<span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> America’s Grid Is Being Rewired For AI… And Guess Who’s Paying For It For decades, electricity sat in the background of American life. You flipped the switch. The lights came on. The bill showed up, mostly predictable, mostly boring. But lately, something’s changed. Quietly at first. Then all at once. Power bills are climbing fast, and not in the gentle, forgettable way people are used to. They’re jumping. Spiking. Showing up in kitchen-table conversations and campaign talking points. And underneath the noise about inflation and climate goals is a less visible force pulling hard on the grid: a sudden explosion of power-hungry data centers feeding artificial intelligence around the clock. What was once a technical issue has turned political—and it’s barreling straight toward the 2026 midterms. The Bill Shock Is No Longer Subtle One bill, two worlds: home vs. AI server farms. To understand why electricity is suddenly getting expensive, start with the raw numbers. Retail power prices in the U.S. are now at record highs—and the climb has accelerated. By late 2025, the average retail price of electricity hit 18.07 cents per kilowatt-hour, after jumping 7.4% in a single month. That was the biggest one-month increase in nearly two years. Step back a little further and the picture gets uglier. Between 2022 and 2025, average U.S. electricity prices rose by low double-digit percentages, stacking right on top of already painful inflation. Electricity has stopped being a quiet utility expense and started behaving like rent or groceries—a full-blown cost-of-living pressure point. And for tens of millions of Americans, the pain runs straight through one massive grid. PJM: Where Wholesale Pain Becomes Household Pain If you live in the Mid-Atlantic or Midwest, odds are you’re plugged into PJM, the giant regional grid that serves nearly one-fifth of the U.S. population. Here’s where things get expensive fast. Recent PJM capacity auctions have locked in record, multi-billion-dollar payments to power generators and transmission builders. In one round alone, total consumer costs landed in the mid-teens of billions of dollars—for just a single delivery year. Those aren’t abstract numbers. They flow straight into retail rates. Analysts point out that rising wholesale power prices, capacity payments, and transmission upgrades inside PJM are now a primary driver of higher household electricity bills, especially in states tightly tied to the grid’s markets. But even PJM’s price shocks don’t fully explain what’s coming next. For that, you have to look at the buildings nobody sees. The New Power Hog Nobody Asked For Underneath the headlines about “AI innovation” sits a very old-fashioned reality: servers burn electricity. A lot of it. All day. All night. No weekends. No seasons. Modern data centers are not polite little office parks. They’re industrial-scale power machines—endless racks of servers humming, cooling, and drawing load around the clock. And the projections have exploded. New estimates from BloombergNEF suggest U.S. data-center electricity demand could reach about 106 gigawatts by 2035. That’s roughly four times the approximately 25 gigawatts of operating data centers reported in 2024. Even more striking, that 106-GW figure is 36% higher than Bloomberg/NEF’s own forecast earlier in 2025, reflecting a sudden surge of mega-scale projects—more than a quarter of them larger than 500 megawatts each. These aren’t edge cases anymore. They’re grid-shaping loads. The Jaw-Dropper Moment And here’s where the floor drops out. Analysts now expect U.S. data centers to chew through about 106 gigawatts of power by 2035—more than four times what they used in 2024. Even sooner, they could grab roughly 12% of the nation’s peak demand by 2028. Put differently: within just a few years, one out of every eight peak-time electrons on the U.S. grid could be feeding server farms—not homes or small businesses. And that’s before the next wave of AI hype even hits. The Grid Is Sounding the Alarm Federal and independent analysts are no longer treating data centers as a niche issue. A July analysis highlighted by Utility Dive reports that the Department of Energy now estimates the U.S. will need around 100 gigawatts of additional peak capacity by 2030. Roughly half of that—about 50 gigawatts—is expected to come from data centers alone. DOE and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory go even further, warning that data centers could account for as much as 12% of U.S. peak demand by 2028. If that demand isn’t met with “behind-the-meter” generation—on-site power that never touches the wider grid—then the only option is more power plants, more transmission lines, and more expensive capacity contracts. And every one of those costs shows up on your monthly bill. Affordability vs Climate vs AI: The Political Collision As electricity prices climb, power is becoming political in a way it hasn’t been for decades. In PJM-heavy states like New Jersey and Virginia, rising electricity costs have already surfaced as major issues in 2025 state-level campaigns. Analysts increasingly expect electricity affordability to be a defining theme in the 2026 midterm elections. The tension cuts in every direction. Wind and solar can be cheap at the margin—but many climate mandates, grid-hardening programs, and transmission upgrades are expensive. Layer those costs on top of explosive AI-driven load growth, and the math turns ugly fast. In this story, data centers are becoming easy villains. Bloomberg’s mapping of wholesale prices shows that regions with intense data-center build-outs have seen local power prices spike more than 200% in certain months compared with five years ago. PJM itself has pointed to data-center-driven load as a primary reason for approving nearly $6 billion in new transmission projects—costs that are spread across all customers, not just the tech giants ordering the capacity. The Price-Control Temptation With Donald Trump back in the White House and electricity prices hitting records, the temptation for direct intervention will be strong. Federal policymakers already have tools on the table: emergency authorities, pressure on market rules, and quiet encouragement of state-level rate caps—all of which could be used to tamp down visible power bills ahead of the 2026 elections. PJM’s markets already operate with explicit price caps on capacity and certain constrained zones. In at least one recent auction, those caps were the only thing preventing even steeper wholesale price jumps. Expanding or tightening such controls nationally would shift the pain—from voters to investors. But that move comes with consequences. The Hidden Risk: Reliability on the Chopping Block Price ceilings tend to crush returns for independent power producers. When returns fall, investment dries up. When investment dries up, supply tightens. And tight supplies mean higher blackout risk. If prices are held below the level needed to attract new generation and grid upgrades, the long-term result isn’t cheap power—it’s a more fragile grid. One stretched thin between artificial intelligence expansion, climate mandates, and everyday reliability. The real threat isn’t just higher bills. It’s a system being asked to do too much, too fast, with political band-aids masking structural strain. The lights are still on—for now. But the warning signs are already flickering.