When Congress passed the Federal Power Act of 1920, it left most electricity policy decisions to the states. The original thirteen colonies that declared independence in 1776 have used that authority differently, and the price gaps between them are stark.
A new interactive index from Always On Energy Research and the Institute for Energy Research shows that the states with the highest electricity prices overwhelmingly have one thing in common: They adopted policies that make power more expensive. In 2025, across the 50 states and Washington, D.C., 86% of states with electricity prices above the national average in the continental U.S. are reliably blue, while 90% of the 10 states with the lowest electricity prices are reliably red.
The original thirteen colonies started from the same historical foundation but experience different outcomes today thanks to their energy policies. Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts rank near the top of national all-sectors rate rankings; Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia sit near the bottom.
Blue states tend to layer aggressive renewable portfolio standards (RPS) on top of full retail-rate net metering, which pays rooftop solar owners more for their power than it’s worth to the grid and shifts the difference onto neighbors without panels. Many also price carbon, forcing power plants to pay for every ton of CO2 they emit. In New England and the Mid-Atlantic, that happens through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), where allowance prices cleared at $35 per ton of CO2 in June 2026, the highest in the program’s history. Regulators in these states also let investor-owned utilities adopt their own net-zero pledges, retiring coal and gas plants that ratepayers will have to pay to replace. Red states lean on natural gas and nuclear instead and decline most resource mandates.
New Hampshire is the exception that proves the rule. It has one of the region’s least burdensome renewable portfolio standards and returned 93% of its RGGI proceeds to ratepayers in 2023, rather than diverting them to government spending as most member states do. Its prices are still among the nation’s highest, because it shares New England’s electricity market, and every major gas pipeline serving it runs through Massachusetts or New York—states that have blocked new pipeline capacity for years. Restrained policy at home doesn’t insulate a state from decisions made upstream.
The good news? States can make efforts to reverse course. Pennsylvania spent years debating its participation in RGGI before repealing its entry last year. Virginia moved in the opposite direction by rejoining the program this summer—with ratepayers expected to pay an additional $13 per month. Those decisions will shape electricity prices for years to come.
Affordability is the word every politician wants to claim as their own. Federalism already supplies the accountability they are dodging: Voters can see which states made power expensive and which kept it cheap, then move or vote on it. The original thirteen are the best place to start, but the rest of the country’s profiles will arrive over the coming weeks at BlueStatesHighRates.com.