Power bills surge, leaving households scrambling to cope – while outages are on the rise

Key Takeaways

1. The energy needs of data centers – and the new infrastructure they require – are major culprits in electrical costs.

2. Natural gas, the Northeast’s dominant fuel source, is expected to increase by a third in 2027.

3. Damage caused by increasingly erratic weather is also driving up the cost of electricity.

4. Tariffs on steel, aluminum and electrical grid equipment make it more expensive to repair and modernize the grid.

5. Utility profit margins accounted for nearly 15 percent of your electric bill in 2025.

Shorter showers. Lower thermostats. Replacing windows. Insulating attics. Buying energy-efficient utilities. Getting solar panels. Doing laundry after 11 p.m. Relying on wood and pellet stoves. “Walking behind my wife turning off all the lights she leaves on.”

These are some of the ways locals have been trying to pare back skyrocketing electric bills, according to a Straus News survey of 149 readers.

Electricity prices have spiked nationwide, but Northeast residents are feeling the squeeze more than most. The Middle Atlantic Region, comprised of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, pays $23.68 per kilowatt-hour as of January 2026 – 36 percent more than the national average and 14 percent more than last year, per the U.S. Energy Information Administration. New York pays the highest rate in the three-state region, Pennsylvania the lowest.

One in six households in this region is energy insecure as of 2024; one in five of our survey respondents said that at some point they have been unable to pay their utility bill. Two-thirds said electric bills are a household stressor.

“It was always around $175ish a month, give or take a few bucks here and there. But it was almost strangely consistent,” said Ben McCool, of Warwick, N.Y., of his family’s wintertime electric bill their first four years in their house. “And then this past winter, we were paying anywhere between $275 and $375.”

The McCools’ doubled utility bill made staying within their monthly budget tricky, though for their two-salary household it was manageable. But it could turn into a real stressor this summer, when electric demand peaks. Their electric bill has swelled as high as $800 a month in past summers, thanks to AC units for their 3,900 square-foot-house and the pool filter.

“If that doubles, then we could be really starting to think about, okay, how can we cut back?,” said McCool, a freelance writer who lives with his wife and young son. “Should the bills skyrocket in the summer – and unfortunately, I’ve got a funny feeling that they will – we’re just going to have to get creative and think of shortcuts,” he said, like seeing whether they can get away with running the pool filter for only half the day.

But why is your bill so high?

We asked John Quigley, senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, to break down the forces at play.

1. Data Centers

The notorious bad guy in the story of our jacked electric bills – power-hungry data centers – is indeed the major culprit.

Not only are data centers – which typically consume as much juice as 100,000 homes – driving up demand for electricity and therefore its per-kilowatt price, but residents are simultaneously shouldering the bill for the infrastructure upgrades needed to connect new data centers to the grid.

“They’re essentially socializing the cost of serving data centers,” said Quigley. It’s not the companies building these plants, but ratepayers – you and your neighbors – who are paying for the new transmission lines, towers and substations needed to handle the explosive demand driven by these digital loads.

In Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County, which is fast transforming into a data center hub despite intense community opposition, one proposed campus about 50 miles west of Milford, Pa., is expected to use more power than the region’s largest power plant is able to produce, The Scranton Times-Tribune reports.

It used to be that the delivery line item on your electric bill, which covers repairs and upgrades to the grid, constituted a fraction of the total. Now it accounts for an average of 35 percent of the bill, said Quigley. Some locals have reported recently that their delivery charge has actually outstripped their usage charge.

“How is my electric bill supply charges $741 and the so-called delivery charges $669?” wrote a commenter on an Orange County moms Facebook group in January. “How is this legit?? What am I supposed to do here?? Like this is robbery!!!”

Electricity prices are incredibly byzantine, though, and the data center frenzy is far from the sole culprit. Depending on where you live, the story behind your eye-popping electric bill will be a bit different.

2. Natural gas

Around here, another huge contributor to rising utility bills is the spike in the price of natural gas, which the Northeast relies upon heavily to power our homes. Our dominant fuel source, natural gas accounts for about 40 percent of electrical generation in the mid-Atlantic region. The price of natural gas is projected to increase 33 percent in 2027.

The industry’s focus on exporting liquid natural gas to higher-paying international markets, said Quigley, means that “the price of natural gas is going nowhere but up, and that price pressure is going to continue to hurt people.”

