Residential electricity prices here in the US are aggressively inflating. It’s an important reason data centers are seeing such strong public relations headwinds.
The chart below shows us that in March 2026, residential electricity prices had increased 10.2% year-over-year (YoY).
That compares to a 2.5% increase just a year ago.
It’s this aggressive inflation in Americans’ electricity bills that is driving a huge part of the resistance to data centers.
Consumers are seeing this kind of pain beyond just their power bills, particularly with gasoline prices having ramped up since the start of the Iran War.
The last time power bills inflated this quickly was during 2022, when inflation soared across all commodity classes during the post-pandemic recovery.
Before that, you have to go back to 2008, when oil, natural gas and coal prices all spiked as demand in China and India ramped aggressively against a static supply base.
Data center developers were already rowing upstream, ushering in waves of demand against a power landscape that was struggling to respond on the supply side.
Now facing a record global energy system disruption that has persisted for months, the supply-demand calculus is getting worse.
That’s the storm that’s driving residential power price inflation at 5X the Fed’s target rate for the broader economy.
