On April 13, Maryland’s General Assembly passed what its House Speaker called the crown jewel of the 2026 session. The Utility RELIEF Act, its supporters tout, will save the average household at least $150 a year on electricity bills — a number that Democratic leaders in Annapolis were careful to describe as a floor, not a ceiling. Governor Wes Moore signed it the same day.

That $150 in savings come almost entirely from cutting EmPOWER Maryland, the state’s flagship energy efficiency program. The new law will lower the greenhouse gas reduction targets utilities must meet from 2.5% annually to 1.75% through 2029. Those targets don’t return to current levels until 2036, and the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimated that weakening them will cost ratepayers $592 million in net increased electricity costs in the interim. The announced savings and the real accounting pull in opposite directions — which is quite the complicated political choice in an era where affordability is top of mind for voters.

Maryland is not alone. Massachusetts passed a $1 billion cut to Mass Save, its own efficiency program, in February — a bill that cleared the House 128 to 27 during a blizzard that had left thousands without power. Rhode Island’s governor requested efficiency budget reductions at the state Public Utilities Commission that dropped its own efficiency program from $117 million to $96 million annually, with a proposal to cap it further to $75 million going forward. Three Democratic trifectas, three flagship efficiency programs, the same political logic.

To understand why legislators keep reaching for this lever, you have to understand what they can and can’t do to help affordability concerns. Electricity prices rose 27% between 2019 and end of 2025, hitting a national average of 19 cents per kilowatt-hour with further increases projected through 2030. And in PJM, data center demand drove 63% of a roughly tenfold capacity price spike over two consecutive auctions. Utilities requested more than $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2025 alone, more than double the prior year. Those cost drivers sit behind walls that state legislators cannot breach, as transmission rates are set by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, capacity market prices are governed by regional ISOs and RTOs, and utility capital expenditure plans are anchored in federal interconnection requirements that no statehouse can rewrite.

The efficiency surcharge is different. It appears as a visible line item on every bill, it sits squarely within state legislative authority, and reducing it produces immediate measurable relief that can be announced at a press conference. A senior adviser to Maryland’s House Speaker described the situation plainly: “We had to do something.” That is not cynicism. It is an accurate description of a perceived political desperation due to constraints.

What gets lost in these cuts is what efficiency programs actually are. They are rarely marketed for their climate benefits, and typically framed instead as consumer protection, via weatherization and appliance rebates and home energy audits. As a result, they feel more like an electricity bill surcharge than part of a blue state’s clean energy portfolio.

However, the mechanism is unambiguously clean energy work. Demand reduction is functionally equivalent to zero-carbon supply from a grid stress perspective, because the marginal generation dispatched to meet incremental demand is almost always a gas peaker, and a megawatt-hour a household does not consume is one that does not have to be generated. 

ACEEE has documented that efficiency is the highest-value clean energy investment per dollar precisely because it addresses demand, emissions, and future infrastructure costs simultaneously. Mass Save’s current three-year plan was on track to deliver $12.1 billion in lifetime benefits.

Reducing funding for these programs, then, means trading near-term bill relief for higher future demand.

This mirrors a pattern Latitude Intelligence documented at the tariff level in March. When regulators built new rate structures for data centers — the fastest-growing source of electricity demand in the country — 40% of the 25 tariffs analyzed left out clean energy requirements entirely. The affordability-first logic produced the same result in a different venue: near-term cost protection, long-term questions deferred.

The reality is that clean energy and affordability are not actually in tension, and the real drivers of high bills are gas prices and utility capex. The Acadia Center’s Kyle Murray, when speaking about this recent trend of cuts to efficiency programs, put it directly: “The best you could say is that it is going after short-term affordability at the expense of long-term affordability.”

However, this argument operates on a timescale that is at odds with the election cycle. Future infrastructure costs do not have press conferences; they show up on bills in 2031 and nobody traces them back to a vote in 2026. New York Governor Hochul delayed her state’s cap-and-invest program under the same pressure, and California’s regulators are modifying theirs. The tension is real even when the economics say it shouldn’t be.

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