Affordability is back in political fashion because it is important to voters. Democrat candidates talk about the grocery bill, rent, utility bills, and the cost of raising a family and pretend it isn’t their policies that are driving high energy prices. Energy costs are embedded in everything we buy.
Germany ran the Democrat climate policy experiment first and faster. We should learn from them.
This year, German manufacturing employment fell by 144,100 jobs, or 2.7 percent. Chemicals fell 3.6 percent. Electrical equipment fell 3.4 percent. The auto industry took the hardest hit. Its workforce dropped to 691,500, the lowest in 20 years.
Recently, Volkswagen's supervisory board approved 50,000 additional job cuts, with about half in Germany. The plan doubles the reductions agreed to since late 2024 and clears the way to cut the vehicle lineup by as much as half by 2035.
Energy is not Germany's only problem. Even though they pay about double the U.S. average, the highest in the G20. Labor costs are high, growth is weak, regulations are strangling, and Chinese competitors are good.
This makes expensive power more important, not less. When factories are already fighting for survival, another cost disadvantage is the last thing they need.
The International Energy Agency reports that in 2025, electricity for energy-intensive industry in the European Union cost roughly twice U.S. levels and about 50 percent more than China. Just six years ago, the gap was much smaller: about 50 percent above the U.S. and 20 percent above China.
Germany shows why cheap renewable energy and cheap electricity are not the same thing.
Wind and solar can generate power at low cost when the weather cooperates. But a factory or data center does not buy a solar panel's marginal cost. It buys electricity from a whole system that must deliver every second of every day.
With wind and solar, that system needs new transmission lines, congestion management, balancing, and power when the wind drops. Ratepayers pay for all of it.
China took a different path.
China is the world's largest builder of coal, wind, and solar. In 2025, it added 315 gigawatts of solar, 119 of wind, and 78 of coal, the most in a decade.
At typical Chinese capacity factors, about 14 percent for solar and 24 percent for wind, 315 GW of new solar is about 44 GW of actual output over a year, and 119 GW of wind is about 29 GW. That is far less power than the 434 GW headline.
78 GW of new coal at 50 percent utilization averages about 39 GW. It can run when the weather doesn't, and it can be turned up or down as needed.
China is not choosing between coal and renewables; it is building both. Democrats, at great expense, want to rapidly end coal in the U.S.
That exposes a contradiction in Democrat climate policy. China, powered by coal, makes panels, batteries, and electric vehicles that Democrat rules pressure us to buy. Democrat policy creates the demand and Chinese factories, running on cheaper power and labor with little environmental cost, fill the order.
America starts with an advantage: we have abundant natural gas, a large coal and nuclear fleet, and strong renewable resources. Rising demand from AI data centers and manufacturing makes affordable, reliable power more valuable, not less.
Mandates, subsidies, and rules that squeeze out dependable generation before their useful lives are up and reliable replacements online, adding more intermittent wind and solar, produce the same sequence here: higher bills first, lost factories later.
So judge energy policy by what the customer pays for delivered, reliable electricity, not by the advertised cost of one generating technology.
Energy costs eventually become grocery, housing, and manufacturing costs, as well as wages. We are paying for past Democrat climate-energy policies.
A candidate who wants to talk about affordability should be asked a simple question: do you want Germany's result caused by their green policies? Aren’t your policies similar?
America should heed the warning before it gives up an advantage it already has.