[A] new study from researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the consulting group Brattle suggests that, counterintuitively, more electricity demand can actually lower prices. Between 2019 and 2024, the researchers calculated, states with spikes in electricity demand saw lower prices overall. Instead, they found that the biggest factors behind rising rates were the cost of poles, wires and other electrical equipment — as well as the cost of safeguarding that infrastructure against future disasters.

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Most of the costs in the system aren’t from pushing electrons through the grid, or what experts call variable costs. Instead, the largest costs are fixed costs — that is, maintaining the massive system of poles and wires that keeps electricity flowing. That system is getting old and is under increasing pressures from wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather.

More power customers, therefore, means more ways to divvy up those fixed costs.

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[T]he new study shows that the costs of operating and installing wind, natural gas, coal and solar have been falling over the past 20 years. Since 2005, generation costs have fallen by 35 percent, from $234 billion to $153 billion. But the costs of the huge wires that transmit that power across the grid, and the poles and wires that deliver that electricity to customers, are skyrocketing. In the past two decades, transmission costs nearly tripled; distribution costs more than doubled.