I'm John Batson. I welcome my good colleague Bud Weinstein. He He is an emeritus professor of applied economics at the University of North Texas.

He is retired as the associate director of McGuire Energy Institute at SMU, a fellow of Good Enough College in London.

But is my go-to guy for the price of electricity, the price of oil, the price of gasoline, energy picture going forward for the balance of this century.

I won't see it, but I can see the numbers projected, and this is not a happy story unless.

But a very good evening to you, the price of electricity.

Everybody's seen this huge jump year over year compared to other other staples of a happy household.

The talk on the street is blame the tech centers.

Is that accurate? Is that enough blame or is there somebody else we should be blaming?

Good evening to you, Blad.

Good evening, John. It's good to talk to you again.

It's a complex picture. The president

talks a lot about affordability. People are concerned about higher energy costs, particularly

electricity. And the fact is that while overall inflation is fairly moderate, the data came in

yesterday, I think, at 2.7% year over year. But the price of electricity has gone up twice as fast over the past year. It's up about 4.5%. And if you look at the last five years, the price of power on average is up 30 to 35%, depending upon what part of the country you live in.

So this has become a real issue. Why is this happening? Well, it's happening, yes, in part,

because of the huge growth in data centers, servers, artificial intelligence. Those facilities

eat up a lot of electrons. And we do see construction of

these facilities occurring in many parts of the country. So yes, that is part of the reason that

electricity prices are going up, but it's not the whole reason. And the whole reason has to do

with the infrastructure of the United States, also the energy picture going forward.

So let's speak to the infrastructure.

That's the electricity grid.

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