Rising power prices, long a political hot potato in the UK, are now burning fingers in the US too. Households there paid 30 per cent more for electricity than they did in 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration. One difference is that in the US, it’s AI data centres that are increasingly being fingered as the culprit.
Data centres are electricity guzzlers, for sure. But even though they are growing rapidly, they accounted for perhaps 4 per cent of electricity demand in 2024, according to Pew Research. Outside major data centre hotspots the rise in bills is driven more by the price of gas — last year, it was 60 per cent higher than in 2024 at the hub — and the investments needed to upgrade creaking electricity grids.
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