Rebecca Michalski lives in Rainelle, West Virginia. She is disabled and uses a walker to get around. She lives on a fixed income and watches every light switch in her house. She burns one lamp at night -- energy efficient. She turns everything off during the day.
Her February electric bill was $940.08. More than her entire monthly check.
She took out a loan after getting a cut-off notice during an arctic blast. "Every time you see that power bill, you're just sick," she said. Over the past year her statements have totaled more than $5,000.
A few miles away, Ashley Nicole Dixon manages a Dollar General store in Danese, West Virginia. She has a teenage daughter at home and another in college. Her house is just over 1,000 square feet. Her air conditioner did not work last summer. Her electricity bills over the past year also totaled more than $5,000. She voted for Trump. She says she is done with him.
These are not isolated cases. Thousands of West Virginians have been posting screenshots of their monthly charges on social media, demanding answers. Bills are surpassing rents and mortgages across the state. Some families are choosing between food and heat. The Associated Press reported on this community today -- April 9, 2026.
West Virginia voted for Donald Trump in all 55 counties in 2024. The state's average household electricity rate has surged 73 percent since 2015. And right now, across rural West Virginia and suburban Virginia and middle-class neighborhoods in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Texas, the same story is playing out in different dollar amounts. Your electric bill is going up. It has been going up for four years. And the people responsible for it are not the ones you have been told to be angry at.
Plain Citizen is not a Republican publication or a Democratic one. This article is not about a party. It is about a documented transfer of money -- from your household to some of the wealthiest corporations on earth -- that is happening right now, with the full knowledge and cooperation of both parties, and almost no accountability for anyone involved.
Let us start with what is documented and not disputed by anyone.
Plain Citizen will note what those two numbers mean together. While 80 million Americans struggle to pay their electric bills, the companies sending those bills booked $186 billion in profits. That is not an opinion. That is what the financial filings show.
Before we get to the politics, we need to talk about what is actually driving this. Because the answer is not the one you have been hearing.
Over the last three years, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been engaged in a race to build the largest network of data centers in human history. These are the massive facilities that run artificial intelligence -- the servers that power ChatGPT, Google search, Amazon's recommendation engine, and everything else running on AI in your daily life.
They require staggering amounts of electricity.
Now here is the part that should make you stop and read it twice.
Data centers and other commercial customers pay less per kilowatt-hour than residential customers like you. Yale Climate Connections documented the pattern clearly: between 2020 and 2024, residential electricity prices rose 25 percent. Over that same period, the commercial sector -- where data centers operate -- saw prices fall relative to households. In other words, as the wealthiest companies in the world drove up electricity demand, ordinary Americans absorbed the cost increase while those companies continued paying discounted rates.
"I think it's almost inevitable, the way that these structures are set up, that ordinary people are going to end up subsidizing the wealthiest industry in the world."
-- Cathy Kunkel, energy analyst, quoted by NPR Planet Money, January 2026That is not a fringe view. It is backed by documented analysis from Harvard Law School, the Yale Climate Connections research team, the Energy and Policy Institute, and Pew Research Center. Ordinary Americans are subsidizing Big Tech's electricity bill. That is what the numbers show.
Here is the part of this story that almost nobody is reporting -- and it may be the most outrageous piece of all.
Regional electricity markets use a system called a capacity market to reserve power for anticipated future demand. The idea is to ensure the grid has enough generating capacity standing by. Grid operators forecast future electricity demand and charge utilities a reservation fee to ensure that capacity exists.
When data center developers file plans for massive new facilities -- even ones that are just empty lots with permits -- those plans feed into the forecast. The model sees the anticipated demand, reserves generating capacity for it, and passes the reservation fee to households through their utility bills.
In the PJM electricity market -- which covers the region from Illinois to North Carolina, serving about 65 million people -- this mechanism caused standby power costs to increase more than nine times in the 2025-2026 cycle compared to the prior year.
The result: $16 billion in charges passed directly to households. Forcing ordinary Americans to pay to reserve power for data centers that have not been built yet and may never be.
This translated to an estimated $25 to $30 surcharge on the average monthly household bill in the PJM region in 2025-2026. On top of all the other increases already in your bill.
Plain Citizen applies the same standard to everyone. Here is the documented record on both sides.
President Trump campaigned on a promise to cut energy and electricity costs in half. Since January 2025, home electricity prices have risen as much as 13 percent -- more than three times the general inflation rate. His administration canceled incentives for wind and solar -- the two cheapest new sources of electricity on the grid -- while simultaneously fast-tracking data center and AI expansion that is the largest driver of new electricity demand.
Democrats championed green energy for years but presided over the policies in Virginia, California, and other states that fueled the data center boom without requiring those centers to pay for the grid infrastructure their demand requires. Democratic governors in New Jersey, Virginia, and New York took credit for landing data center investments while residents in those same states saw some of the steepest electricity rate increases in the country.
Some states are beginning to act. Oregon passed a law requiring data centers to pay for the actual strain they place on the grid. Several states including Georgia, Maryland, and New Jersey are weighing legislation that would create separate rate structures for large power users. Microsoft announced it would voluntarily request higher electricity rates in areas where it builds data centers -- though it is worth noting that voluntary pledges from corporations are not the same as binding requirements.
The Trump administration and several northeastern governors asked PJM -- the regional grid operator -- to hold an emergency power auction that would require tech giants to pay more of the costs their data centers create. PJM said it was not given advance notice of the plan and is not required to comply.
What is not being done: a comprehensive federal requirement that data centers pay for the grid infrastructure their demand requires before they come online. No such requirement exists. The cost continues to flow to households by default.
One energy analyst put it plainly to NPR: unless the rules are reformed so that data centers pay more of the infrastructure costs themselves, ordinary Americans will keep subsidizing the wealthiest industry in the world.
Amazon made $638 billion in revenue in 2024. Google made $350 billion. Meta made $165 billion. Microsoft made $245 billion. Combined, these four companies generated over $1.3 trillion in revenue last year -- much of it from the AI services their data centers power.
Rebecca Michalski in Rainelle, West Virginia received a $940 electric bill in February. She is on a fixed income. She is behind on payments. She turns off every light she does not need.
The electricity demand driving her bill higher comes in significant part from data centers built by companies with a combined market value of over $10 trillion. Those companies pay discounted commercial electricity rates. She does not.
Plain Citizen is not saying data centers should not exist. AI is real, it is here, and it is not going away. Plain Citizen is saying that the cost of powering them should not be carried primarily by the people who can least afford it -- while the companies that profit from them pay discounted rates and book trillion-dollar revenues.
That is not a partisan position. It is an arithmetic one.
Your electric bill is up 26 percent since 2022. The national average is now $163 a month. One in six American households is behind on payments. Utility companies booked $186 billion in profits from 2021 to 2024.
The largest driver of new electricity demand is data centers built by Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft to power AI services that generate over $1 trillion in annual revenue. Those companies pay discounted commercial electricity rates. Ordinary households pay more -- and are also being charged to reserve power for data centers not yet built.
President Trump promised to cut energy costs in half. They went up. Democrats promoted data center expansion as economic development without requiring those centers to pay for the grid strain they create. Both parties collected contributions from the industry. Neither has required data centers to fully pay for the infrastructure their demand requires.
The question is simple: should the people who profit from AI pay for the electricity it requires -- or should that cost continue to land on the people who can least afford it? So far Washington's answer, regardless of party, has been the latter.
The conclusions are yours to make.
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