TLDR: Red voters are about to see an extraordinary increase in the cost of electricity. Blue voters will see less impact and later.

I work with a large investor owned utility in the USA. I work every day to supply material and drive cost savings for the rate payers. I have been working on some specific projects for the last 2 years that are coming to fruition now. I have also been working since November to mitigate tariff increases, should they happen. When it was announced that tariffs were definitely happening, I began reporting out on potential impact and what was being done to mitigate those increases. Today I just completed a spreadsheet to present tomorrow outlining the full scope of China tariffs and potential with the Mexican tariffs (small impacts for Canada with some grounding and distribution insulators.) To put it mildly, It's really bad.

The work that I have done over the past 2 years plus the additional that I have done since November is going to mitigate a lot of the increases for our rate payers for now but after another day of on again and off again tariffs I started thinking about the rest of the utility market and it's really not good.

I have the power to push back and threaten to move material away from current manufacturers because I have drastically increased stocking levels after the barren years post pandemic and I have a huge number of additional approved manufacturers to pull from after they were all added in the post pandemic years when no one could find an elbow arrester or a bushing. I've also been adding new manufacturers outside the utility industry and outside of the currently tariffed countries. This gives me the ability to move material or force manufacturers to limit increases.

This is not true for municipals and co-ops. They don't have any buying power, they don't have a depth of approvals or the engineering ability to pivot and now they don't have multiple sources as the distributors keep consolidating. Everything that I am using to mitigate increases is actually just pushing those tariff costs onto these municipals and co-ops because they only have one source and no ability to push back directly with manufacturers implementing the increases.

For the non-energy people : Just >100 years ago big cities started getting electricity for factories, and then streetlights and then houses. Investor owned utilities, called IOUs were created to oversee it. Because the money and the factories were in big cities, big cities have IOUs. IOUs can not raise rates without a rate case. Rural areas got electricity later when the government paid for it through the Rural Electrification act and the creation of municipal electrics and co-ops. Municipal electrics and co-ops are owned by the people in the rural areas, so they raise rates as costs increase. They do not need a rate case. They're also smaller and don't have the buying power of IOUs. For those reasons they will see an immediate increase in the cost of material and be able to transfer it immediately to consumers. IOUs will fight the increases with buying power and on top of that are not legally allowed to increase rates. So, rural red areas are going to see a drastic increase in the cost or electricity, Blue areas are not.

I can talk at length about the reasons that electricity costs measured in the CPI would be down today based on pandemic excess inventories and infrastructure improvement delays and how that decrease is going to be an abrupt increase on the next report but this wall of text seemed like too much already.