ICYMI: E&E News: Electricity costs in PJM climbed 56% in 2025

PJM blamed data center growth and supply issues for the $80.5 billion increase in electricity prices

Trump and Congressional Republicans’ budget bill canceled or stalled 363 clean energy projects

Washington, DC – A new report for the country’s largest regional power market confirms that demand from data centers is driving up utility bills as Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress gut clean energy supply across the country. Clean energy is the least expensive and quickest way to satisfy growing demand, but Trump has canceled or delayed 363 clean energy projects since he took office, leaving American families to foot the bill.

With just 8 months until the midterm elections, Republicans know that soaring energy costs are a liability. Polling from Climate Power and Blue Rose shows that rising utility bills are decisively Americans’ top concern about the impact of data centers. The poll also found that respondents of all backgrounds  prefer data centers powered by clean energy by a +25-point margin and oppose those powered by fossil fuels by a 16-point margin. As long as electricity costs continue to climb, Republican lawmakers will pay the political price. 

E&E News: Electricity costs in PJM climbed 56% in 2025

The burst of current and planned data center development in mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes states led to a 56 percent increase in overall wholesale electricity prices to $80.5 billion last year, the region’s market monitor reported Thursday.

“The price impacts have been very large and are not reversible,” said Joseph Bowring, president of Monitoring Analytics, in his annual “state of the market” report for PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. regional power market.

Prices will continue to rise unless power supply challenges tied to demand from large data centers are resolved in the next few months, Bowring said. PJM has fallen far behind the eight ball in connecting power generation fast enough to meet growing demand from U.S. tech companies developing artificial intelligence, he added, putting the region increasingly at risk of power shortfalls…

Coupled with the spiking prices is the increasing risk of outages, Bowring said. “There’s no free capacity. There’s no spare capacity. PJM is tight,” Bowring said at a recent energy briefing in Washington at the Brookings Institution.

“The current supply of [generation] capacity in PJM is not adequate to meet the demand from large data center loads and will not be adequate in the foreseeable future,” Bowring’s annual report said. “The region is on a path toward continued shortfalls, increased reliability issues, continued maximum prices.”…