Visualizing 2026
Some big accomplishments in 2025 and a look at the year ahead
2025 marked an incredibly successful year for us at Energy Bad Boys and Always On Energy Research (AOER). Today, we’re going to give you a sneak peek at what’s to come in 2026 and reflect on some of the highlights of 2025.
As always, thank you to all of our Energy Bad Boys readers for their ongoing trust in our content. We’re incredibly grateful that you spend (almost) every Saturday with us.
2026: Onward and Upward
One of our key focuses in 2026 will be data visualization. We already do the hard work of digging through primary sources and assembling datasets; why not present them with interactive graphs, maps, and charts so they are more likely to be shared by our readers?
As an example, we made the video below of a bar chart race with Flourish. It shows the All-Sectors electricity prices for each state from 2001 through August of 2025 as they change over time. As you can see, there is some sorting that takes place between liberal and conservative states during this time frame. Take a look!
These types of graphics, in addition to the maps and graphs we’ve recently made with Datawrapper, represent a leveling up of our ability to communicate with the general public and provide policymakers with useful and shareable information.
More to come in 2026!
Speaking of Useful Information
We are also very excited to announce that Sarah Montalbano will be joining the AOER team. In addition to being an accomplished policy analyst and a terrific writer (check out her Substack here), she has a background in computer programming and data science, and we are excited to leverage these skills to (hopefully) automate some of the manual data-collecting work we do with EIA forms, utility filings, and other datasets.
Ideally, we’ll be able to build interesting dashboards like this one so we can compare things like electricity prices across utilities over time.
We’re also looking forward to expanding the analyses we can conduct with our S&P Global Capital IQ subscription to deliver more deep dives into utility finances and broader power-sector trends.
Projects
Right now, we are working on some fun projects that will carry us through the first quarter of 2026, including:
A Levelized Cost of Energy analysis for the state of Indiana on behalf of Reliable Energy Inc. The project compares the cost of new generation to the existing fleet as Indiana seeks to navigate affordability concerns and new data center demand.
Rate case intervention with our friends at the Arizona Free Enterprise Club. We will be helping with the analysis of the Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power rate cases.
The Social Cost of Blackouts: A deep dive into the economic impact of power outages and the time value of electricity.
Blue States, High Rates will be an ongoing project for us.
What’s driving costs in Wisconsin? We’ll be doing a policy brief on the factors increasing electricity prices in Wisconsin, and draw from our previous work at Center of the American Experiment for a forecast of things to come.
If you or your company would like to work with us for your energy analysis needs, please reach out at isaac@aoenergy.org.
The Best of 2025
We completed several projects at AOER in 2025. They included:
A report with the Commonwealth Foundation in Pennsylvania modeling the cost of Governor Shapiro’s proposed renewable energy mandates and PA’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The report was cited by Pennsylvania lawmakers and helped get legislation passed removing Pennsylvania from RGGI this fall.
Reliability and cost modeling for the Prime Mover Institute on the EPA’s proposed rules to repeal Biden-era regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. We argued the administration was massively undercounting benefits because it was simply reversing many of the Biden administration’s assumptions. We received several emails stating our comments were the best the readers had seen in the docket.
An analysis of the cost savings of phasing out wind and solar subsidies in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for Alex Epstein.
An update to our 2024 report on the cost of decarbonization with our friends in New England. The report should be out in January.
An analysis of the enormous cost of green hydrogen in Colorado for the Independence Institute.
A report calculating the tax revenues of coal, natural gas, oil, wind, and solar for the Wyoming Liberty Group.
Calculating the cost and reliability implications of the Arizona Public Service IRP for the Arizona Free Enterprise Club.
Expert witness testimony involving the certificate of need for a proposed solar project in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa.
Blue States, High Rates.
We haven’t written summaries of all of these projects on Energy Bad Boys. That’s in part because we like using this platform to explore new topics, because eventually it probably feels like too much self-promotion, and, most importantly, because we feel like reading summaries of our reports probably gets repetitive for our readers, and we value your time and attention spans.
Let us know in the poll below if you want more summaries, fewer summaries, or if you’re happy with the balance we’ve struck so far. No post next week. We’ll see you in 2026.
The bar chart from 2001 to date with a “flourish” is brilliant. Ask any 3 year old child in the United States where electricity comes from and they will excitedly run to the switch on the wall and push it “up” for “on” and “down” for “off”! That is basically the multi generational understanding of electric power in the USA from Edison’s discovery forward, so the graph is just a gem. It is a real graphic reminder that if you don’t run down the RGGI and other rabbit holes and let the IOU’s put everything and the kitchen sink into rate base that you don’t have to plan on paying .50 cents a kilowatt hour by 2030. Simple is good. It has been a very good year for the EBB’s and their ability to bring the most important issues forward, with precise data and reasoned arguments for generating and sending an electron down the line in the most efficient manner. So carry on EBB’s, give ‘em Hell!
Looking forward to your work in Arizona!