A University of Chicago study led by Barack Obama's former chief economist found that state renewable energy mandates have driven electricity prices up 17% and cost consumers $125 billion, undercutting the central promise of the green-energy push.

Michael Greenstone spent years inside the Obama White House as chief economist of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is not a fossil-fuel lobbyist or a Republican operative. He is an academic at one of the country's most respected universities. And his research team's findings on Renewable Portfolio Standards, the state-level mandates that force utilities to buy a set percentage of electricity from wind, solar, and other approved sources, read like an indictment drafted by the green movement's own auditor.

Frank Lasee, president of Truth in Energy and Climate, laid out the Greenstone team's conclusions in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner. The numbers are difficult to dismiss. In the 29 states that adopted renewable mandates, retail electricity prices climbed 11% within seven years of adoption and 17% after twelve years. Consumers across those states paid a combined $125 billion more than they would have without the mandates. And whatever carbon reductions the policies achieved came at a price of $130 to $460 per ton, compared to $5 to $15 per ton on actual carbon markets.

Put differently, mandate states paid roughly ten to thirty times the market rate for every ton of carbon they eliminated.

Greenstone's method compared states before and after adoption

The study's credibility rests on its design. Greenstone and his University of Chicago team used a statistical comparison of states before and after they adopted renewable mandates, drawing on government data rather than industry projections or advocacy models. The approach isolates the effect of the mandate itself from other variables, geography, population growth, fuel mix, that might otherwise muddy the picture.

That methodology matters because defenders of renewable mandates routinely blame price increases on other factors: transmission upgrades, natural gas volatility, aging infrastructure. Greenstone's framework controls for those variables. The 11% and 17% figures represent the mandate's own contribution to higher bills, not background noise.

Lasee pointed to a revealing geographic split. The states with the highest electricity prices, California, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, all operate under aggressive renewable mandates. The cheapest states, Idaho, Utah, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Louisiana, largely let cost and reliability determine their energy mix. Lasee noted that roughly 86% of states with above-average electricity prices vote reliably Democratic, a correlation he argued reflects the political incentives behind the mandates rather than any geographic inevitability.

Former President Obama has remained active in public life since leaving office, but the policy architecture his administration championed on energy continues to shape what families pay every month when they flip on the lights.

California's grid sent emergency alerts to millions of phones

The price data alone would be damning. But the reliability picture may be worse.

In August 2020, California ordered rolling blackouts, deliberate, utility-managed power shutoffs, because the state's grid could not meet demand. Two years later, in September 2022, California narrowly avoided a repeat. The state blasted an emergency alert to millions of phones ordering residents to cut power use immediately. Demand dropped roughly 2,000 megawatts within minutes as Californians shut off appliances and unplugged devices on command.

Lasee described a grid that texts customers to turn off appliances and unplug their electric vehicles as "a rationed system, not a modern one." The characterization is hard to argue with. A state that bills itself as the world's fifth-largest economy asked its residents to sit in the dark to prevent a system collapse, not because of a hurricane or an earthquake, but because the power supply could not keep up with ordinary summer demand.

California's average retail electricity price runs about 27 cents per kilowatt-hour, more than double the national average of under 13 cents, with residential rates often exceeding 30 cents, based on U.S. Energy Information Administration data as cited by Lasee. Californians pay a premium for electricity and get a grid that cannot guarantee it will stay on.

The Obama legacy has drawn scrutiny on multiple fronts in recent months, but the energy framework his administration helped normalize may carry the heaviest long-term price tag for ordinary Americans.

NERC warns the retirements are accelerating

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the body responsible for assessing whether the nation's power grid can handle what's coming, has issued warnings that tens of gigawatts of dependable coal, gas, and nuclear capacity are scheduled for retirement this decade. NERC's assessment, as described by Lasee, found insufficient firm replacement capacity lined up to fill the gap. Regions in the Northeast and West face elevated blackout risk under extreme conditions.

"Firm replacement" is the key phrase. Wind and solar create power only when the wind blows and the sun shines. A coal or natural gas plant can run around the clock regardless of weather. When mandates force utilities to retire those plants and replace them with intermittent sources, the grid loses the capacity to guarantee power during peak demand, exactly the scenario that produced California's blackouts and emergency alerts.

Lasee noted that about 80% of customer-minutes lost to power outages stem from storms and severe weather. Renewable mandates do nothing to address that dominant cause of grid failure. Instead, they layer additional fragility onto a system already vulnerable to weather events by making the power supply itself weather-dependent.

Carbon reduction at thirty times the market price is not a bargain

The environmental case for renewable mandates depends on the assumption that the carbon reductions they produce justify the cost. Greenstone's findings challenge that assumption directly.

At $130 to $460 per ton, the carbon reductions purchased through state mandates cost far more than the same reductions would cost on actual carbon markets, where the price runs $5 to $15 per ton. They also exceed conventional estimates of the social cost of carbon, the dollar figure economists assign to the damage caused by one additional ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

When a policy costs ten to thirty times the market alternative to achieve the same result, the question is no longer whether the goal is worthwhile. The question is whether the method is defensible. Greenstone's data, as presented by Lasee, suggests it is not.

Lasee argued that the mandates amount to "technology-specific mandates" that have "failed on their own terms: Higher bills, a less reliable grid, and carbon reductions purchased at indefensible prices." He contrasted the mandate approach with states that let cost and reliability drive their energy decisions and ended up with lower prices and stable grids.

Meanwhile, as the Obamas have remained prominent public figures, the policy framework that traces back to their era in Washington continues to extract billions from household budgets in mandate states.

Mandate states chose ideology over arithmetic

The political geography of electricity prices tells its own story. The states with the most aggressive mandates and the highest prices are concentrated in blue America. The states with the lowest prices and the most flexible energy policies lean red. Lasee's observation that 86% of above-average-price states vote reliably Democratic is a single-source claim, but the underlying price data from EIA is public and verifiable.

The pattern suggests that renewable mandates are not driven primarily by engineering analysis or cost-benefit calculations. They are driven by political constituencies that prioritize climate symbolism over affordability. The families who pay the bills, the retiree on a fixed income in Connecticut, the single mother running the air conditioner in a Sacramento apartment, absorb the cost of that symbolism every month.

Lasee pointed to China's continued construction of coal plants at what he described as "astonishing levels," arguing that any carbon reductions achieved by American mandate states are rendered nearly meaningless in global terms. The claim underscores a persistent tension in domestic climate policy: American consumers bear real, measurable costs for carbon reductions that register as a rounding error against the emissions of the world's largest polluter.

Greenstone's study did not set out to make a partisan argument. It set out to measure what renewable mandates actually did to prices, reliability, and carbon costs. The answer, higher bills, weaker grids, and carbon reductions purchased at prices no rational market would pay, speaks for itself.

As Lasee wrote, "When Obama's own economist shows the mandate fails the arithmetic, the remedy is not a larger dose. It is a different prescription."

When the architect's own engineer says the foundation is cracked, doubling down on the blueprint is not courage. It is stubbornness, and the people living in the building are the ones who pay for it.