Our reliance on natural gas also makes us extra vulnerable to outages, said Quigley. Natural gas is “inherently unreliable, and severe weather is the main driver. Gas-fired power plants tend to fail when it’s really cold or really hot, especially when it’s really cold.”

3. Weather disasters (and car-pole crashes)

Our region’s increasingly erratic weather takes the form of fires, extreme wind and more frequent storms that damage power lines. Last year was one of the windiest ever, according to the winter 2026 issue of Currents, Sussex Rural Electric Cooperative’s newsletter – and the utility has been around since 1937.

Tree removal is the cooperative’s single biggest expense. The co-op spends more than a million dollars a year trimming its 774 miles of line, “but you have trees falling well beyond our right of way, and they will fall on our lines,” said Claudia Raffay of Sussex Rural Electric Cooperative. Raffay is director of marketing at the nonprofit utility, which provides electricity to about 12,000 customers in rural New Jersey.

”Some storms come in quick and cause a lot of damage,” said Raffay. A few years ago, she said, “we had a five-to-ten minute wind storm, repairs cost over a quarter-million dollars. Where some of our members were having hail, others had sun, and they’re calling to ask why the power’s out.”

(As it happens, Raffay was taking the call with this reporter from her car, because the power in her house was out.)

Americans experienced an average of 11 hours of electricity interruptions in 2024, nearly twice as many as they saw over the previous decade, mostly due to severe weather events like hurricanes.

Pennsylvania’s PPL Electric Utilities cited increased costs from storm damage in their latest filing to the Public Utility Commission, as the utility sought its first major rate increase in a decade. As of July, PPL will begin to recoup $32 million from ratepayers for anticipated storm damage, up from $20 million.

On top of nature’s curveballs, car-pole accidents are also on the rise, said Raffay. A crash in January took out two telephone poles on Wawayanda Road and left hundreds of Sussex Rural customers in the dark.

“We lose power all the time,” said Bill Young, who’s retired and lives with his wife on a Christmas tree farm in Vernon, N.J. “We just had a power hit this morning, but we didn’t lose it; it was just a couple seconds. With all the ash trees falling down every time there’s a windstorm or big snow,” Young estimates his power went out 10 times in the past year. “Didn’t always used to be that way.”

In response to the increasingly tenuous grid, locals are investing in redundancies at home – on top of paying higher electric bills.

Young couldn’t be more pleased with his decision to get solar panels on his barn roof in 2016 to power his all-electric home, an investment he estimates has already saved him $17,000. But going all-in on electric has necessitated a second investment: he just upgraded to a larger generator – whose 4-cylinder engine is the same size as his car’s – capable of running his geothermal heating system when the power goes out. He wasn’t sure his old generator could handle it.

After a “ridiculous” number of outages this winter, Chris Wyman, 76, a retired technical writers and photographer (and Straus News contractor) who lives in Highland Lakes, N.J., and his wife bought a pair of pricey, high-powered flashlights and a pair of headlamps. They put their computers and a hall light onto an uninterruptible power supply, a type of rechargeable battery that’s separate from their fuel-powered generator. Wyman uses a wheelchair and oxygen, so losing power is a serious concern.

4. Tariffs

President Trump’s new 15 percent tariff on steel, aluminum and electrical grid equipment acts as a multiplier, making it that much more expensive to repair storm damage and extend transmission infrastructure, said Quigley.

“Some pieces of material have gone up 300 percent,” added Raffay, of electrical grid equipment.

Those costs show up on your electric bill, under that enigmatic delivery charge.

5. Utility profit margins

Social media is blowing up with complaints about sky-high electric bills, and people often lay the blame at the feet of greedy utilities – a villain second only to data centers. It turns out, they’re not wrong.

A substantial and growing share of what consumers are paying for electricity ends up in power companies’ pockets as profit, according to a March analysis by the Energy and Policy Institute.

Utilities took a 13 percent cut of your electric bill between 2021 and 2024, the analysis found – a relatively high profit margin. Most industries see single-digit margins; grocery stores squeak by on about 2 percent.

In 2025, utility margins rose to nearly 15 percent, according to available filings.

“A larger portion of customers’ electricity bills are just going into the pockets of utilities,” said Quigley. That’s because utilities are allowed to make a profit on repairs and infrastructure upgrades – the kind they’re making to bring data centers online – “and they’re taking advantage.”