Trump and the AI industry are raising your electricity prices
If you're utility bills are going up, you can thank Trump and the AI companies.
Welcome to the Madness newsletter—where I cover politics, tech and science with a dose of history. If you’re not subscribed yet, you can join here. Free and paid options available.
Have you noticed your electricity bill going up? If you haven't, then you might soon. That's because AI data centers are now sucking up so much energy that the rise in demand is making electricity more expensive. You can also thank Donald Trump for that pricey bill—not just because he's backing these AI companies but because he's trying to crush renewable energy, which is the cheapest form of energy and helps reduce costs.
The rise in energy costs in recent months has been significant, and it will likely only get worse. It was reported last month that in some states people have seen their energy bills rise by nearly $30 a month. The AI industry is continuing to grow, and prices are expected to stay high throughout 2026. Electricity demand growth is expected to exceed 2% next year, which is a lot.
Donald Trump likes to blame renewable energy for the increasing price of electricity—inexplicably—but Senate Democrats have rightly pointed out that the Republican tax and spending bill that passed in July withdrew federal support from many renewable energy projects. That's going to increase energy prices.
As I said, renewable energy has been the cheapest form of energy for some time. Don't take it from me, though, just ask the banks. The investment bank Lazard wrote in July that renewable energy continues to be the "lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy" form of energy.
A paper published by Harvard researchers in March found a number of things that can help us understand how AI companies are making energy more expensive. Essentially, power companies like working with big tech companies, because they can reliably extract money from them. That's easier than relying on revenue from a group of individuals.
Because these energy companies like those relationships, they prioritize them. They'll do what they need to do to keep those lucrative deals alive. One of the things the energy companies are doing is expanding their infrastructure to generate more power to serve these tech companies, and the costs of expanding that infrastructure are being passed onto the consumer.
So it's not just about increasing demand. It's also about prices increasing because of investments that the energy companies are making to benefit tech companies. The energy companies put up more transmission lines and build more power plants, and you foot the bill.
