Note: This article was originally shared in SACE’s free newsletter, “Wired In,” which includes relevant articles, media clips, and actions to take. Join us to receive Wired In once a month in your inbox, and see April’s full newsletter here.
There’s a simple reason your electric bill keeps climbing: the people running your utility company are making bad decisions — and getting rich doing it. Across the Southeast, utility executives are choosing to build billions of dollars’ worth of expensive new methane gas power plants, coupled with their fossil fuel pipelines and massive storage tanks. To appease the current administration, they keep aging inefficient coal infrastructure online and pass the vast majority of it along to you and your family. Their shareholders and their CEO bonuses come first. You come last.
Across the mid-Atlantic and Southeast, Big Tech’s data center explosion is turbocharging the problem — and voters are taking notice. Virginia is a bellwether of what happens when Big Tech’s digital demand colonizes the electric grid. The state has more data centers than anywhere else in the country, and voters there are fed up — recent polling shows 73% now blame data centers for rising electricity costs, and 68% say data centers’ negative impacts outweigh their economic benefits. Lawmakers, not the tech companies, are the ones voters hold most responsible for letting it happen.
Further south in Georgia, voters turned that frustration into action last November, throwing out two sitting Public Service Commissioners on the strength of one unmistakable message: our power bills are too high. Georgia Power customers have absorbed six rate increases since 2023, adding roughly $43 a month to the typical bill. The PSC then approved a record-breaking $20 billion in new power generation — much of it to serve speculative data center demand — which could add $20 a month or more on top of the previous six increases. This fall, two more Georgia PSC seats are on the ballot, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
In North Carolina, Duke Energy’s new CEO recently told Fortune, with striking tone-deafness, “It’s a good time to be in the utility business. I say that we’re the cool kids now.” Duke customers have a different experience — families struggling to pay power bills isn’t cool. Duke is pushing a 15% rate hike while planning a massive gas buildout that the state’s own Public Staff says would cost North Carolina families more than a billion dollars over the next decade. And, towns across the state are already imposing moratoriums on data centers.
Where are the regulators who are supposed to protect us? Too often, they are choosing the wealthy utility executives over the working people. Across our region, people are passionately speaking truth to power, saying, “Our bills are too damn high.” Communities from mountain towns to coastal cities across the Southeast are demanding accountability from the utility companies that control their power bills.
And people are also taking energy into their own hands. This month, you’ll meet a Tennessee couple who are cutting their electricity costs by plugging solar panels right into their wall outlets — proof that clean energy savings are within reach for renters and homeowners alike. You’ll also find out why right now is one of the best times ever to buy a used electric vehicle, and how Congress can protect historic investments in clean, affordable transportation.
For over forty years, SACE has been fighting for smart, affordable energy policies that are good for people and our planet. The old way of doing business — where utilities build whatever they want, regulators rubber-stamp it, and you pay for it — is greed and grift. Let’s make sure what replaces it works for all of us. Click here or below to take action in your state.
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