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This episode was recorded Sept. 14, 2026.
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Diego Mendoza-Moyers: Today: It’s really hot in El Paso.
That probably sounds like saying water is wet. But, by at least one measure, 2026 has so far been the hottest year on record in El Paso. From January 1st through mid-September, the average daily temperature in El Paso has been 72.7 degrees, more than three degrees hotter than the historical norm.
And it’s not just hotter afternoons. It doesn’t cool down at nighttime as much as it used to in El Paso. Historically, in the month of September, nighttime lows average 68 degrees. But, so far this month, the coolest it has gotten each day is about 73 degrees on average.
That’s a big reason why El Pasoans are seeing eye-watering electric bills this summer totaling hundreds of dollars in many cases.
El Paso Electric also implemented a 13% rate increase in May. And that, combined with hot temperatures driving more air conditioning usage at homes and businesses is raising a real question of affordability. What happens if running the AC becomes prohibitively expensive for El Pasoans?
We’re facing a pernicious cycle: Hotter temperatures lead El Pasoans to run their air conditioners more. And more AC means more electricity consumption that translates into higher monthly bills.
At the same time, as demand for electricity increases across the region, El Paso Electric is responding by spending billions of dollars to build several solar farms and a power plant to supply more electricity to customers. El Paso Electric, in turn, will bake that into the rates we all pay so it can recover all that money the utility is spending.
To put it simply, we have two factors pushing up utility costs in El Paso: hotter temperatures and the power generation plants EP Electric is building to catch up with rapidly rising demand.
It doesn’t paint a great picture.
I’m Diego Mendoza-Moyers, a reporter with El Paso Matters. In a moment, I’ll welcome El Paso Matters CEO Bob Moore onto the podcast so he can talk through his reporting on climate change in El Paso and what that could mean for household affordability going forward.
First, this El Paso Matters Podcast episode is brought to you by our podcast title sponsor Tawney, Acosta and Chaparro, truck crash and injury attorneys. Their team of local, seasoned trial attorneys are ready to help if you’ve been injured in a crash.
And you can subscribe to the El Paso Matters Podcast on YouTube, or read our free reporting at elpasomatters.org.
Now, onto the show.
Bob, thanks for taking the time to join me. I know you’re a busy guy.
Bob Moore: Yeah, glad to be here and glad to see some slightly cooler temperatures on the horizon.
Diego: Yeah, really. I woke up this morning with some rain. That was nice to see, too.
But, Bob, just walk us through – you’ve really done some pretty intensive analysis and math of looking at the climate data in El Paso. Just tell us what you found in the story you wrote recently.
Bob: I think that the basic takeaway, as I said in the story, is that this could be the summer where people finally realize the financial impact of climate change, because a couple of things collided here.
As you said in the introduction, we had a rate increase that took effect at the beginning of May. And then we just had an extraordinarily hot summer. And, I mean, extraordinarily hot by historic standards, but just another summer from recent years.
And, so, I kind of wanted to figure out if we could isolate the financial impact of these rising temperatures. And it turns out we could, and I’ll talk about the intense math I did with the help of my friend Claude. I’m not usually a guy who’ll do a regression analysis, but I did here.
And, as it turns out, I mean, the important headline is, if our temperatures this summer had been more like what they were in the first 10 years of this century – so between 2000 and 2009 – our electric bills, even with the same rates in effect, would have been about $74 a month lower. So, like, $220 less throughout the summer.
If our temperatures were like where they were 100 years ago, we would have been paying almost $100 less a month or almost $300 through the course of the summer.
READ MORE: El Paso’s hotter summers adding hundreds of dollars to electric bills
Those are costs that we can directly attribute to climate change and to urban heat island issues in El Paso. But, really, it’s even more pronounced than that, because one of the key reasons that electric rates went up 13% this summer, as you mentioned, is because we have to build more and more generating capacity to meet this thing known as peak demand. We’ll talk more about that as we go along.
But it’s clear that things are much, much hotter. And, increasingly through the data, we can actually pinpoint a real turning point in El Paso, and that’s around 2009.
Starting in 2009, what used to be freakish occurrences – meaning something that happened once in the last 140 years – is all of a sudden happening every year in terms of heat. And that’s what we saw again this summer.
