The May 2026 edition of our monthly newsletter features our latest research, Introducing the Social Cost of Blackouts. Federal and state regulators already attach a dollar value to carbon emissions through the Social Cost of Carbon and rely on it to justify burdensome regulations and subsidies. Nothing equivalent prices the outages those same rules produce.

Always On builds just that, using tools the government and industry already rely on. Our report values the blackout costs of the Biden EPA’s carbon rules in the Southwest Power Pool, where the blackout costs alone are large enough to wipe out the rule’s entire claimed national net benefits.

Our research is already getting attention. The Denver Gazette’s editorial board made the case for the metric in Colorado, and its news team covered the framework and the state’s new role in SPP. In The Wall Street Journal, Kimberley Strassel featured the report in her All Things newsletter:

Environmental groups push regulators to use what they call the “social cost of carbon” to predict the supposed mounting price tag from greenhouse gas emissions. Now comes a great innovation from Always On Energy Research—a nonprofit that brings data to energy debates. In a new report, it introduces the “Social Costs of Blackouts,” which seeks to quantify the “economic and human costs of power outages caused by regulation.” The AOER report provides a seven-step process to calculate SCB, and helpfully provides a case study—using it to demonstrate the enormous costs of a particular Biden carbon rule. The report calls on regulatory bodies to be required to adopt SCB as part of their cost-benefit analyses, since “a regulation that prices one externality and ignores the other gives policymakers half the math.” Are Trump regulators paying attention?

Subscribe so you never miss an edition of Always On Energy Research’s monthly newsletter. We promise not to inundate your inbox. We’re too busy trying to stop bad policy to send more than one email per month!