A carbon price can be a tough sell when electricity costs are rising.
That’s what governors up and down the eastern seaboard are facing as they decide what to do with revenues from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an 11-state cap-and-trade program for the electricity sector that operates from Virginia to Maine.
In Virginia and New Jersey, two states where Democratic governors won last year amidst a maelstrom of concern about rising electricity prices, the program has been at least partially reoriented around putting dollars back into the pockets of ratepayers.
Virginia only recently rejoined the group this year after having left under the leadership of Republican Glenn Youngkin in 2023. When Virginia was last a member of RGGI, the proceeds from the auctions for emissions allowances largely went to an energy efficiency program for low-income households and a flood resilience fund. Today, having rejoined RGGI, some 45% of the revenue will be earmarked for rate relief, thanks to a budget amendment passed in June.
In New Jersey, meanwhile, Governor Mikie Sherrill has used money raised through to help fulfill the rate freeze pledge on which she centered her campaign for Drumthwacket by directly reducing bills.
Conservatives in RGGI states have for years tried to make a stink about the up-front costs it imposed on ratepayers. Now as electricity costs balloon, Democratic governors and state legislatures are looking to RGGI to help balance their emissions goals and efforts to keep electricity bills under control.
In New Hampshire, for instance, the most conservative state to be a consistent RGGI member, nearly all the state’s proceeds from the program now go to rate relief, compared to about three-quarters historically. In its latest report on how RGGI funds get used, the organization reported that in 2024, the last year for which comprehensive data is available, some 23% of RGGI proceeds went to direct bill assistance, compared to 16% over the 17-year lifetime of the system.
“The affordability narrative is the leading political narrative of 2026. And the albatross around the neck of carbon pricing has been that it’s going to raise energy prices,” Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, told me.
Seen holistically, Burtraw told me, “carbon pricing is built for affordability.” That’s because, one, economists generally consider carbon pricing the cheapest and most efficient way to hit a given emissions reduction goal (assuming, that is, that you want to reduce emissions in the first place), and secondly because the proceeds from the carbon price can be invested and distributed in ways that mitigate price hikes.
“Carbon pricing raises tremendous proceeds, and the question comes down to the distributional impacts of carbon pricing. It always comes down to how you use those carbon proceeds,” Burtraw told me.
The current pressure for rate relief comes as RGGI prices have risen as the same time electricity prices up and down the East Coast are at or near all-time highs. The clearing price in the latest quarterly auction for carbon dioxide allowances was $35 per ton, the highest price in the history of the program, bringing in some $642 billion to be distributed among the states. By contrast, the third quarter auction in 2025 had a clearing price of $19.63 and raised some $300 million.
At the same time, electricity bills have risen across the RGGI system, including an 18.5% rise in New Jersey by 12.5% rise in New Hampshire just over the past year, according to Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub.
Because every state in the RGGI system besides Virginia operates in a restructured wholesale electricity market, it’s hard to say exactly how much RGGI prices affect ratepayer bills. In Virginia, Dominion, the dominant utility, has requested permission for a rider on bills of $10 to $13 per month, compared to monthly added costs under $3 when Youngkin began the process of withdrawing Virginia from the system in 2022.
In a New Jersey regulatory filing, meanwhile, the state’s Board of Public Utilities recommended using RGGI proceeds to fund $150 million of rate relief for moderate- and low-income households that Sherrill announced in June, citing an update to the state’s three-year strategic plan for RGGI that directly the NJBPU “to provide direct bill credits on residential energy bills for NJ’s most vulnerable residents.” There is precedent for this in the Garden State: In 2025 Governor Phil Murphy helped deliver rate relief by shifting some RGGI money around.
The trend toward using RGGI funds for rate relief has caused disquiet among environmental groups that support carbon pricing and want to see the dollars largely go to energy efficiency programs, not ratepayers.
In 2025, a coalition of Virginia environmental groups that supported rejoining RGGI called for revenue to go to the “low-income energy efficiency fund and the Community Flood Preparedness Fund.” The Flood Preparedness Fund issues grants to local governments for flood mitigation and resiliency projects, while the energy efficiency programs fund things like home weatherization.
“The case we’ve made to our environmental advocates in Virginia is that we have taken 45% towards RGGI credits, but we’ve left 55% of the revenue. That leaves each of the programs with record levels of funding,” Josephus Allmond, Virginia’s chief energy officer, told me, referring to the flood and energy efficiency programs that have historically been funded by RGGI.
“We were able to take what could have been a pretty negative impact to residential customer bills and turn it into something we can basically hold customers harmless.”
While the Natural Resources Defense Council has said it supports temporary rate relief to low-income ratepayers, it also has also mounted a defense of using RGGI revenues “to fund energy and environmental programs.”
“Several states are using larger amounts of program proceeds to provide households with bill credits or rebates that immediately lower monthly electricity bills, which means less investment in programs that provide long-term benefits,” Jo Gardias and Dawone Robinson wrote for the NRDC.
To me, Gardias framed the debate between energy efficiency programs and bill credits as between up-front and long-term benefits.
“Energy efficiency programs not only save the households that are getting the upgrade money, but every other customer through avoided transmission and distribution and generation costs,” Gardias told me. “On the far end there’s energy efficiency where you’re getting lifetime savings, on the shorter or more immediate end there’s the bill credit on energy savings.”
RGGI itself has estimated that every $1 of investments funded by the auction results in a lifetime bill savings of just over $4. In 2024 alone, RGGI claims that investments “are associated with approximately $363.9 million in annual energy bill savings and $2.6 billion in lifetime bill savings.”
“The question of how you spend proceeds is a large question of tradeoffs,” Gardias said. “What we’re seeing now is that because we have price spikes that are happening from data centers and other factors, there’s more interest in spending money on bill credits that provide immediate relief.”
Of course, this is the dilemma with all climate policy. The costs are immediate and upfront, while the benefits accrue over time and are more difficult to attribute to any one program or investment.
“There’s a lot of priorities for ways that you should use carbon proceeds to address the challenges of climate change,” Burtraw said. “But in 2026, given the affordability narrative and the populist sentiment in politics today, it makes sense to use carbon proceeds to reduce electricity prices.”
While an economist could draw up a cost benefit analysis that shows any number of uses of the proceeds could be more efficient for the economy or the environment — using the money to reduce taxes on investment, say, or using the money to fund energy efficiency programs — any of those would assume certain baseline of support for carbon pricing in the first place.
“For 25 years we’ve argued about this with the expectation that carbon pricing was inevitable because it was so much more efficient than any other type of approach. But we’ve seen after 25 years that carbon pricing is not inevitable,” Burtraw said. “We have to face the realities of what it takes to make it possible to do carbon pricing.”
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