Diego: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about the overnight temperatures, Bob, that I mentioned at the top, but that’s one thing that’s really stood out for me, that the biggest increase you’ve seen in the temperatures historically versus what we’re seeing this year is overnight, where it’s, like, five degrees hotter than normal.
I mean, I should say, before you answer that, the historical norm is defined as, like, 1991 to 2020, I believe. And, so, that 30-year period, not even that long ago, that’s where we’re seeing a real departure from. So, it’s not like we’re comparing – when I say norm, it’s not like 100 years ago. It’s just from 1991 to 2020.
But, anyways, speak to kind of some of the things you saw in the data, overnight temps, things like that?
Bob: So, one number I like to look at is 75, the overnight low temperature of 75. Which, by real historic standards, is very, very warm. And, so, what I found is, prior to 2009, we had about a week every year where temperatures wouldn’t drop below 75 at night on average. Since 2009, it’s, like, a month every year where it just doesn’t drop below that.
And I think urban heat islands probably play as much of a role in this. And urban heat islands, for people who don’t know, is what happens when you sort of pave over nature and replace, in our case, desert sand primarily with asphalt and things like that. It tends to up the heat and retain the heat. And, so, we’re seeing that.
And you were mentioning earlier the overnight lows we’ve been seeing this month in September, where it should be much cooler, where we’ve had an overnight low on average of 73 through the first half of the month. That includes nights where it didn’t get below 78. And that is super warm.
And, so, what that means is a lot of people are running their air conditioning systems well into the early morning hours instead of cutting them off at about 9 at night. And we’ve all heard the metaphor of the frog boiling in the kettle where you just turn up the water a few degrees at a time and pretty much the frog’s cooked before the poor thing knows what happens. That’s essentially the world we’re living in right now.
As many times as you and I have written about heat in El Paso, the first response you always share (see) on social media is, “We’re in the desert, it’s supposed to be hot.” And it’s, like, yes, it is warm. But not only we’re in the desert, we’re at 3,800 feet elevation here. It’s supposed to be cool at night at that elevation, and that’s not happening.
And, so, there are these changes that we’ve kind of come to assume are normal, and I think we kind of take our eyes off the real issue here. And we’re far from alone. Climate change was a big issue for discussion in prior election cycles. We’re not hearing it talked about at all here, but it doesn’t mean it’s gone away. And El Paso is a living exhibit of this. As we’ve mentioned in our coverage a couple of times, there are only a couple of cities in the United States that are heating faster than El Paso.
Diego: Yeah, I believe, like, Las Vegas is one of the other communities.
Bob: Las Vegas and Reno. So, we’re the fastest warming place outside of Nevada, which is not where we’re going to be.
Diego: Yeah, and it’s interesting how I think some people, including myself at times, you would think of this summer as almost, like, kind of mild or sort of, “Hey, it’s not as hot as it was a couple of years ago”, right? I think it was ’23 or ’24 were the hottest on record.
But you mentioned earlier before we started recording that the winter and spring this year were, like, historically warm. And, so, even though I think this is only the fifth-hottest summer of all time in El Paso, the other seasons are warming as well. It’s not like it’s just the intensity of the summer increasing.
Bob: Right. And, so, the result of that is what you mentioned, is that through the first eight-and-a-half months of the year, we are on a record pace. And, so, here’s how we’re going to end the year: When 2026 wraps up, the four warmest years on record in El Paso will be 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026. Noticing a trend there? And there’s no reason to believe that that’s going to change.
We’ve got this massive El Niño that will create some destabilizing things, and we probably don’t know exactly how next year is going to work. I can guarantee you it’s going to be well above those historic 30-year norms that you were talking about.
Diego: Just one more numbers question before I move on. Can you speak to the frequency of 100-degree days, Bob? And just, is it true to say that 100-degree days are more common in El Paso than 20, 30, 40 years ago?
Bob: Much more common. So, this year, just in the summertime – and, by the way, when I talk about summer, I mean what meteorologists call summer, which is different than what humans define. So, just for calendar purposes, it’s June through August.
We had 52 days above 100 in June through August. That means more than half the summer days were above 100. As recently as 1984, we had one day. This used to be not common, but it would occur occasionally where you’d have one day in the year in El Paso where it got above 100. Now, it’s just repetitious that way.
