Data centers in Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania Independent Fiscal Office found that the average residential electric bill in Pennsylvania rose about 20.6 percent from 2024 to 2026, from roughly 213 dollars to roughly 257 dollars a month, driven by a series of default service price increases in June 2025, December 2025 and June 2026. State officials, including the PUC chairman and the Consumer Advocate, told a January 2026 legislative hearing that growing electricity demand from AI data centers is a major factor pushing up the wholesale capacity costs behind these increases, alongside power plant retirements. The Consumer Advocate's office estimated that, following the 2025 increases alone, residential customers of the four major utilities would pay an additional 940 million dollars for generation in the following year.

Governor Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05 on August 18, 2026, requiring large AI data center developers in Pennsylvania to sign a binding consent order agreeing to a set of standards the administration calls GRID. The order requires developers to bring and pay for their own power rather than shifting costs to households, to accept being cut off first during a grid emergency, and to show a real community benefit plan, and it blocks the state environmental agency from reviewing a data center's permits until the local community has signed off. The order also directs the state to build a public tracker of data center permit applications.

PECO had filed for a 12.5 percent increase in electric distribution rates and an 11.4 percent increase in natural gas rates, which the governor's office estimated would have cost customers about 510 million dollars combined. After Governor Shapiro publicly urged the company to step back given the strain of rising costs on households, PECO withdrew the rate case from PUC consideration on April 16, 2026, citing affordability concerns for its customers.

PPL Electric had asked to raise its base distribution rates, the part of the bill that pays for poles, wires and local service rather than the electricity itself, by 356.3 million dollars a year. A settlement filed in March 2026 cut that to 275 million dollars, working out to about a 4.9 percent increase for a typical residential customer, whose bill would rise to roughly 184 dollars a month once new rates take effect July 1, 2026. The settlement also builds in a large load tariff for new data center customers, including minimum 10 year contracts and security deposits, plus an 11 million dollar a year contribution to low income customer assistance programs.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission approved a statewide model tariff framework in April 2026 that tells electric utilities how to handle very large new customers such as data centers, generally those wanting 50 megawatts or more at one site or 75 to 100 megawatts across nearby sites. It requires these customers to pay the cost of any grid upgrades their connection requires, commit to minimum contract terms, and put up financial security, rather than spreading those costs across all ratepayers. Individual utilities, including PPL Electric and Duquesne Light, are now folding versions of this large load tariff into their own rate filings.

PECO's residential price to compare, the default electric supply rate for customers who do not shop for a competitive supplier, rose from about 11.024 cents to about 11.572 cents per kilowatt hour on June 1, 2026, an increase of roughly 5 percent. The increase followed the 2025/2026 PJM capacity auction, where prices in some parts of the grid surged more than 800 percent, driven partly by plant retirements and growing data center demand. The rate had already risen from about 10.40 cents in June 2025, so the two increases compound to roughly an 11 percent rise over one year.

FirstEnergy's four Pennsylvania utilities raised their default electric supply rate, called the price to compare, on June 1, 2026. West Penn Power went up about 10.3 percent, Met-Ed about 7.6 percent, Penn Power about 6.9 percent, and Penelec about 11.9 percent. The company and regulators point to a sharp rise in PJM capacity auction costs, tied in part to surging electricity demand from data centers, as the main driver.