For most Americans, the utility or energy bill is a fairly predictable monthly expense. It may go up in the winter and summer when we use more electricity, natural gas or heating oil to keep our homes warm or cool. But we count on the base rate to stay about the same through the year.
Not anymore.
In the last year, Americans around the country have seen their energy bills jump, up 20 percent in some cases, and more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living. And it’s just the beginning.
Demand from new data centers powering artificial intelligence and the cloud is beginning to make electricity more expensive on top of other rising costs that utilities are passing on to customers. In the Mid-Atlantic region, where data center growth has been greatest, some residential electric bills have leaped up astonishingly quickly in recent months. Data centers now use about 40 percent of Virginia’s electricity, compared with 5 percent in 2010, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
For a forthcoming project on the grid, Times Opinion invites readers to share three months of your energy bills from June, July and August 2025, and the same months from 2024 and 2023 so that we can see how electricity rates are changing.
An editor will contact you before publishing any personal information included in your submission.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Has Your Energy Bill Gone Up? Show Us. appeared first on New York Times.