And, a couple of years ago, we set the all-time record where we had more than 70 days above 100. So, we’re not reaching those levels, but it’s become the norm now to see 40, 50, 60 days a year where it’s above 100. And not that long ago, you wouldn’t see that many days above 100 in an entire decade. I mean, that’s how much it’s warming out there.
Diego: And we should mention the trend is clear to us, but also to the city, which adopted a climate action plan earlier this year in March. And that was something that had been under development for a while. So, I think the policymakers, to some extent, see this as an important issue to try to work on.
I don’t really – I think the climate plan really centers around, like, planting a lot of trees and trying to maybe install solar energy at, like, I think we saw at the airport, they kind of did, like, a shade structure. So, the city leaders and city staffers have seen the rising heat as a problem to try to address, but I don’t know how much sort of power they have.
You can kind of trim at the edges and try to do these things, maybe weatherize homes or put more efficient windows and things like that at certain low-income homes. But it seems like policymakers are – you’re kind of trimming at the margins, right, to try to attack this kind of overwhelming trend.
Bob: Yeah, it’s a lack of power and a lack of money that really drive a lot of this. So, the city’s kind of taking what steps they can. And I think a lot of people very interested in the climate would say that plan lacked ambition. But, then again, it’s a resource-constrained community for sure. So, that becomes problematic.
There’s no question that climate change represents an economic threat to El Paso. It represents a health threat that we don’t talk about enough. And those aren’t going away.
Diego: Yeah. And I want to shift back to EP Electric here. And you bring up the health question, which is of course, like, the biggest thing that it becomes as we have an increasingly warm world, it becomes a real matter of life and death if you have AC and the ability to afford to run your AC. And, so, it’s like this – the stakes are rising as the heat increases and electric rates increase at the same time. And, so, it’s just kind of a scary thing to see, right?
But I did want to mention, just to put it in perspective, El Paso Electric – so, like I said, they implemented the 13% rate increase earlier this year that was meant to collect money they’ve invested in power plants and these various things and transmission lines and various things they’ve done.
But going forward, from 2026 to 2030, El Paso Electric has planned $6.5 billion of capital expenditures. From ’22 to ’24, in those three years, they spent $1.5 billion on capital expenditure. So, in three years, they spent $1.5 billion. Now, they’re going to be spending $6.5 billion in the next several years.
Bob: And we’re not paying for that yet. We are going to pay for it in the future.
Diego: Exactly. And I know people at the utility would say, “Well, it’s not just for the heat. It’s because we under-invested in the grid for years amid stable demand.” And it’s kind of a nationwide trend. But I know utility people would say, “Yeah, this is much needed. We need to build new things.”
But, to me, I see this kind of threatening wave coming where we’re already seeing escalating prices. People are already freaking out about their bills as it is, right? I mean, you see people post online, like, $500 bills and things like that. Which, my first question is what do you set your AC at? Right? Because, if you set it low enough, it’s going to drive the bill no matter what.
But I just – I want to communicate to listeners, like, there’s a ton of money that EP Electric’s planning to spend, a lot of it on solar farms. There’s a handful of really, really large solar farms. So, I guess, to their credit, they’re going to try to shift off of the fossil fuels and things that contribute to climate change, but still spending many billions of dollars on all these things and new transmission lines and all this stuff.
And the way that it works is that, once EP Electric builds something and spends $200, $300, $400 million, they go to the Public Utility Commission and say, “Hey, PUC, we’ve just made this investment for the benefit of our customers. Let us bake that in the rates to collect that money from our customers.”
Bob: Plus a 9.5% profit margin.
Diego: Exactly. So, that really boosts it. And, so, I just – man, it’s kind of scary. And, I don’t know – I sometimes wonder how much El Paso Electric is concerned about, like, the average bill versus median income and kind of these general metrics of affordability. But I would just say to listeners, man, there’s a big wave of spending coming that’s going to be reflected in our rates in the next five to 10 years.
Bob: Yeah, and you and I have talked with people from the electric company pretty frequently. I think they are aware of the price sensitivity and the need to create systems that take into account both demand and sort of the financial limitations of the market. And that’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.
