In an opinion article for Utility Dive, Bryce Yonker, executive director of Grid Forward, argues that energy affordability and grid modernization can be tackled together through a dozen coordinated actions. He points to average U.S. electricity rates growing from 10.59 cents/kWh in 2020 to 13.63 cents/kWh in 2025, a 29% increase, even as major outages have surged over the past decade.
Yonker says the first line of defense is scaling energy efficiency, demand-side management, and other grid flexibility measures to their fullest cost-effective extent, though he cautions these alone cannot address current pressures. He also calls for industry-wide standardization of equipment such as transformers, where hundreds of similar SKUs create unnecessary complexity and cost.
The article further urges regulatory incentives better aligned with desired outcomes, and stresses that large-load customers like massive data centers must pay for the full system costs they impose. It also criticizes tariffs on basic grid materials, noting that steel, aluminum, copper, and wood are building blocks of the grid, and taxing them makes modernization more expensive.