Your Light Bill Is About to Rise to Fund AI!

By Aiden Satterfield | BBG Tech

Electric bills across West Virginia are starting to climb and one of the biggest reasons isn’t in your home or business, it’s sitting in the massive, and controversial data centers powering artificial intelligence. As Big Tech companies race to build AI “factories” that require enormous amounts of energy, the costs of powering and upgrading the grid are being quietly passed on to regular people. West Virginians, who already face rising living expenses and stagnant wages, are now helping foot the bill for an industry boom they might never benefit from directly.

The PJM Interconnection, which manages the electrical grid for West Virginia and much of the Mid-Atlantic, recently reported record-breaking power demand tied to data centers. Those massive facilities, some running thousands of servers 24/7 have sent wholesale electricity costs soaring from $2.2 billion to more than $14 billion in just one year. Even though most of these data centers are being built in northern Virginia, West Virginians are unluckily part of the same grid.

That means the cost of new transmission lines, substations, and capacity expansions is spread across all ratepayers, even those far from the centers of development.

Lawmakers in Charleston have also moved to attract more data centers by loosening regulations and offering tax incentives, but few have discussed how this growth will affect household budgets. Consumer advocates warn that as utilities build new infrastructure to serve corporate clients like Amazon or Microsoft, the average electric customer could see their monthly bill rise 20 to 60 percent over the next few years. For Black-owned businesses, families on fixed incomes, and small-town residents already struggling to keep the lights on, this isn’t progress, nor good. It’s another financial burden disguised as innovation. The AI revolution has its pros, but it definitely has its cons as well.