But, again, it comes back to, really, two issues that we’ve talked about at different times. One is climate change and the other is sprawl. And, so, what’s worth noting is this peak demand issue.
And, so, just so everybody understands, electric utilities in this country build their systems around peak demand. They don’t want the system to fail at the moment of greatest stress. And, so, in El Paso, that’s obviously in the summertime when everybody’s running their ACs. And I used to say, “We build these electric systems for three or four weeks a year and then don’t use them the other 48 weeks.” Now, we’re using them for three months a year because it’s just so hot for so long.
But we are building these systems to respond to the increasing demand generated by heat.
So, since 2016, the population of El Paso County has increased by 2% or 3%. The peak demand for the electric utility in that time has increased by 33%. And, so, they’ve had to build a system to adapt to that. That is the primary thing, along with sprawl where they have to build wider distribution systems, that’s really driving these rate increases.
And it’s funny, I always told our staff, including you, “Don’t read the comments on social media.” I made the mistake of reading the comments on social media after the story came out on the effects of climate change. And, in some circles, people just don’t want to hear it. They just want to hear that “electric company bad. They’re out there to get us” and everything. And the world just doesn’t operate that way.
And I’m not defending the electric company here at all. I think they – and they would probably acknowledge this – they made a lot of mistakes this summer as they knew bills were going up and they didn’t get ahead of them. And we can talk about some of those solutions that they’ve identified that they’re trying to get people to adapt now.
So, this isn’t meant to excuse the electric company at all. But the truth is we can identify why we’re paying more for electricity right now. And it’s that climate change is driving up peak demand and we’re spreading people out over a wider area without more people necessarily coming in. So, that’s all driving up these costs that we’re paying for now.
And, yes, it’s creating real issues for people. I’ve talked to people over the course of summer who’ve told me they have to turn their thermostats up higher because the only other alternative they have is to sacrifice food or medicine or something like that. Those are really difficult choices. And, as you indicated, it’s going to get worse.
And the other thing I’ll say, everything we’re saying about electricity right now, we can also say about water, right? So, we’re going to pay more for electricity and more for water in the coming years. And I’m pretty sure I can say I’m not seeing matching income increases going up. So, it is going to increasingly constrain people and we need to have deep conversations with political leadership, economic development folks about how we juggle all of this.
Diego: Yeah. And I’m glad you brought up the peak demand point because I think that would be lost on so many people. Like, what is this term? Who cares? But it’s just this idea that you have to build a system to meet this really, really high level of usage, even if it’s only there for, I guess, now for three months as opposed to three weeks. But you have to spend so many billions of dollars to build this very robust system where the utilization isn’t that high.
But the other thing, too, that I wanted to mention that’s kind of a little bit counterintuitive is that, as it relates to bills – I mean, first off, I think there’s kind of a popular assumption that, “Hey, there’s data centers sprouting up and now our bills are going up.” And there’s real complex questions in the future about (data centers’) impact to rates. But I think now we can say that it’s not – they haven’t operated yet.
Bob: Data centers are not driving up our rates today. That’s something we have to watch for. So, again, to get back to your earlier point, of all of the challenges we’ve had now, they’re only going to get steeper going forward.
Diego: But, just a funny point from EP Electric, their argument is actually that Meta coming here is, like, one of the things that’s going to help sort of keep rates from going up too much because, “Hey, Meta shows up and they’re absorbing the costs for grid maintenance that EP Electric currently spreads across all the customers.” Meta comes in, really big customer, they absorb, according to EP Electric, $40 million that they’re paying that current customers are no longer having to pay, or in the near future won’t have to. So, it’s just, people may not buy that, but that’s …
Bob: And not only will they not buy it, they’ll point to other places where electric rates have gone up as data centers have sprouted, too. It is a regulatory issue that we really have to pay attention to. And even Governor Abbott has changed his tune on this in the last few months as the elections draw near.
The real issue over the next few years is watching what regulators do if these data centers are built out, which they almost certainly will be. Can they protect ratepayers from absorbing the impact of those costs and instead make sure that the data centers are absorbing them? We don’t have a great history with regulators in Texas being sort of pro-consumer. They tend to be more pro-business. So, it’s something we really have to watch out for.
