The rapid growth of data centers across the country has already stressed power demand and driven up electricity bills. And those impacts are only worsening.
Americans could see $6.3 billion added to their energy bills within the next three years, an increase primarily driven by data centers.
PJM Interconnection, the largest power grid operator in the United States, revealed on Tuesday the results of its annual power auction—a way to secure electricity generation and set costs three years before that power is actually needed.
During the auction, power providers bid on the prices they’re willing to accept during peak demand times, which then become part of customer electricity rates.
This year, prices hit PJM’s cap of $325 per megawatt-day. That means an estimated additional $6.3 billion in energy costs, according to Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor.
PJM’s auction also tries to secure future electricity demand. This year, it fell 6.8 GW short of what PJM’s reliability requirement, meaning the amount of power it needs to guarantee grid reliability during a spike in demand.
Stress on the power grid is especially concerning during extreme heat, like the country has seen this summer. Without enough capacity, communities could experience brownouts and blackouts.
“These auction results show that demand for electricity continues to grow faster than electricity supply,” David Mills, PJM president and CEO, said in a statement.
And the primary driver of that growth, the company said [in a post](https://insidelines.pjm.com/the-capacity-auction-is-coming-heres-what-were-doing-now/) ahead of the auction, is data centers.
New data centers (as well as the expansion of existing data centers) can be developed quickly—up to two to three times faster, the grid provider says, than many of the ways to generate electricity.
PJM manages the power grid for 13 states and the District of Columbia. Those 67 million customers have already been dealing with rate increases.
Since 2024, these PJM auctions have added some $29 billion in utility costs because of data centers.
In PJM’s December 2025 auction, data centers accounted for 40% of capacity costs, or $6.8 billion. “Today, PJM delivered more bad news for people already struggling with higher energy bills: Prices will continue at the maximum level allowed under the law,” Julia Kortrey, director of Strategic Initiatives for the States Program at the clean energy nonprofit Evergreen Action, said in a statement about Tuesday’s auction results.
To Kortrey, these rate hikes were avoidable.
“PJM continues to slow-walk cheap, clean energy that could lower bills for working families while protecting a system that delivers record profits for member utilities, rather than fixing its problems,” she said. “PJM continues to allow the same utility and fossil fuel companies to cash in while families get stuck with the bill.”
Utility bills in general are spiking for millions of Americans.
This week, Powerlines, a nonprofit that aims to lower utility bills, released a report showing that utilities across the country requested $18.6 billion in electric and gas rate increases during the first half of 2026 alone.
In some instances, those hikes came from spikes in fuel costs or for upgrades to grid infrastructure. Data centers also play a part.
Oncor, an electric utility in Texas, requested the largest single increase in the second quarter of 2026, according to that report: $1.2 billion in rate increases, “driven largely by its 5-year transmission and distribution spending plan—a $45 billion investment focused on meeting demand from oil and gas industry and data centers in the Permian Basin.”