Here’s Why Your Electricity Bill May Skyrocket This Holiday Season

As the holiday season arrives, one prevailing headache set to keep hammering Americans is exorbitant electricity costs.

Though the Trump administration has worked to unlock more reliable energy resources, several stressors on the American power grid mean that ratepayers will continue to see electricity costs rise, according to multiple reports and energy sector experts. Aging energy infrastructure, the proliferation of data centers, rapid transition policies and increased electrification are all filtering into shocking totals on utility bills, research from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) shows. CEO of the American Energy Institute Jason Isaac points right to the past administration in his analysis.

“Americans may finally feel relief at the pump, but they are not getting it at the meter,” Isaac told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Biden’s policies sent electric rates soaring more than 25 percent, and even with the [Energy Information Administration] EIA projecting a smaller increase of about 2 percent this year, families will still face higher electricity bills this holiday season.”

While on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to cut energy and electricity prices in half, however, utility costs are projected to climb 2% from 2024 to 2025, according to data from the EIA. Electricity costs were projected to grow by 13% from 2022 to 2025, EIA noted.

After years of stagnation, America’s energy needs are soaring as artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, onshore re-industrialization and electrification drive demand, according to the EIA, IER and some energy experts.

Crushing utility bills have already hit some communities, with one 63-year-old Pembroke Pines, Florida resident named Al Salvi telling NPR in October that he pays close to $500 a month.

“Seniors down here that are living check to check, now we got to decide whether we’re going to pay the electric bill or buy medication,” Salvi told NPR.

Data Centers

Heading into this winter, harsh weather could stress the power grid, leading to outages — with NERC warning that “much of North America” is at risk of failing to meet demand in “extreme operating conditions.”

Part of the strain on the grid is due to AI data centers, according to NERC, as the facilities extend the window of peak electricity demand.

One October study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that data center-rich regions may see lower electricity prices as utilities can distribute costs to the facilities. However, the EIA projects that demand from data centers and cryptocurrency mining will contribute to electricity costs increasing by 2.6% in 2026.

Biden-Era Policies

Both sides of the political aisle are assigning blame to their rivals, with Democrats lambasting the One Big Beautiful Bill and the Trump administration for cracking down on “renewable” energy projects as well as “failing” to plan for the influx of power-guzzling data centers, while the administration highlights the destructiveness of Biden-era policies.

“The momentum of the Obama-Biden policies … that destruction is going to continue in the coming years,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Politico in August. “That momentum is pushing prices up right now. And who’s going to get blamed for it? We’re going to get blamed because we’re in office.”

The Department of Energy (DOE) warned in its July report that blackouts could increase by a factor of 100 by 2030 if America keeps retiring power plants without adequate replacements. It continued to single out wind and solar as key contributors to declining grid stability and argued that dispatchable generation from sources like coal, oil, gas and nuclear are vital to meet U.S. power demand.

While the Trump administration and Congress have moved to ax federal incentives for wind and solar enterprises and the Department of the Interior (DOI) has issued some work stop orders for offshore wind projects, many of the orders have been lifted as the admin also works to bolster conventional energy resources like coal.

“President Trump and Secretary Wright are reversing the damage by keeping reliable power on the grid and rebuilding what Washington tried to destroy for years, coal, natural gas, and nuclear,” Isaac told the DCNF.

Former President Joe Biden oversaw massive energy cost spikes, with residential electricity costs rising about 25% from 2020 to 2024, according to IER research. During his tenure, Biden declared that he aimed to shut coal “plants down all across America,” blocked the Keystone XL pipeline project, froze new liquified natural gas (LNG) exports and allowed strenuous regulations on power plants that a top grid regulator warned would be “catastrophic” if they came into full effect.

The Biden administration instead juiced intermittent energy resources like solar and wind through billions in federal incentives.

Energy experts, grid watchdogs and operators have long warned that the Biden-era green energy push destabilizes the grid and hikes electricity costs, as power demand also surges from the booming AI sector.

“Democrats committed arson on electricity prices and now they have the nerve to accuse Trump of playing with matches. In Trump’s first term, electricity prices rose by less than 1% per year. Under Biden, electricity prices rose 22%. I think the American people will trust President Trump’s energy policies more than hypocritical Democrat finger-pointing,” James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute and the founding director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy, previously told the DCNF.

State-Level Schemes

Utility costs are surging in some regions of the country more than others, with several of the states facing the most brutal electricity bills and unstable power grids forcing accelerated green energy transitions and leaning left.

Natural gas bans and a forced and rushed energy transition have been linked to higher energy costs, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and energy sector experts. Many states in New England are crippled by high energy costs, a region of the country that has cracked down on natural gas pipelines and enacted strict green energy mandates.

The IER noted that many states seeing cost spikes “mandate renewable energy” are in “New England and Middle Atlantic regions and are members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — a group of 11 states that have a cap-and-trade mechanism, which is essentially a tax on the use of fossil fuels in the utility sector.”

“Renewables”

Research from IER and energy policy expert Isaac Orr assert that “renewable” energy like wind and solar drive up transmission costs because the turbines and solar farms tend to be sited far from where people live.

“The biggest costs of wind and solar are obviously not fuel. They’re not on the generation side,” Orr told the DCNF. “The problem is that wind and solar requires a lot of land, so it has to be built a long way from population sites. So, that means you need transmission to get it to people that can use it, and because it’s intermittent, you need to have some sort of backup… Whether that’s batteries or natural gas or whatever it is, you have to have some sort of backup.”

Utilities

Energy sector experts like Isaac have argued that utilities are far from deregulated and need to be free from political mandates that drive up costs.

As he put it, “regulated utilities are still clinging to Paris aligned Net Zero pledges that reward costly spending on unreliable wind, solar, and batteries. If utilities want to help lower bills, they need to drop the politics and return to what customers actually need, affordable and reliable power.”