Utilities requested $18.6 billion in electric and gas rate increases during the first half of this year, according to an analysis by the nonprofit watchdog PowerLines today.
That’s in addition to the already record-breaking $31 billion in rate hikes requested in 2025, and the $15 billion in 2024 — some of which has shown up in customers’ bills. State utility regulators tend to approve the majority of the costs, including 58% between 2023 through 2024, PowerLines found. Nearly half of the requests from 2025 were still pending at the start of this year.
The latest filings come despite mounting pressure from White House, state governors, and customers to keep energy bills down, especially as hyperscalers race to power their data centers for artificial intelligence. The White House is planning to expand its voluntary “ratepayer protection pledge” to utilities in the coming weeks, Reuters reported. But it’s unclear whether that will have any impact on rate increase requests.
Hyperscalers including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and three other companies initially signed the pledge in March. They promised to pay for building new power and other grid infrastructure to serve data centers, as well as negotiate special tariffs with utilities and state governments to cover the costs. At least 25 utilities already had these tariffs on the books last year, with more being filed this year, according to a Latitude Intelligence analysis.
The White House didn’t return a request for comment.
While data centers are partly to blame for cost increases in specific regions like PJM, research has shown that places with the highest demand growth generally had rates decline in recent years. Rising rates are more a reflection of how power markets are structured, including disorganized infrastructure planning, slow interconnection queues, and financial incentives that encourage utilities to build new poles and wires rather than invest in efficiency.
PowerLines found that utilities justified their requested rate hikes for a range of reasons, including replacing old poles and wires, rebuilding infrastructure damaged by extreme weather, and investing in grid hardening. Utilities also pass wholesale gas and electricity prices onto consumers, which are outpacing inflation.
Where rates are rising
In the second quarter of this year alone, utilities across 15 Southern states — from Virginia to Florida to Texas — requested $4.5 billion in rate hikes, PowerLines found. The region covers 26 million customers.
Oncor in Texas filed the largest single increase, at $1.2 billion. The increase is due to a five-year, $45 billion investment in transmission and distribution spending to meet demand from the oil and gas industry and data centers in the Permian Basin.
Meanwhile, Dominion Energy in Virginia requested $1.5 billion across three rate requests, the vast majority of which is to cover fuel costs.
Customers of DTE Energy and Consumers Energy in Michigan are also facing higher bills.
Both utilities requested nearly $500 million in rate hikes in the second quarter. If DTE’s case is approved, the increase would be on top of the $242 million that regulators approved in February of this year and another $217 million in 2025.
The utility in April said it won’t file another increase until at least 2028, on the condition that two major data centers come online. That’s because the projects — by Oracle and Google — are expected to contribute nearly $9 billion combined to improving the electric system, reducing the amount DTE must then recover from other customers.
