EIA's September 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook, which attributes record US electricity demand to data-center development, forecasts the average residential electricity price rising from 17.30 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025 to 18.20 cents in 2026 and 18.59 cents in 2027
These are EIA's annual average prices for residential customers, in cents per kilowatt-hour and not adjusted for inflation. Commercial customers pay less in the same table: 13.41 cents in 2025, 13.99 cents in 2026 and 14.15 cents in 2027.
Verified 2026-09-21
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Data centre demand can feed through to household bills, linking the AI boom to ordinary living costs.
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- American Electric Power, one of the largest US utilities, which counts hyperscalers and manufacturers among its new large customers, signed fresh load commitments in the third quarter of 2026 and now expects its contracted extra load to reach 84 GW by 2031 AEP signed 15 GW of new load commitments in a single quarter
- AI data centres worldwide reached a power capacity comparable to New York State at peak demand in 2025, which Stanford's AI Index puts at 29.6 gigawatts
- OpenAI does not disclose GPT-4o's resource footprint, so Stanford's 2026 AI Index Report turned to independent researchers' estimates of the water needed to cool the servers behind it — as much as 1.58 million kilolitres a year — more than 1.2 million people drink annually
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