Big Tech, Bigger Bills

Paying the price for AI’s growing power demand.

When her electric bill arrived this summer, Cassandra Lainez of northern New Jersey thought she’d made a mistake. She had used less power than last year — yet her bill jumped nearly thirty dollars. “It felt like a slap in the face,” she said. “I’m being charged more for using less.”

If you live in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, or Delaware, you may have noticed something similar. All three states share the same regional power grid — PJM Interconnection — and right now it’s being stretched thin by an unexpected force: the massive electricity appetite of high-end data centers powering artificial intelligence.

Power Suck, Wallet Drain

A recent investigation by More Perfect Union found that data centers — the sprawling server farms behind Amazon Web Services, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI — are quietly driving up electricity costs for everyone else on the grid.

“Americans’ utility bills are rising while Big Tech’s profits are going through the roof,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “We’re all subsidizing the wealthiest corporations in the world in their pursuit of AI.”

In northern Virginia — nicknamed Data Center Alley — more than 200 facilities already hum around the clock, filled with power-hungry computer chips training large-language models.

According to the Piedmont Environmental Council, the number of U.S. data centers nearly doubled between 2021 and 2024.

The companies behind them — Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google — are spending billions to expand. But the real costs don’t stop at their gates — they ripple across the regional grid.

Your Bill Caught in the Surge

Inside PJM’s wholesale power market, utilities buy electricity through an annual capacity auction — a bidding process meant to ensure enough future supply to keep lights on. Last year’s auction broke records: prices surged roughly 800 percent, with data-center demand responsible for 63 percent of the increase.

Those higher costs don’t just disappear; they’re passed along through the supply section of electric bills — the same area where Lainez spotted her mysterious jump.

“We saw customers with bills over $900 or even $1,000,” said David Lapp, Maryland’s People’s Counsel. “It’s unfathomable that ordinary residents are paying higher rates to support wealthy corporations building data centers.”

Utilities Love the Boom — and the Guaranteed Profit

Data centers also hit another part of your bill: delivery or distribution charges. That’s where utilities recoup the cost of new transmission lines, substations, and power plants — plus a regulated profit, usually around ten percent.

“The utility business model is more than a hundred years old,” explained Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School. “They build something, and the cost gets socialized to all the ratepayers who have no choice but to buy that utility’s service.”

It’s a model that rewards expansion. Every new data-center hookup justifies billions in new infrastructure — and for shareholders, bigger returns.

In Virginia, Dominion Energy has proposed six new power plants to keep up with data center demand. Tech companies would cover only about 30 percent of the cost, leaving residential customers to absorb much of the rest — by some estimates, nearly half. Dominion projects that average household bills could more than double to $315 per month within fifteen years.

Political Pushback

Some regulators have started drawing lines. Virginia, Utah, and South Carolina have all proposed legislation for a new customer class for large data centers, ensuring their infrastructure costs don’t spill over onto households. Oregon passed a comparable law this spring.

And in Pennsylvania, a similar bill was proposed in July. Meanwhile, tension continues to rise. Governor Josh Shapiro has publicly demanded reforms from PJM, warning that if the grid operator can’t rein in prices, “Pennsylvania will go its own way.” It was a striking statement — but as Spotlight PA notes, no state has ever withdrawn from PJM in the organization’s near-century history, and such a move would likely require legislative approval.

For now, Shapiro’s threat reads more as political leverage than practical plan, but it underscores growing frustration with how PJM manages soaring data-center demand against the goal of keeping electricity affordable.

Lawmakers and energy advocates are also calling for stricter rules requiring data-center operators to build their own generation capacity or purchase power off-grid so that ordinary customers aren’t forced to subsidize their usage. One independent market monitor, Joe Bowring, put it plainly: “If you’re going to bring data centers, we need to bring generation along with it.”

Neighbors Say No

Closer to home, the debate has already arrived. A proposed 2-million-square-foot AI data center at the former Cleveland-Cliffs steel-mill site in Plymouth Township, near Conshohocken, has drawn sharp pushback from residents concerned about rising power demand, noise, and strain on local infrastructure.

“We don’t think municipalities are ready to have these conversations or draft ordinances that can protect residents,” said Patti Smith, who’s part of the community opposition group.

Because Pennsylvania is part of PJM, what happens hundreds of miles away — from Loudoun County to Maryland — affects us here in the Philadelphia region. When demand spikes elsewhere, our grid and our wallets feel it too.

As AI projects multiply, analysts estimate that data-center-related grid upgrades could exceed $160 billion nationwide over the next fifteen years — potentially raising household electric bills by as much as 70 percent if policies remain unchanged.

For ratepayers like Cassandra Lainez — and many across southeast Pennsylvania — that’s reason enough to start asking questions. “If tech companies want to build these things,” she said, “they should pay for them — not us.”

Keep In Mind: 

• Shared grid, shared risk. The Philadelphia metro area is powered by the same PJM network that serves the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. A capacity crunch anywhere in the region can raise prices everywhere.
• Watch your bill. Check the supply or capacity line on your PECO or PPL statement — that’s where PJM market costs show up.
• Who’s paying for expansion? Ask utilities and local officials how new “large load” users such as data centers are charged.
• Stay involved locally. Plymouth Township residents moved fast when the Conshohocken project surfaced — showing how early public engagement can shape policy.
• Policy moves matter. Other states are setting new customer classes for data centers; Pennsylvania lawmakers may follow. Keep an eye on Harrisburg — these rules could decide who foots the bill for Big Tech’s electricity.

---

What do you think? Click the links (and watch the videos) for more information. Drop your thoughts in the comments below, or email us at editor@nwlocalpaper.com — especially if you’re open to sharing your opinions in a future article. Thanks for your civic interest and engagement!