By Toby Z. Rice
The price of electricity in America rose about 30% in five years. Washington has decided the culprit is a building that, for the most part, hasn’t been built yet.
Americans are right to be angry, and both parties are scrambling to respond before the midterms. Data centers are the most visible piece of the energy landscape, so data centers are getting the blame for higher prices. But that view misses the real issue.
To be clear, data centers should pay for the infrastructure built to serve them, and host communities deserve enforceable commitments rather than press releases. But those are questions about allocating cost. None of them create another megawatt, and the reason your bill is going up is that we stopped creating megawatts.
Residential electricity prices climbed roughly 30% between 2020 and 2025, while the AI buildout was still mostly slides in a pitch deck. Tomorrow’s consumption doesn’t drive today’s bills, but what you can blame is electricity prices lagging behind demand. Since 2015 this country has retired more than 100 gigawatts of dispatchable generation faster than we replaced it.
And look at where prices actually rose. Texas and Virginia host roughly a third of the country’s data centers, and yet residential customers in both states still pay less than the national average — Texas by about 10%. Meanwhile New England, which has almost no data centers to speak of, watched summer residential prices climb about 40% between 2020 and 2025, compared to a 30% increase nationally. If data centers set electricity prices, that pattern would be impossible.
What separates those places is their approach to building power infrastructure. Texas said yes and has added more generation and storage than any other state. New England said no and spent two decades fighting over pipelines it never built. Today, the region burns oil on the coldest days because there isn’t enough pipe to move gas to power plants.
Three things will lower an electricity bill, and America has made all three nearly impossible to do.
The first is building generation. At the end of last year, roughly 2,060 gigawatts of generation and storage sat in interconnection queues awaiting permission to connect to the grid — against about 1,280 gigawatts actually installed nationwide. We have more power waiting in line than we have plugged in, and the median project that made it through spent 61 months in that line.
The second is building transmission. Cheap electricity in one place is worthless to a family in another if there is no wire between them. A major line crosses multiple states, agencies and courtrooms, and routinely takes a decade or more.
The third is delivering fuel to the plants we already have. Roughly 40% of American electricity comes from natural gas. When a pipeline doesn’t get built, the electricity gets more expensive, and precisely on the coldest and hottest days, when families need it most.
Every one of those is a permitting problem, and Congress is closer to fixing it than it has been in a generation. The House passed several meaningful bills in December — before data centers were even blamed for high electricity prices — and if bipartisanship prevails, the Senate is poised to act on permit reform in the immediate future. The window closes with this Congress. Finish the job and pass permitting reform.
Do that, and data centers stop being tomorrow’s problem and start being tomorrow’s solution. Demand is going to grow either way. Data centers are only about a third of projected U.S. load growth through 2030, so two-thirds of it arrives whether another one gets built or not. A nationwide ban would not fix this imbalance. But unlike manufacturing coming home or a driveway full of electric vehicles, data centers can actually push prices down.
When a data center builds its own generation on site, reliability standards mean it overbuilds — roughly 1.2 gigawatts to serve a gigawatt of demand. The tech company pays for its own electricity and builds excess on top of it. Today that excess sits idle behind a fence, because the rules for pushing surplus onto the regional grid are unsettled. Fix those rules, and what was a data center turns into a tech-financed power plant for the region.
That is the solution worth fighting for: not data centers subsidized by ratepayers, not a ban on data centers, but new generation financed by the primary beneficiaries of the AI revolution. Done right — with community benefit agreements, labor arrangements and stringent environmental compliance — regions that welcome data centers will end up with cheaper power than they have today.
We can spend 2026 arguing about who raised the bill, spend 2028 arguing about it again, and hand the next administration the same problem. Or we can build.
America is not short of energy. We are short of permission. Until that changes, it won’t matter much who wins in November. Scarcity wins every time.
Toby Z. Rice is president and CEO of leading natural gas producer EQT Corporation.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
