New England Paid Nearly Twice What Texas Did for Wholesale Energy in 2025.
These numbers are useful for reference but not ready to publish. They mix very different measures. This is Claude’s work, not fact-checked and not for publication.
I asked for this after a story about Australia getting US5¢ bids for solar plus batteries, and I wanted a rough comparison.
The rough takeaway: Europe is high. Asia runs lower than Europe. US markets differ by roughly 2x on energy alone, and more once capacity charges are added. (Dave)
From Claude
There is no official state-by-state wholesale electricity price. Prices are set by grid operators, and their footprints ignore state lines. So this table maps each state to the market that serves it and reports that market’s 2025 average, mostly from its independent market monitor. The spread is wide. Real-time energy in New England averaged $65.89/MWh, against $36.94/MWh in ERCOT, which serves most of Texas. Roughly half the country has no wholesale energy market price to report at all.
| States | Market | 2025 price | ≈ ¢/kWh | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont | ISO-NE | $65.89/MWh real-time; $71.81/MWh day-ahead | 6.6 | ISO-NE Internal Market Monitor |
| New York | NYISO | $74.40/MWh, energy plus ancillary services, statewide | 7.4 | NYISO market operations report |
| Delaware, D.C., Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia; parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina | PJM | $50.73/MWh real-time load-weighted LMP; $82.67/MWh total wholesale cost | 5.1 (8.3 total) | PJM market monitor |
| Texas (about 90% of load) | ERCOT | $36.94/MWh energy; West zone $41.59/MWh | 3.7 | ERCOT market monitor |
| California | CAISO | About $39/MWh day-ahead | 3.9 | CAISO Department of Market Monitoring |
| Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Dakota, Wisconsin; most of Michigan, Indiana, downstate Illinois, and Missouri | MISO | About $41/MWh real-time, our average of four seasonal monitor figures, December 2024–November 2025 | ~4.1 (estimate) | MISO market monitor quarterly reports: winter, spring, summer, fall |
| Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and parts of neighboring states | SPP | Not yet sourced | — | — |
| Southeast (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, most of North Carolina) and the West outside California | No RTO energy market | No state-level wholesale price. Across the Western Energy Imbalance Market, 15-minute prices averaged about $34/MWh | — | CAISO Department of Market Monitoring |
What the numbers measure
Each figure is a market-wide average applied to every state in that market. Prices inside a market vary by zone. ERCOT’s West zone, for example, averaged $41.59/MWh against $36.94 market-wide, per the ERCOT monitor. The state-to-market mapping is ours, and several states straddle two markets. The MISO figure is our unweighted average of the monitor’s four seasonal real-time prices: $40.57 (winter), $35.07 (spring), $48.56 (summer), and $39.20 (fall). It is an estimate, not a reported annual figure.
Capacity widens the gap
Energy is only part of the wholesale bill where capacity markets exist. In PJM, the total wholesale cost was $82.67/MWh in 2025, including capacity at $12.94 and transmission, against an energy price of $50.73, per the PJM monitor. New England’s total wholesale cost came to $127/MWh of load served, according to ISO-NE. ERCOT has no capacity market. Its all-in price, covering energy, reserves, and uplift, was $38/MWh, according to its monitor.
Gas set the direction
Henry Hub averaged $3.52/MMBtu in 2025, up 56%, and prices rose at most major trading hubs, according to EIA. New England felt it most. Gas there averaged $6.27/MMBtu, more than double 2024. Texas felt it least. ERCOT’s all-in price rose 13.8% while gas rose 61%, which its monitor attributes to new solar and storage pushing expensive gas units off the margin.
Edited and authored by Dave with close collaboration by Claude.