Trump Is Immiserating His Own Voters With His War on Renewable Energy

One tiny problem, outside the fact that the four biggest wind power producing states all voted for Trump by an average of 19 percent in 2024, is that Trump’s own government data doesn’t back up that assertion. “Among the 22 states that drew higher-than-average shares of their power from wind and solar, 17 had below-average electricity prices in June, according to EIA data,” reported Politico. Energy prices across the country right now are surging, up 30 percent on average since 2020 and double the rate of inflation over the last year. There is no one singular cause to this trend that precedes Trump 2.0, but his war on renewable energy certainly isn’t helping to create the supply that increasing demand from things like AI data centers are placing on the grid.

Trump’s tariffs are raising energy costs too, as his desire to make things in America requires parts made elsewhere. “Long-term costs for utility-scale energy storage projects would increase anywhere from 12 percent to more than 50 percent, depending on the [tariff] scenario,” said data and analytics company Wood Mackenzie to Utility Dive earlier this year.

This war waged on clean energy is hitting red states, as an analysis by Energy Innovation of the GOP bill found that energy bills in Republican-leaning states could rise by more than $600 every year, and energy prices across the country could see their energy bill rise by as much as 18 percent by 2035. This study found that “Bills in Missouri will spike the most, by $640 a year, with the next largest increases – in Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Texas,” as The Guardian noted in their writeup of it earlier this year. All states that voted for Trump in part because their energy bills were too high. He’s only raised them since coming into office.

Politico’s analysis of EIA data found that “U.S. power prices rose an average of 23.4 percent from June 2021 to June of this year,” and just yesterday the Trump administration decided to further immiserate their own voters by abruptly canceling a massive solar project in Nevada, another state that voted for Trump in November. Heatmap reported that the Esmeralda 7 solar project, delivering a massive 6.2 gigawatts of power to the state, was canceled seemingly out of nowhere last night. To put that figure in perspective, the Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts. They canceled three Hoover Dam’s worth of energy just like that. This will raise energy bills in Nevada.

This is basic economics Trump never learned in the economics 101 class I strongly believe he never showed up to. The economy and the people who live in it demand energy to run our lives, and if there is not enough supply of energy, it will cost more. Energy prices are intertwined with inflation, which further clouds our stagflationary picture Trump is painting right now. He is depressing growth by raising energy prices and adding a surcharge on to every import while threatening to raise tariffs on China again today, all while destroying the labor market with his racist immigration policy which all combine to have the net result of potentially lowering the baseline growth we can expect from a damaged American economy.

And many red states are going to feel it the hardest, even as Trump tries to let them keep some Biden-era clean energy grants in place (but not all) while canceling $8 billion in equivalent ones for blue states because he is waging war on America, as he previously said. Nebraska already closed a rural clinic due to the GOP’s Medicaid cuts while advocacy groups estimate that about one in three rural hospitals are at risk of closing—proving that the $50 billion rural hospital fund the GOP included in their bill as a tacit acknowledgement it harms their own voters is not enough, as all the experts at the time said. Trump’s tariffs are killing farmers’ exports while he deports their workforce and opens massive opportunities for farmers around the world like Argentina’s. They received a $20 billion bailout from Trump and immediately lowered export taxes on soybeans, a betrayal of many American soybean farmers who voted for Trump and have seen their exports to China drop from over $12 billion last year to literally $0 right now. We are in the midst of widespread economic destruction on multiple fronts all because Trump wants to hurt liberals, but as the saying goes, we truly do live in a society, and many of his own voters are feeling the brunt of this Trump-induced pain first.