C alifornia’s power prices are skyrocketing. Since 2008, electricity rates in the state have increased 3.2 times faster than the national average, far outpacing inflation. Per the Wall Street Journal, 215,000 Californians had their power shut off last year, and households owed a staggering $2.1 billion in unpaid utility bills, more than four times the amount in 2019.

Sacramento’s politicians have saddled Californians with these soaring costs through misguided climate policies over the past two decades. Even if you believe (as I do) that addressing climate change is critical, and that sustainably transitioning to a low-carbon economy is necessary, poorly conceived policies have inflated the costs of the state’s energy transition far beyond what is necessary or sustainable while simultaneously stalling the modernization of the electric grid.

Take San Diego, for example, where electricity prices reached an astonishing 47 cents per kilowatt-hour this year — roughly three times the national average. The premature closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS), under pressure from anti-nuclear politicians like former governor Jerry Brown and former senator Barbara Boxer, has been a significant factor. While SONGS did have a serious engineering issue with a faulty steam generator, the decision to shutter the plant has proven far more costly than fixing it would have been — in terms of both electricity bills and carbon emissions.

The result of SONGS’s closure was a 9-million-ton increase in carbon-dioxide emissions in just a year — the equivalent of putting 2 million internal-combustion-engine cars back on the road. Meanwhile, ratepayers are still footing the bill for SONGS’s decommissioning, as well as the costs of replacing it with alternative zero-emissions generation sources, which, unlike nuclear, cannot provide 24/7 baseload power and require extensive new transmission infrastructure. These additional costs further inflate power bills, hitting those struggling to make ends meet the hardest. Fortunately, legislators have recognized their mistake and voted in 2022 to save the state’s last nuclear-power plant, Diablo Canyon, which Brown had previously slated for retirement.

California’s flawed rooftop-solar-panel incentive program, net-energy metering (NEM), also imposes significant costs. NEM allows households with rooftop solar panels to sell excess power back to the grid at rates seven times higher than its actual value, according to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). This leaves households without rooftop solar panels — especially low-income families — bearing a disproportionate share of the fixed costs of maintaining the grid, including energy-efficiency programs, EV-charging stations, and transmission upgrades. The CPUC estimates that this cost shift will burden non-solar ratepayers with an additional $6.5 billion in costs in 2024. While legislators finally moved to reform this inequitable program in 2022, households that installed solar panels before 2024 will remain unaffected.

Wildfires also continue to take an increasing toll on the state’s grid infrastructure, driving up power bills and effectively erasing decades of decarbonization. A recent UChicago study found that the carbon released from California’s wildfires in 2020 amounted to “about two times the reductions achieved from 2003 to 2019.” Yet state prosecutors have focused their blame on utilities while downplaying the negligent forest-management practices that have turned California’s forests into tinderboxes. For over a century, federal and state forest agencies prioritized wildfire-exclusion policies, leading to unnaturally dense and highly flammable forests. Consequently, when wildfires break out, they are far more intense and challenging to control than they otherwise would be. Although legislators have recently ramped up preventative measures like prescribed burning, they’ve failed to enact the regulatory overhauls necessary to speed up permitting, which will require standing up to green NGOs that weaponize litigation.

To their credit, Sacramento lawmakers have taken some steps to address these issues. But they are also advancing questionable measures like income-based electricity rates. Modeled after a progressive income tax, these new rates will lower fees for low-income households, which may seem fair given the disproportionate burden they’ve borne under previous policies, but merely shifts the underlying costs of greening the grid onto higher-income households and businesses, which could exacerbate the ongoing exodus of businesses, jobs, and wealth to more sensible states.

In 2021, California lost $343 million in taxable income as wealthy residents fled the state. Corporations, including Oracle, Chevron, HP, CBRE, and SpaceX, are relocating to Texas in droves. Commercial and industrial power prices in California are already two to three times higher than the national average, and as large corporations leave, small businesses will be forced to shoulder even higher costs. California is already ranked as one of the worst states for entrepreneurs and small businesses, and the situation could deteriorate further.

Fortunately, there is a better way to decarbonize while injecting life into the Golden State’s economy. Public investment should be adjusted to focus on long-term efforts to revitalize nuclear power and expand proactive forest management as a means of correcting previous government blunders. Without abundant and affordable electricity, California’s energy transition will fail miserably — and without these policy shifts, abundant and affordable electricity will remain out of reach.