ABC gets it right. Utility bills rising due to aging infrastructure, Data Center driven demand, rising gas prices following increased exports, cancellation of renewable tax credits and clean energy projects.
The amount of money Americans are paying for their energy bills has increased since President Donald Trump took office earlier this year, according to a new report.
In the U.S., electric bills have increased 13% in 2025, according to Climate Power, a climate advocacy organization whose national advisory board features prominent Democratic politicians and activists. Climate Power analyzed data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The report pointed to the massive spending bill Trump signed in July, which it claims is “driving up utility costs and destroying jobs by removing cheaper, cleaner energy sources from the grid, all while funding new tax breaks for the oil and gas industries.”
Projects that were canceled or delayed since Trump’s election have led to a loss of 24,958.5 megawatts of planned energy generation, which could have powered more than 13.17 million homes, according to the report.
Prices are expected to spike even further, especially as rising energy demands are driven by data centers and extreme heat, the study said.
“A lot of it is data centers,” according to Mark Wolfe, co-director of the Center for Energy Poverty and Climate.
In the electricity sector, demand is currently outpacing growth “by a lot,” David Spence, a professor of energy law and regulation at the University of Texas, told ABC News. He agreed that data centers are “partly” to blame, in addition to other energy intensive technologies, such as Bitcoin mining and electric vehicles.
“We’re just not able to bring new supply on as quickly as demand is growing, and that’s driving prices up,” Spence said.
Another recent analysis found that U.S. households are paying 9.6% more in utility bills this year on average versus 2024, according to the December energy snapshot by the Center for American Progress and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Americans are also in debt due to higher energy costs, said Mark Pierce, an attorney and the executive director of Protect Borrowers. As of November, Texas had the highest number of residents in utility debt, with more than 943,501 households with overdue balances, according to research by Protect Borrowers.
Energy affordability and “what to do about it” is currently a topic “that everybody on Capitol Hill wants to talk about and is fixated on,” Daniel Bresette, president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, told ABC News.
When asked for comment on the Climate Power report, a White House spokesperson told ABC News: “Fixing the energy crisis Joe Biden created has been a priority for President Trump since day one. Joe Biden’s green energy policies sent electricity prices soaring more than 30 percent over four years, and Blue states that refuse to adopt President Trump’s energy dominance agenda continue to have sky-high energy prices.”
For context, the ABC video report mentions New York, Missouri, and Massachusetts as states that have had particularly high increases in the past year.
Let’s see what the Energy Information Administration says about the generation sources for those states. Click on the images to go to the graphs.
So, are we clear? States that have had very high rises in electric rates have a heavy reliance on fossil fuel, gas in the case of Massachusetts and New York, coal in the case of Missouri, and nuclear.
Household electric bills have increased by 13% nationally since Trump took office, while natural gas prices rose 98%. In the year-over-year comparison between September 2024 and September 2025, residential electric prices rose 7%, residential gas prices increased 8%, and the cost of gas for electricity generation rose 28%.
Newly released data from the Center for American Progress, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Climate Power reveal the breadth of rising utility costs nationwide. Since Trump took office, gas and electric utilities have raised or sought to increase bills by more than $85 billion, affecting more than 108 million electric customers and nearly 49 million gas customers across 49 states and the District of Columbia.