Electricity Is One Part of US Inflation That Congress Can Help Tame
Gas may drive energy price trends, but electricity isn’t immune to inflation. Subsidies for renewables in the Inflation Reduction Act would encourage stability.
Wind turbines and power transmission lines at a wind farm in Rio Vista, California.
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We are less than a week away from the much-anticipated release of the Consumer Price Index, the key measure of US inflation, for July. As of June, US personal spending on energy goods and services (gasoline, electricity and natural gas) was running at an annual rate of $860 billion . That is a record in nominal dollar terms: US consumers have never spent more on energy. Even adjusted for inflation, US personal spending on energy was at an all-time high in June, having passed its previous March 2008 high in March 2022.