Diego: Yeah. And I think that’s one of the bigger questions I’ve had is, like, is our regulatory regime up to the moment (when) we’ve got this dynamic of a warming world? And then there’s also, at the same time, utilities investing all this money in the grid after decades of underinvestment.
And I just wonder if, is it going to come to a point where, “Hey, maybe the standard rate of return for utilities has to come down to, like, prevent societal chaos,” right? Or, that’s probably a harsh word, but just this idea that is there a point where utilities are unaffordable for a big chunk of the population? And how do you prevent that and address that? And, so, I think I have this bigger question of is our regulatory regime up to the moment?
Bob: I think the one way to rephrase that question a little bit, too, is that every dollar people spend on an electric bill or a water bill is a dollar they’re not spending somewhere else. So, it’s squeezing out other forms of consumption, which can have really tremendous economic consequences. And, so, that’s something we need to be focused on. And it has to start with regulators.
Diego: Yeah, that’s a good point. We’ll close here in a minute, Bob. But I did want to talk about potential solutions, I guess, or at least ways to sort of mitigate the really high bills people are facing. And, so, I wonder just what you saw or have heard about in your reporting on this topic of climate and rising electric bills?
Bob: So, there’s a couple of things. One that’s been around for a while and another that’s fairly new that’s in the toolkit of electric utilities everywhere. So, one is an annual billing program. So, you kind of spread the cost equally over 12 months rather than having these big spikes. And it’s important to note that at the end of 12 months, you’ve spent the same amount of money, but it can help people build more predictable budgeting tools so that they’re not paying $50 in the winter and $500 in the summer and trying to build that out.
The electric company at the start of the summer only had about 9% of their ratepayers on that kind of plan. That’s way, way too low. And they’ve really begun to try to market it a lot more. So, that is a tool that’s out there for at least to give people predictable bills. It doesn’t put any money back in their pocket.
The other one that folks can look at is this time of day billing plan, which other utilities have used, and El Paso Electric is starting with it now. And, basically, the idea behind that is you punish people for using electricity at the highest demand times during the day. And, so, that’s in the afternoon here in El Paso during the summertime. And, so, you agree to pay god-awful rates. I think it’s, like, 31 cents a (kilowatt-hour), which is more than twice the normal rate for anything you use during that period.
But, in exchange, you get a rate of something like 8 cents per (kilowatt-hour) at other times. And that can be very beneficial, particularly to people who are working during the day and they don’t have to cool their home. People like me, who, I work in an office, but I’ve got puppies at home. You’ve got to watch out for that.
But this is a voluntary plan. So, people can kind of do the math and, hopefully, the electric company has a customer service department that’s pretty good in my experience in kind of responding to customer needs, so they can explain it to you. You’ll have to pencil out the math to see if it works for you.
If you’re retired and you’re at home most of the day, it’s probably not a good plan for you. But, for many others, it might be. And that can lower your bills. And it can also, really importantly for El Paso Electric, it can lower that peak demand issue a little bit and maybe save us a few hundred million dollars over the next few years in new construction needs.
Diego: Yeah. And I think of time-of-use rates as reflecting the fact that a kilowatt-hour is not the same value at all hours of the day. And, so, at 2 in the morning, there’s not many people using electricity, a kilowatt-hour is not worth that much. But a kilowatt-hour at 2 in the afternoon or 4 in the afternoon, when it’s really hot, everybody is wanting to get some juice for their AC, a kilowatt-hour is more valuable and so you have to pay more for it.
And I think it’s the idea from the utility’s perspective – and I’ve talked to executives at El Paso Electric and if you ask them the question of, like, how do you address affordability, they’ll tell you that this is their idea of, “Hey, give people control where you run your appliances, you do laundry at the nighttime or in the early morning as opposed to in the afternoon,” or run your dishwasher, kind of stagger your appliance use and things like that.
So, I think – and I’ll say this, too. I think that, right now, it’s small. I think EP Electric looks at the time of use rates at the moment as, like, a pilot to sort of gather behavioral data and things like that on how customers respond. But I think, again, another thing to look at in the next three to five years for EP Electric customers is time of use pricing. I think they’re going to really push that really, really hard to where a big majority of customers are on it or at least have it available.
