Kristen Schwab

Luhe is nervous.

He's worried about his personal budget, and he's cutting back on spending.

Less family vacations or trips, if any at all.

Less going out to eat.

He figures if he's spending less, the people who might buy his appliances are spending less too.

I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

These prices have got to be sustainable for a very long period of time.

You'd have to see $70 a barrel going out for several years to be able to say, hey, when we drill this well, which we expect to produce for 20 years, we have to get a return on it that our shareholders are going to be happy with.

Places in Texas, New Mexico, while they're producing oil, they produce natural gas as a byproduct.

And so you have this excess of natural gas just because there's a lot of production happening there.

And so that keeps prices slightly lower in general here.

Data centers are kind of the first

Boulder rolling down the hill triggered a broader rock slide.

There are White House orders forcing aging power plants held together by duct tape to remain open, even when their own owners want to close them to stop losing money.

The grid was largely built in the 60s and the 70s, and these assets are just coming towards the end of their useful life.

hurricanes, wildfires, storms.

And if you think about like the frequency and severity of those getting worse over time, then that obviously drives the need for investment to be even greater.

And that could continue to put upward pressure on people's utility bills going forward.

Going into this year, insurance companies knew a lot of people were likely to drop ACA coverage because it was clear that Congress was not going to extend the extra financial support many people had been getting to buy insurance on the marketplace.

Matthew Fiedler at the Brookings Institution says they also had a good idea of who was likely to go without insurance.