The bill arrives, you see the total—ouch. It’s higher than it was last year. But what are you supposed to do? It’s hot—really hot—and that air conditioner is your only relief. Are you really running your AC more than usual? Is that the only reason your electricity bill keeps rising?
Electricity costs more for reasons that predate any one president. The grid is old. Summers keep breaking temperature records. Utility companies are spending billions to replace aging equipment and harden lines against storms. And, recently, AI data centers have been coming onto the grid—and consuming as much power as a small city.
That's the backdrop. Policy happens on top of it. A president worried about household electricity bills would be racing to add cheap power to the grid and shield families from the cost increases caused by the AI infrastructure buildout. This administration has mostly done the reverse: accelerating the new demand, putting up hurdles for new wind and solar generation projects, and, most directly, making ratepayers keep uneconomic coal plants alive.
All of this is having real impacts on actual households’ monthly bills. As of April 2026, the average U.S. residential electricity price was about 18.8 cents per kilowatt-hour, up 18 percent from the average rate in January 2025, according to EIA data.
For a household using around 900 kilowatt-hours in a hot month, an 18 percent increase is another $25 to $30 on the bill. Every month. It stacks on top of the gas and grocery costs that are already up.
Demand is getting a green light
Data centers are the new big thing, and they require a lot of electricity. The International Energy Agency expects data centers to drive nearly half of all growth in U.S. electricity demand between now and 2030, and it estimates that a single typical AI-focused data center can use as much power as 100,000 households.
Adding the equivalent of another 100,000 households drives up the cost of electricity for actual households—regular Americans who pay their bills. You might think the government would slow down data center development to protect its citizens from skyrocketing electricity bills.
This administration's response was to clear the runway. A July 2025 executive order directs federal agencies to fast-track permits, open up federal land, and line up financing and tax breaks—loans, grants, tax incentives—for data-center projects that add more than 100 megawatts of new load.
Somebody has to build the substations and wires that serve all that. When utility companies front those costs, they recover them from consumers in the form of increased prices. Effectively, the same households competing with a data center for power are the ones paying to put it online.
Cheaper new power is getting a red light
It doesn’t have to be this way. We could be investing in ways to add more energy capacity to the grid, so that households and data centers can satisfy their power needs without driving prices up. The kind of energy that is cheap and could keep pace with our demand for AI data centers is the fast, fuel-free kind. EIA data show solar and batteries make up 79% of planned U.S. utility-scale capacity additions for 2026—a record 86 gigawatts overall—with wind adding another 14%.
Instead of fast-tracking the development of new energy capacity, this administration moved to slow it down. A day-one presidential memorandum froze new federal approvals, permits, and leases for wind projects. A federal court later struck that freeze down as unlawful and vacated it, and the administration dropped its appeal in mid-2026. But it kept hampering wind power by other means. In April 2026, the Interior Department agreed to cancel two offshore wind leases—Bluepoint Wind off New York and New Jersey, and Golden State Wind off California, about 4.4 gigawatts of planned capacity between them—and to reimburse the developers only if they redirected the money into oil, gas, or liquid natural gas.
What has this administration done?
The administration has also tried to keep existing supply on the grid past its expiration date. That comes at a cost, too.
The Energy Department has used emergency powers to keep coal plants open past the dates their utilities set to retire them. Michigan's J.H. Campbell plant was scheduled to close in May 2025; the administration ordered it to keep running under a series of 90-day emergency orders. Consumers Energy's filings put the cost at more than $80 million through September 2025, climbing to about $135 million in net costs by the end of the year—charges the utility is seeking to recover from ratepayers across 11 states in the regional grid.
The utility wanted to close the plant because it had cheaper options; state regulators approved the retirement, and even on the grid's peak demand day, the region had surplus capacity many times what Campbell provided. A federal order kept it open and sent the difference to ratepayers.
Families pick up the bill
Plenty of things move your electricity bill that fall outside of the president’s control: the weather, the utility provider, your state regulations. Federal policy is one input among several. Right now it's pushing costs up by loading more demand onto the grid while slowing down the development of cheaper new energy sources.
For a household, none of this shows up as an energy policy fight. It shows up as a bigger number on a bill you can't skip, in a summer that's already run more expensive (and hotter) than the last one.