Bob: There may become a point where they try to make it mandatory, too. I mean, just because you basically try to tie the price to market demand and that’s what you wind up with.
Diego: Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to make a comment on here is rooftop solar, which is interesting because, I think for a long time, that was, like, one of the ways that, generally more affluent customers, but customers with the resources to afford it, like, that’s a huge tool to lower your bill, right? And to control just your usage of electricity that you’re buying from EP Electric.
But even on that, El Paso Electric recently implemented this demand charge, which is kind of a little bit of a complex charge. But it, really, if you talk to the solar companies, in many ways it kind of knocks out the value of having solar and really doesn’t result in that big of a savings so it’s not worth the investment.
So, I just think that that’s something that I think the solar advocates in town would point to of, like, “Man, that’s one of the biggest tools you had as a customer to lower your bill. And now that’s much less valuable.” And I think the value proposition isn’t quite there as much. So, of course, EP Electric would disagree with me and say that “Rooftop solar customers were paying too-little before.” But I do think that’s one thing that’s just one less way for people to control their bill.
Bob: And I think it points to the need to have more people involved in these decision-making processes. And I do think that the solar community has gotten a lot more active over the last few years, because there are other things that the electric company has done that they’re not particularly happy with.
But, at the end of the day, I mean, if regular electric bills aren’t affordable to people, for the vast majority of El Pasoans solar is just not an option, right? So, it can be an option, though, for governments and things like that. And you mentioned the airport example. So there are ways to try to expand that out that take more and more things off of sort of the main need for power. But they’re very complex issues and it’s going to require a lot of governments and a lot of businesses to kind of come together.
The price we will pay if we don’t do that is going to be immense. El Paso needs to get a better hold of this so that it can be economically competitive and be able to offer reliable energy to companies that might want to come in here or people who might want to live here. We’re a long way from that right now.
Diego: Yeah, and we’ll close here, Bob. But just as it relates to the climate for the rest of 2026, do you have any sense of how things are looking? And I will mention that, as far as rainfall, we’re a little bit behind the norm. We’re just over 6 inches as opposed to closer to 6.5 inches that we would typically receive by this time of year. But at least we’re not in the same historically dry conditions we saw the last couple of years. I think that’s one maybe slight mitigating force that’s prevented the heat this summer, just a tiny bit.
But, I just wonder if you have any thoughts on what to expect climate-wise for the rest of the year?
Bob: I think it’ll be pretty much a continuation of what we’ve been seeing. It’ll be much warmer than normal. And unless we get some kind of weird Arctic snap in the winter, we’re going to wind up with this being the hottest year on record, which if that doesn’t happen, it’ll be the second-hottest year on record.
So, this is just, it’s the new normal. But that doesn’t mean we need to accept that. We are going to have to one way or another adapt to these conditions. And all of the options to that involve expense. And, so, we need to – there’s no cheap options left and communities like El Paso that have low income levels are incredibly vulnerable right now. And we’re not seeing much conversation from the leadership of the community talking about issues like that.
Diego: Yeah, we’ll go ahead and wrap up after that, Bob.
I will say, man, I’m usually a pretty optimistic guy until we start talking about population trends and climate trends and so forth. There’s some sobering information out there. I think it’s important for people to realize.
Bob: It’s sobering, but it’s not inevitable. We have it in our power to change these things. The fact that we’re on course to set new records doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. We all have agency to become involved in that. And it’s just going to take all of us kind of demanding from our leadership that we want to have a response to these issues like population growth or lack of population growth and climate change and things like that. We’re still a democracy. We get to decide what we want our future to look like.
And I would just encourage, even if you don’t agree with anything I’m saying here, make your voice heard. And that’s the way that things can get changed. We are, I think, seeing an increase in activism on a lot of issues out there, which is a good thing. But we can’t pretend the solutions are going to be easy or painless. All of these solutions that we’re looking for right now are going to be quite painful. We have to have conversations about how we protect the most vulnerable as we begin to implement these changes.
Diego: All right, Bob, we’ll leave it there. Thanks again for your time. And maybe we’ll reconnect at the end of the year and see if it sets the record that we’re expecting.
Bob: Yeah, I hope I’m wrong, but I’m guessing I’m not.
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