Note: This article was originally shared in SACE’s free newsletter, “Wired In,” which includes relevant articles, media clips, and actions to take. Join us to receive Wired In once a month in your inbox, and see February’s full newsletter here.
If you’re like me, it feels like there are two distinct realities right now. There’s the world we live in – our kitchen tables where we make real-life decisions for our families to keep them safe. Then, there’s the world inside the White House, devoid of lived experience. Let’s start with the one that matters most: yours.
The World at Your Kitchen Table
Energy bills are squeezing families across our region and the nation. Sixty percent of Americans rank utility bills among their top three financial stresses — alongside groceries and housing. One in three families has cut back on essentials just to keep the lights on. Regulators have already approved $8.4 billion in rate increases affecting nearly 14 million Southeastern customers alone.
Here’s what makes that harder to swallow: clean energy has never been more affordable. Lazard’s 2025 Levelized Cost of Energy research confirms that utility-scale solar and wind are the lowest-cost, fastest-to-deploy options for new power generation in America — even without subsidies. Paired with long-term storage, they’re increasingly reliable at critical times when the utilities need them most. Utility-scale solar is now 41% cheaper and wind 53% cheaper than the least expensive fossil fuel alternative. The case for clean energy isn’t ideological. It’s simple math. The low cost associated with the clean energy transition is both reality-based and the economically smart choice, yet the Trump administration is deliberately blocking clean energy deployment.
The World Inside the White House
Meanwhile, there is a distorted series of theatrical events playing out at the White House, each one more cut off from reality than the last.
Consider the morning of February 11, when TVA’s Board — stacked with Trump administration appointees abiding by his every executive order — voted unanimously to keep outdated coal plants alive, ignoring their own past financial reviews and engineering recommendations to close them. Trumps’ TVA Board did not ask a single question or have any public discussion — just adulation for the administration. TVA’s CFO then thanked Trump’s Energy Dominance Council for the spur to keep coal on life support, calling the same economically-indefensible infrastructure that has polluted our air for decades, “affordable, beautiful, and clean.”
That evening at the White House, Peabody Energy’s CEO presented the President with a golden trophy of a coal miner, inscribed: “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.” A trophy. From the coal company. To the president who accepted their campaign support and is now returning the favor on that investment. The next day brought another delusional performance: the Trump EPA rescinded the scientific finding that greenhouse gases harm public health, stripping the legal basis for any regulation of carbon pollution nationwide — much of which comes from burning coal. Connecting the dots?
Then, at this week’s State of the Union, the President declared “energy dominance” and “drill, baby, drill” at the same time that atmospheric carbon dioxide sits at its highest recorded levels in human history due to decades of pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere, destabilizing the climate. Our own Southeastern states live with the consequences: billion-dollar disasters, like Hurricane Helene in 2024, are spiking, and our utilities are adding the resulting costs of both weathering these events and recovering in their aftermath into our monthly power bills.
Despite the absurdity, the reality is that American families will now fund both the aging coal plants Trump has ordered be kept alive, and the massive new methane gas plants that utilities are racing to build largely to serve data center demand that is projected, but not proven. The result: redundant capacity, doubled costs, and decades of rising emissions, all to pander to a political performance.
Two Realities. One Choice
Meanwhile, carbon dioxide doesn’t check federal policy before entering the atmosphere. The pollution will keep rising — and so will our power bills — until we demand better. The only antidote to a world where grift gets rewarded with trophies and sycophantic groveling is people who refuse to stop telling the truth. For 40 years, SACE has stood firm when facts were inconvenient for the powerful. Reality is not subject to a unanimous board vote, a presidential executive order, or a golden trophy.
That’s exactly what the Clean Energy Generation movement is proving. Join us, and together we’ll keep building the affordable, resilient future our families deserve until it becomes the reality we all live in.
Join the Clean Energy Generation
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