Energy affordability is often discussed in terms of price, but its real impact is measured in access to heating and cooling, to food, and to the services that make modern life possible.
“We need a shared understanding of a floor for energy services — a baseline level that everyone should have access to,” Julia Haggerty, Montana State University Earth Sciences department head, said at a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine workshop.
Haggerty chaired the committee that convened the workshop Understanding and Addressing Energy Affordability in the United States. Across several panel discussions, the conversation moved beyond prices alone to consider whether households can access the energy services required to live safely and participate in modern society.
“We really need to dive into what does it actually take to be a healthy household from an energy standpoint,” said Destenie Nock, professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “You need refrigeration, you need heating, you need cooling, you need lighting … and all of these things are required to actually operate in modern society.”
Nock and other participants noted that modern households rely on energy for an expanding range of services, including internet-connected devices used for work, schooling, and access to information.
As Sanya Carley, University of Pennsylvania, put it, “in short, I would say affordability is: how do we not break American households?”
This perspective informed workshop discussions, which explored both how affordability is experienced in practice and how the use of energy, in particular electricity, is being consumed by households.
“There is a natural human tendency to want to identify a single villain,” said Susan Tierney, Analysis Group. In practice, however, rising energy costs reflect the interaction of multiple factors, many of which are evolving simultaneously and differently across regions.
“The national average electricity price is a meaningless number — no one actually pays that,” said Ryan Wiser, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “You pay local prices, and there are vast differences across states in both price levels and how those prices are changing.”
Those differences reflect a mix of drivers, including investment in transmission and distribution infrastructure, efforts to strengthen system resilience in response to extreme weather, and volatility in fuel markets. At the same time, supply chain constraints, permitting timelines, and workforce limitations can affect how quickly new infrastructure is deployed and at what cost.
How those pressures are felt depends not only on price levels, but also on whether service is stable and predictable. “Customers don’t experience rates — they experience bills and reliability,” said Suzanne Ogle, SGA Natural Gas Association.
Investments that improve system resilience can increase near-term costs, but participants noted that underinvestment can shift costs into outages and disruptions. “The most expensive energy is the energy that fails when it’s needed most,” Ogle said. “Outages are not reliability failures; they are affordability shocks for families that can't absorb them.”
The broader energy system is undergoing changes that may further influence affordability. After years of relatively flat demand, growth is projected in some regions, driven by electrification, economic shifts, and the expansion of large energy users, such as data centers.
Outcomes may vary depending on local conditions. In some cases, additional demand can improve utilization of existing systems and spread costs more broadly. In others, it may require significant new investment, increasing upward pressure on rates. How those costs are allocated remains a central issue.
“Affordability, reliability, and sustainability are interconnected — you can’t optimize one without considering the others,” said Wayne Blaylock, Dow.
For households, those connections are often visible through their overlap with other challenges. Participants described how energy affordability intersects with housing quality, health outcomes, and broader economic pressures.
“Affordability isn’t just an energy issue — it’s a housing issue, a health issue, and really a broader cost-of-living issue,” said Paula Glover, Alliance to Save Energy.
Industry views affordability from a different perspective: risk management. “For industry, affordability is not just about cost — it’s about managing cost, volatility, and reliability risk,” said Cliff Ho, SB Energy, pointing to factors such as market prices and supply chain variability.
As discussions turned toward potential responses, no single approach emerged as sufficient on its own. Infrastructure planning, rate design, and demand-side strategies such as energy efficiency were all identified as important, along with programs that provide near-term support to households — often involving tradeoffs. Measures that provide immediate relief may not address underlying cost drivers, while long-term investments can increase costs in the near term even as they aim to improve system performance and stability.
“If we want meaningful policy reform, we need to figure out how communities can actually participate in those conversations,” Haggerty said.
A consistent theme through the workshop was the scale and uncertainty of the challenge. Significant investment is expected in the years ahead to modernize infrastructure, expand capacity, and adapt to changing demand patterns. At the same time, the pace and location of that demand — particularly from large new users — remain uncertain.
“This is a salient issue in the public mind — and it’s not going away,” said Stephen Comello, EFI Foundation, chair of the National Academies Forum on Energy Systems Transformation and Decarbonization. “These kinds of issues tend to be driven by shocks, and we’re seeing that kind of moment now.”
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