Who Pays for Data Center Power: The Ratepayer Tracker

PJM runs an annual capacity auction that pays power plants to be available three years out. The clearing price is set by how much capacity the region needs against how much is offered, and the cost is passed through to every retail customer in the territory. Here is what the last four auctions did.

Delivery year	Clearing price ($/MW-day)	Notes
2024/25	$28.92	Baseline before the data center load forecasts arrived
2025/26	$269.92	Roughly a ninefold increase in one auction; BGE and Dominion zones higher
2026/27	$329.17	At the federally approved cap; BGE zone $466.35, Dominion zone $444.26; peak load forecast up more than 5,400 MW
2027/28	$333.44	At the cap again; PJM estimated roughly $530 without it; 145,777 MW procured, 6,625 MW short of the reliability target; total cost $16.4 billion; data centers nearly all of a 5,250 MW load increase

The market monitor's accounting of who caused it is the citable part. Joseph Bowring's Monitoring Analytics, PJM's independent market monitor, attributes $6.3 billion of the $16.4 billion 2027/28 auction, 38 percent, to data center load, and $29.4 billion of the $63.6 billion in capacity charges across the last four auctions, 46 percent. The monitor also estimates the price cap, in the two auctions where it bound, kept $13.1 billion in additional capacity costs off bills. Through July 2026, data center load accounted for 9 percent of PJM's total wholesale power costs, about $10.48 per megawatt-hour of capacity cost, as total wholesale costs rose to $56.7 billion from $38 billion in the same period of 2025. The Citizens Utility Board's summary: the capacity market is breaking under the weight of data center demand.

Capacity charges are a line item most people never see, folded into the supply portion of the bill. The translations into monthly dollars come from consumer advocates and utilities rather than from PJM, and they vary by state and utility:

• PJM region: consumer advocates cited in policy reporting project the average household paying about $70 a month more by 2028.
• Washington, D.C.: Pepco residential customers saw bills rise an average of about $21 a month starting June 2025, the first delivery year of the higher capacity prices.
• North Carolina (outside PJM): Duke Energy's proposed 18 percent rate increase has been estimated at $280 to $355 a year per household, in a state where data center load growth is a central driver of new generation.

Two cautions. First, capacity prices are not the only driver of rising bills; fuel, transmission, and storm costs move them too, and a Rutgers policy analysis of New Jersey concluded that data centers were, as of its writing, mostly not yet the cause of that state's increases. Second, the cap that held the 2026/27 and 2027/28 prices at roughly $330 is a temporary settlement between PJM and the states; if it lapses, the monitor's uncapped estimate of about $530 is the reference point.

A large load tariff is a separate rate class and set of service rules for customers above a demand threshold, typically 20 to 25 megawatts, designed to make them pay for the generation and grid capacity built to serve them rather than spreading the cost across everyone. As of May 2026, 23 states had approved at least one and seven more had tariffs pending, according to analysis summarized by Columbia Law School's climate law program, and at least 18 legislatures had introduced bills creating special rate classes.

State	Action	Key terms
Ohio	AEP Ohio large load tariff, approved 2025	25 MW and up; minimum payment of 85 percent of contracted capacity; 12 year minimum contracts. Challenged at the Ohio Supreme Court (Case No. 2025-1458)
Virginia	Dominion Energy GS-5 tariff, approved 2025, effective January 1, 2027	25 MW and up; 14 year minimum contracts; 85 percent of contracted transmission demand and 60 percent of contracted generation demand as minimum bills; $1.5 million collateral per MW; campus aggregation permitted. Virginia also enacted a $0.011 per kilowatt-hour data center tax effective July 1, 2026
Texas	SB 6, signed June 2025	Expanded regulatory oversight of large loads and interconnection
Minnesota	HF 16, signed June 2025	Separate very large customer class with all attributable costs assigned to it; data center fee funding low-income programs
Oregon	HB 3546, the POWER Act, signed August 2025	Directs the PUC to create a separate rate category for 20 MW and larger loads to prevent cost shifting
South Dakota	SB 135, signed March 2026	Protects residential customers from data center driven cost increases
Florida	SB 484, signed May 7, 2026	Bars passing data center costs to ratepayers; preserves local siting authority; threshold raised to 100 MW
Tennessee	HB 1847, the Data Center Cost Responsibility Act, signed May 2026	Prevents infrastructure cost shifting to other customers
Oklahoma	HB 2992, signed May 2026	Requires separate tariffs for large load customers
New Jersey	A796, the Data Center Fair Share Act, signed July 7, 2026	Large load class; facilities of 50 MW and up commit to 85 percent of projected power costs for 10 years, with an efficiency upgrade incentive
Kentucky, Louisiana	Executive Orders 2026-494 and 26-058	Require energy plans and bar utilities from recovering data center costs from other ratepayers; require projects to fund their own power

The pattern across them is a set of financial commitments that shift risk back to the data center: minimum bills whether or not the load materializes, contracts long enough to pay off the plant built to serve it, collateral, and exit fees. Ohio's tariff, the first of its kind, is the test case. Our report on the Ohio data center electric rate fight follows it at the state supreme court.

Electric rates are set in public proceedings, and the proceedings are where the cost-shift question gets decided. Unlike a nuisance claim, this is a fight residents join rather than file:

• Find the docket. Every rate increase and every large load tariff goes through the state utility commission with a case number, a schedule, and a comment window. Ohio's is 2025-1458; Virginia's GS-5 tariff and the Duke Energy rate case in North Carolina have their own.
• Comment on the record, with numbers. Your bill history, the capacity charge line, and the monitor's 46 percent figure are what a commissioner can cite. Consumer advocates and attorneys general intervene in these cases and welcome documented residential evidence.
• Ask for the tariff. If your state is one of the seven with a tariff pending or the twenty-plus without one, the question to your commission and your legislators is specific: a separate rate class, minimum bills, and collateral, on the Ohio and Virginia model.
• Watch the interconnection. A data center's power request appears in utility filings and PJM's queue long before it appears in a hearing. That is the earliest point at which the cost question can be raised.

Rate proceedings are regulatory, not damages cases, and our guide to data centers and your electric bill explains how to participate. Where a data center's power infrastructure crosses private land, transmission and eminent domain questions do become legal claims, and our free case review connects you with an independent attorney in our network who handles data center cases in your state, at no cost and with no obligation.