Exposing your electric bill’s hidden supply chain

Food, gas pump, electric—these bills keep going up, and no matter what you do, it feels like you have zero control over it. But here’s what you probably don’t realize: these bills are connected. They’re all at the end of the same energy supply chain, and every step along that chain is vulnerable to price spikes, which trickles down to our everyday items. Lately, these prices have become more and more unaffordable.

Wes Herche, a former U.S. intelligence officer turned energy executive, said we need to start treating energy for what it is: “Our life is not only dependent on energy, it’s an expression of energy.” 

Herche has seen the negative impacts of the country’s energy supply chain up close, and he said it’s time for America to start making a change. Watch this episode of Plugged In or keep reading to learn how the energy supply chain is increasing your bills and how to free yourself from that chain.

For most of human history, we had a direct relationship with our energy. If you wanted heat, you chopped wood and you tended the fire. You knew exactly where the heat came from because you went and got it yourself.

The way most of us get electricity today is quite different: you flip a switch and it comes invisibly through a wall. Of course, it doesn’t magically appear. Somewhere—likely hundreds or thousands of miles away—fuel came out of the ground, was transported to a power plant, burned to spin on a turbine, stepped down at a substation, sent through distribution lines, through a transformer on a pole in your neighborhood, through thermometer on the side of your house and then, finally, into your walls.

That’s the supply chain behind every kilowatt-hour of energy you use. Every hand it passes through between the fuel source and your outlet adds costs, and when something disrupts that chain upstream, the effects don't stay contained to your power bill. Earlier this year, escalating conflict around the Strait of Hormuz pushed gas prices up, but few people connected that same disruption to the cost of groceries, restaurant meals, or anything else that depends on transportation, refrigeration, or manufacturing.

"When you start seeing that our modern economy is an expression of energy, it makes a lot more sense," Herche said. "Otherwise, you miss it a little bit. You're like, 'That's weird, all these prices are more expensive.' If you start with the premise that the entire economy is an expression of energy, then anytime the price of energy goes up, everything's going to be more expensive."

In other words, it's not a coincidence that U.S. residential electricity prices have climbed significantly over the past decade, with no sign of leveling off. Gas, groceries, and electricity all run on versions of the same supply chain—they just show up on different receipts.

If a long supply chain is what makes things expensive and exposed to disruption, shortening it is the fix. For home energy, that’s exactly what solar panels can do.

Sunlight hits your panels, and that energy goes straight into your home. Instead of a dozen steps between fuel source and outlet, there's basically one. Add a battery, and you're storing that energy for nighttime and cloudy days. Add an electric vehicle and home charger and you're fueling your car from the same source, no longer at the mercy of gas prices every time you fill up.

Herche sees a historical parallel in the victory gardens millions of Americans planted during World War II to ease pressure on strained supply chains. 

"The idea was that the way you could support and help—and also just be more self-reliant and resilient—was if you had a patch of lawn, you should create a garden," he said. "I think it's a similar theme [to solar panels]. There's the hardcore economics of it: 'I'm going to start being less of a passive consumer and take a more active role.' But there's also a piece that's almost as much psychological as it is economically mathematical."

A hundred years ago, energy was something that people actively managed. Over time, it became something that just happened to us. Solar, batteries, and EVs are a way to take some of that control back.