Data Centers and Your Electric Bill — July 2026

The price trajectory, already sourced on this site

RTO-wide Base Residual Auction clearing prices, published by PJM Interconnection — the same figures used throughout the capacity charge explainer and every locked line on this site.

From the 2025/2026 price to the 2028/2029 price, the RTO-wide clearing rate moved by a factor of 1.20×. That move is a documented auction result, not a projection — what follows is reporting on why it happened.

What trade press attributes the increase to

PJM's own published load forecasts point to data centers as the largest single contributor to new electricity demand across the footprint — energy trade press covering those forecasts has reported figures including a multi-thousand-megawatt increase in forecasted peak load year over year attributed largely to data center expansion, and utilities across the footprint doubling their forecasts for new large-load additions through the early 2030s. PJM's Independent Market Monitor has separately attributed a substantial share of recent capacity-price increases specifically to data center-driven demand growth, though the exact share reported varies by auction and by publication.

These are third-party figures, not numbers this site has independently verified against a primary PJM or market-monitor report — treat this paragraph as a pointer to the reporting, not as a sourced statistic on the same footing as the auction prices above. For the primary reporting itself, search “PJM data center load forecast” and “PJM Independent Market Monitor data center capacity costs” for the most current coverage; both terms turn up ongoing trade-press analysis as new auction results are published.

What it means for your bill

Whatever the precise share attributable to data centers, the mechanism that puts it on your bill does not change: capacity costs are pooled RTO-wide and passed through to every customer in the footprint, whether or not a data center sits anywhere near their meter. Which states carry the largest projected impact and the documented $/MW-day-to-¢/kWh arithmetic are both already on this site — this page adds the why, not a new number to the bill itself.

See it on your own bill

Enter your state and bill: if you are in the PJM footprint, the calculator applies the locked auction prices above at your own usage. Nothing you type is stored.

Keep going

• The PJM capacity charge, explained — the mechanism and the documented arithmetic.
• Which states actually pay it, ranked — the projected dollar impact by state.
• Why is my electric bill so high? — the full usage-vs-price diagnosis.
• How solar panels affect your electric bill — why this same price trajectory still shows up on a bill behind solar panels.