the next blackout won’t be a mistake. It will be policy.