Residential Electricity Prices Are Surging Even More
We have been warning about this for months...
In one year, this will be the most popular chart on this site pic.twitter.com/h93gWXMoNL
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 11, 2025
... and months....
between exploding electricity bills and lack of jobs for grads, a new luddite revolution is coming - they will be burning down data centers within a year
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 25, 2025
... and now that even the deep state spies at the WaPo finally catching on...
5 months later https://t.co/reP3n5lhfp pic.twitter.com/5Lg5pPiXl4
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 6, 2026
... the future has finally caught up to the present,
As Bloomberg warns, rising retail electricity prices have become a political issue in several US states, especially in PJM, the Mid-Atlantic regional grid, which as we discussed recently, is woefully under-energized.
"eight out of the 13 US regional power markets are already at or below critical spare capacity levels." - Goldman https://t.co/YYAGUukfwR pic.twitter.com/eU4XPFAMrp
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 23, 2025
As Bloomberg says, paraphrasing us 5 months ago, "Power prices emerged as a a major campaign theme in off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia in 2025, and will play a big role in 2026's upcoming national midterms and state elections."
This is just the start: as we discussed over a month ago, data center power demand could reach 106 GW in 2035, For context, the US had about 25 GW of operating data centers in 2024 (according to Bloom Energy). Which means that unless all these data centers somehow find behind the meter sources of collocated power, electric bills will, pardon the pun, go nuclear.
A July report from the Department of Energy estimated an additional 100 GW of new peak capacity is needed by 2030, of which 50 GW is attributable to data centers. Those facilities could account for as much as 12% of peak demand by 2028, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Bloomberg's conclusion: "Affordability politics have mixed implications for climate (renewables are cheap, but some programs expensive), and for data centers, which take the blame for rising prices."
Our question: how long before Trump imposes price caps/controls on utilities ahead of the midterms (similar to those at PJM, which were the only thing that prevented a 60% spike in prices) to keep electric bills low, and sends IPP stocks freefalling.
