It’s been a rough couple of years for utility bill increases. Here's why it's about to get worse.

It’s been a rough couple of years for utility bill increases, and it’s not about to get better. Fresh data from energy nonprofit PowerLines and Ipsos this week says utilities requested $9.4 billion in rate hikes in the first quarter of 2026. That’s after they requested $31 billion in 2025, which was more than double the year before.Yes, data centers are part of that — but that’s not the only culprit. The price hikes have been huge because basically a bunch of different problems are converging at once. Tom Bullock leads the Citizens Utility Board in Ohio, one of the states with the steepest increases. “Data centers are kind of the first boulder rolling down the hill, triggering a broader rockslide,” he said. Bullock also blamed delays for permits and equipment, skilled labor shortages, and policies that favor older, coal-burning facilities.“There are White House orders forcing aging power plants held together by duct tape to remain open, even when their own owners want to close them to stop losing money,” he said. Then, there’s the list of unavoidable costs. “The grid was largely built in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, and these assets are just coming towards the end of their useful life,” explained Michael Levy with Baringa Management Consulting.The hikes cover fixing and upgrading aging equipment and broken equipment, which Levy said is a more common problem now, thanks to climate change.“Hurricanes, wildfires, storms, and if you think about, like, the frequency and severity of those getting worse over time, then that obviously drives the need for investment to be even greater.”You’ve also got geopolitical pressures, too. Prices went up after the war in Ukraine disrupted the global fuel supply, according to Charles Hua, who leads PowerLines, which put together the report. The same problem is happening now with the war in Iran, “and that could continue to put upward pressure on people's utility bills going forward,” he said.Hua added that all the metrics that PowerLines measures say that utility bills are going to keep going up, at least for now.