You've noticed the pump. AAA had the national average for regular gasoline at $4.11 on August 21 — up from $3.14 at the same point last year. That's a 31% increase in twelve months, and it is not your imagination.
The cause isn't mysterious. A war involving Iran, Israel and the United States that began at the end of February has left the Strait of Hormuz — the shipping channel connecting the Persian Gulf to the open ocean — effectively closed to normal commercial traffic for months, and a ceasefire signed in June has since broken down.
The Energy Information Administration's figures show why a single waterway moves a global price. In the first half of 2025, about 20.9 million barrels of oil a day passed through Hormuz — roughly a fifth of the world's petroleum consumption. EIA's earlier analysis of 2022 flows put more than a fifth of the world's traded liquefied natural gas on the same route.
Brent crude started this year around $63 a barrel. In late August it's been trading in the $90s.
So a reasonable person concludes: oil is up, therefore my electric bill is next.
Here's the part almost nobody explains correctly.
Your electricity is barely made of oil
Petroleum generates about 0.4% of America's electricity. Not four percent — four tenths of one percent. Oil-fired power plants were mostly retired decades ago, precisely because of what happened in the 1970s.
The fuel that actually makes your electricity is natural gas: roughly 40% of US generation, per the EIA's most recent outlook. So the honest question isn't "what is oil doing," it's "what is natural gas doing."
And the answer this summer is going down. The EIA's August 11 outlook forecasts Henry Hub natural gas at $3.44 per million BTU for 2026 and $3.31 for 2027, with the current quarter down near $2.87 — a forecast the agency attributes to maintenance at LNG export terminals temporarily reducing the gas they draw, plus strong domestic production. Not to anything happening overseas.
Two different fuels. Two different markets. Two different meters in your life. Gasoline is directly and immediately exposed to a shipping lane on the other side of the world. Electricity mostly isn't.
And your power bill is going up anyway
This is the uncomfortable part.
The same EIA outlook has the US average residential electricity price rising from 17.3 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025 to 18.27 cents in 2026 — a 5.6% increase — and to 18.65 cents in 2027. Cheap fuel, rising prices.
California is further along the same road. The CPUC's Public Advocates Office puts average residential rates as of June at about 33.7 cents for PG&E, 34.4 for SCE, and 45.5 for SDG&E.
If it isn't fuel, what is it? Mostly the parts of the system that have nothing to do with what's burning: transmission and distribution infrastructure, wildfire mitigation and insurance, and — increasingly — the cost of building enough capacity for demand that's growing for the first time in twenty years.
That's the thing worth internalizing. The scary headline is about a war. The line item on your bill is about wires and demand. The second one doesn't stop when the first one does.
What history actually says about fuel shocks
Fuel spikes do reach your electric bill. They just arrive muted and late.
The clearest recent example is 2022, when European gas markets went haywire. The delivered cost of fossil fuel to American power plants rose 34% that year. The average residential electric bill rose 13% — from about $121 to $137 a month. Painful, but a third of the fuel move, because fuel is only one component of what you're buying.
Go back further and the pattern's the same. During the 1973 embargo, crude roughly quadrupled and US gasoline went from 39 cents a gallon to 53 cents in nine months. Electricity moved far less — and the durable consequence wasn't the price spike at all. It was that the country spent the following decade rebuilding what its power system ran on.
What solar does and doesn't fix
Since we're being precise about mechanisms, let's be precise about this one too.
Solar does nothing for gasoline. If your household spends $250 a month on fuel, panels on your roof change that number by zero. An electric vehicle changes it; solar panels don't.
Solar doesn't eliminate your electric bill either. You stay connected to the grid, and you keep paying the fixed monthly charges that come with a meter. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
What solar does is fix the price of the part that scales with use. When you generate your own power, that portion of your bill stops tracking whatever the utility charges next year. In a state where residential rates have roughly doubled in a decade, that's the part that compounds.
And it does nothing for outages by itself. A grid-tied system shuts down during a blackout for line-worker safety. Backup requires a battery — a separate purchase, and a separate decision.
That's the whole honest case. Not energy independence. Not immunity from world events. Just: one line on one bill, converted from a variable rate someone else sets into a fixed cost you already know.
The short version
The war is showing up at the pump — that's real, that's now, and solar doesn't touch it. Your electric bill is also going up, but for domestic reasons that would be true in a completely peaceful year. Be skeptical of anyone who blends the two together to create urgency, in either direction.
If you're evaluating solar, evaluate it on the boring math: your actual rate today, what you'd pay instead, and how the two diverge over twenty years. That case doesn't need a headline to hold up.
GRID doesn't sell solar to homeowners — GRIDcard connects homeowners with verified local solar pros who show their math.