New York
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On the campaign trail last summer, President Donald Trump promised to swiftly cut electricity and energy prices in half if voters returned him to the White House.
“We intend to slash prices by half within 12 months, maximum of 18 months,” Trump said during a campaign rally in battleground North Carolina. “You will never have had energy so low as you will under a certain gentleman known as Donald J. Trump.”
Although gasoline prices have been low during the first year of Trump’s second term, electricity costs are rising uncomfortably fast for a variety of factors, including the insatiable power needs of massive data centers that serve as the backbone of the artificial intelligence boom.
As of the end of July, electricity prices had surged 5.5% over the prior 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s just over twice the pace of overall inflation, which remains elevated despite Trump’s promises to make prices tumble.
Power bills are causing sticker shock in some corners of the nation, adding to lingering frustration over the cost of living.
Residential electricity prices spiked by much more than the national average in Maine (26%), New Jersey (25%), Wyoming (15%), Utah (15%) and Illinois (14%) as of June, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the analysis arm of the Energy Department.
Average residential power prices have fallen in only a handful of states: North Carolina (-1%), Rhode Island (-1%), Idaho (-1%), Hawaii (-4%) and Nevada (-26%).
Cherelynn Baker, an Arizona-based content producer, said her electric bill has nearly doubled over the past year.
“It’s been a rough adjustment,” she told CNN.
Baker said it’s been months since she’s been able to pay her electric bill all in one payment, forcing her to break it up in installments. “This contributes to a daily strain and worry on what bill to pay when…It’s stressful!”
About one in six US households were behind on their energy bills as of March, according to estimates from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. Americans were collectively sitting on about $24 billion in outstanding utility debt.
“Joe Biden’s Green New Scam agenda crushed America’s energy industry with stifling regulations, causing electricity prices to soar by more than 30 percent in just four years,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement to CNN. “Beginning on Day One, President Trump began rolling back these policies and unleashed American energy to lower costs for families and businesses.”
Analysts blame the power price hikes on a range of factors joining forces to push up costs.
“Unusually fast electricity prices are due to a perfect storm involving all market drivers: fast growing demand, supply constraints and infrastructure costs,” said Bob McNally, president of consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group and a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush.
Historically, tracking demand for electricity was a boring task marked by little to no change. But that’s not the case anymore.
Suddenly, demand is increasing rapidly in part because of the rise of electric vehicles and the enormous power needs of AI.
“This is a system that is not used to increasing demand,” Dave Turk, former deputy energy secretary under President Joe Biden, told CNN in a phone interview.
AI is fueling a demand explosion
Massive data centers, some larger than footfall fields, are a big part of the demand growth story.
Data center energy usage has tripled over the past decade, according to a late 2024 report from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
AI prompts can take up to 10 times more energy to complete than a typical Google search, according to estimates from the Electric Power Research Institute.
Complex questions to AI systems produced up to six times more carbon dioxide emissions than questions with concise answers, researchers in Germany found in a recent study.
Many experts anticipate this trend will continue, if not accelerate, as AI plays a greater role in society – consuming more power as AI adoption grows.
Data center energy usage is projected to double or triple by 2028, the Berkeley Lab found.
To put it another way, data centers consumed just 4.4% of total US electricity in 2023. By 2028, data centers are expected to consume 6.7% to 12% of total US electricity.
That’s one reason the EIA is projecting retail electricity prices to residential customers will increase by 4% this year and then 6% next year.
Although Big Tech companies continue to pour enormous sums of money into power-hungry data centers, there remains significant uncertainty over just how much electricity data centers will use in the future.
Meanwhile, the supply side of the power question has been complicated by rising natural gas prices.
Although natural gas remains much cheaper than the peak in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prices remain 37% higher than this point last year.
That’s significant because natural gas is the leading source of US electricity generation, making up about 40% of the total – equaling all of coal and renewables combined, according to the EIA. Natural gas is also the leading space-heating fuel in US homes.
The cost of natural gas to the electric power industry surged by more than 40% during the first half of 2025, according to the EIA. The cost of natural gas for power generation is projected to rise by another 17% next year, the EIA said.
Another expensive problem on the supply side: Aging infrastructure that requires costly repairs and upgrades.
In some cases, transmission and distribution facilities were built in the 1960s, or even earlier.
In California, which has suffered from a series of deadly wildfires, utilities have been forced to invest in expensive upgrades to lower the risk of fires.
“Aging infrastructure and increased climate risk can threaten reliability if we don’t make necessary infrastructure investments. Those investments end up getting pushed onto consumers,” said Jesse Buchsbaum, a fellow at the Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan research institution.
At the same time, the Trump administration has scrapped plans to retire some coal power plants, citing concerns of an electricity shortage.
For instance, in May the Energy Department issued an emergency order requiring that J.H. Campbell, a Michigan coal plant more than 60 years old, stay online. Some local officials warned the move to keep alive the aging coal plant would be costly.
“If you artificially force people to keep assets online, it just costs consumers. That’s an own-goal and doesn’t make sense,” said Turk, now a distinguished visiting fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
Even though Trump has promised to usher in a period of American energy “dominance,” his administration has cracked down on one fast-growing and critical section of the energy industry: Clean energy.
Trump’s signature spending and tax law stripped tax incentives for wind, solar and other renewable energy projects.
The White House recently halted construction on a nearly finished wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island. Trump argued last week that “windmills” are “ruining our country” and said he won’t allow them to exist. But New England’s grid operator warned the decision to pull the plug on the Rhode Island wind farm threatens the reliability of the region’s electric grid.
Rogers, the White House spokesperson, argued that relying on renewable energy is a bad strategy.
“While many states have capitalized on their ability to ‘drill, baby, drill’ again, Democrat-led states continue to have higher energy prices because of their obsession with unreliable and costly green energy sources like wind and solar,” Rogers said.
However, EIA data shows that some states like Texas and Iowa that use wind to keep the lights on in addition to fossil fuels have relatively cheap power prices.
Buchsbaum cautioned that taking projects offline can cause challenges for prices and reliability down the line.
“There is an important role for renewables in achieving an affordable energy future – especially wind power,” he said.
New England, including Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, already suffers from among the highest electricity costs in the nation.
“I’ve been really, really surprised by how little this administration seems focused on affordability and price. They’ve been much more focused on ideology and being reflexively anti-solar and wind,” said Turk.
That risks a continued surge in power prices, piling more pressure on the elevated cost of living, said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM.
“It’s very simple: Turning on the lights will require more of your paycheck,” said Brusuelas. “The solution to inflationary bottlenecks is more supply, not less.”
