America’s Grid Is Entering Crunch Time—And Consumers Are Being Left Behind

America’s electricity system is entering a period of real strain. Demand is rising fast. A lot of it is data centers, but it is also from consumers deploying amazing new technologies. Just ten years ago about 36% of new homes featured electric heating and cooling, today it is 52%. We are also building new manufacturing facilities in the country as we reindustrialize. Meeting that demand while navigating all of the permissions you need to build new power plants will define the energy story of the next decade.

But there’s a critical part of this story that most coverage misses: individual consumers are getting left behind.

Rising rates pressure consumers

Electricity rates are rising fast at a time when people are complaining about affordability across the economy. And unlike large commercial customers, most households don’t have a partner to help them make smart, long-term energy decisions.

After years of less than 0.5% electricity growth, U.S. electricity demand is now growing at more than 2% per year, and Grid Strategies expects much faster growth through 2030. If the cost of building new infrastructure is spread across all customers—as it usually is—consumers will face higher prices and growing reliability risks.

Utility incentives play a big role here. Earnings are largely tied to capital investment: the more utilities build, the more they earn. That structure naturally favors “build more stuff” over “get more out of the assets we’ve already paid for.” Instead of prioritizing lower-cost solutions like weatherization, local generation, and load flexibility, the system often defaults to large new power plants feeding already-congested transmission and distribution networks.

As electricity rates rise, households do have options—but they are being asked to navigate them without the right tools.

• About 650,000 households adopted solar and battery storage last year
• Roughly 3 million heating and cooling systems are replaced annually, with more consumers considering heat pumps
• More than 7 million water heaters are replaced each year, increasingly with smart or grid-interactive models

Major appliances are typically replaced when they fail, forcing rushed decisions with incomplete information. Consumers need help with important questions like:

• Which contractors do quality work?
• Which appliances actually save money over time with low maintenance costs?
• How do I get immediate financing without using my credit cards?

A partner and guide for consumers

Lower electricity bills require an integrated solution: energy bills, comfort, reliability, and resilience. This requires a partner who is aligned with the homeowner’s outcomes—not looking for a one-time sale.

This is why I joined Palmetto as an advisor. This moment requires a consumer-first platform. One that works with consumers to provide them with the best data and a simple interface to choose solutions that meet their needs at the best possible value.

After consumers adopt a solution, they get ongoing performance monitoring and support. That matters because consumer energy is not a transaction; it’s a relationship that compounds over time as households have more appliances that need replacing and they change the way they use power.

One of the biggest unlocks here is optimizing the tax credits and utility rebate programs. Last year, tens of thousands of consumers took advantage of this program to protect themselves from rising utility prices—an average of 20% savings last year. Add a high efficiency heat pump, smart water heater, and weatherization and you could double the savings.

Financing for consumers is essential because it does three things at once:

1. Provides much lower interest rates than credit cards, the most common form of financing for households
2. Speeds millions of improvements in the near-term as large-scale infrastructure works its way through the bureaucracy
3. Aligns incentives as financing companies get paid back when the assets work and consumers are happy

And once consumers have a good experience, they keep using the service. To truly manage costs, comfort, and resilience, most households will need three or four major improvements over time. A platform that serves that full lifecycle—rather than selling a single product and disappearing—creates better outcomes for homeowners and reduces the high customer-acquisition costs that decreases the savings that are possible across the industry.

The energy transition isn’t happening in spreadsheets or permitting dockets—it’s happening in kitchens, basements, and garages when something breaks. Right now, families are being asked to make rushed, high-stakes decisions with the wrong tools and the wrong incentives. If we want this transition to lower bills and improve reliability, we have to start where energy is actually consumed: the home. Build for consumers, and the rest will follow.

And we need them now.