A summer electric bill in California is not a puzzle. It is what you get when a state runs electricity as politics. The producer who keeps equipment running all day feels that choice before anyone at a hearing does. California’s energy policy has failed. The price says it plainer than a press conference.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A, lists preliminary July 2026 residential average prices, as reported in the July 2026 release data. California stood at 33.61 cents per kWh. Arizona was 15.38 cents, Nevada 12.77 cents, Oregon 15.97 cents, and Washington 14.71 cents. The U.S. average was 18.31 cents. California’s price is more than double the residential price in each of those neighboring states, and it sits far above the national average on the same table. A state at 33.61 cents, with Nevada at 12.77, does not get to call that a success.
This has nothing to do with an Iran war or any other Middle East conflict, and it is not federal policy. The costs are state-imposed. Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington answer to the same federal government and do not charge 33.61 cents per kWh.
Sacramento has already named the drivers, even if it will not take the political blame. The California Public Utilities Commission’s 2025 Senate Bill 695 report says the largest contributors to rising electricity rates include wildfire-related costs, rooftop solar program costs and cost shifts, and increased investment in distribution infrastructure. Those sit in the state and regulatory sphere. Rate Realities, in an independent bill-stack analysis from June 2025, found nearly 37% of a typical investor-owned-utility household electric bill attributable to state policies related to public purpose programs, renewable requirements, wildfire prevention, and the rooftop-solar cost shift. The CPUC set a 2026 Wildfire Fund non-bypassable charge of $0.00591 per kWh. That is a state charge on the kilowatt-hour, not a market accident.
Wildfire danger in California is real. Loading wildfire costs, rooftop-solar program costs and cost shifts, and distribution investment onto customers is still a choice made in the state regulatory system. Markets did not invent that mix. Politics did.
August 2020 brought rolling blackouts under the California Independent System Operator, with the state grid under stress. State politics nearly closed Diablo Canyon, and later state action kept the plant online. That reversal is political whiplash. It is a bad way to treat supply. Builders and producers cannot plan around power Sacramento keeps second-guessing.
Call the whole pattern a process tax on energy. It works like the process tax on housing and on people who build: the cost is real, and it rarely introduces itself by its right name. Abundance needs power plentiful enough to run a shop, a pump, and a house without this kind of price. Political scarcity does the other thing. It keeps control in the agencies and leaves the bill with the people who make things. You do not clear the runway that way.
The Democrat machine in California built this energy regime and has had the power to keep it. Grid mismanagement and interference in the market were not weather that happened to a helpless government. They were choices, repeated, with the charges to prove it. A gentler speech from the same machine will not move 33.61 cents toward the price Arizonans pay.
This is opinion, separate from our news coverage. My ask is concrete. Vote out the Democrat machine that built this energy regime. Reward the leaders who cut process taxes on energy, housing, and builders. Clear the runway for producers. The July table is already the argument. Abundance will not show up on a bill Sacramento insists on writing.
