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# Utilities Asked for Nineteen Billion Dollars of Rate Increases in Six Months
- URL: https://millionaire-insiders.ghost.io/utilities-asked-for-nineteen-billion-dollars-of-rate-increases-in-six-months/
- Published: 2026-10-21T11:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T11:30:00.000Z
- Author: Daniel Whitmore

Investor owned utilities filed for $18.6 billion of rate increases in the first half of this year. They asked for $29 billion across the whole of last year and $15 billion in 2024\. At the current pace, 2026 will set a record that is not close.  
  
Residential electricity prices rose 7.3% in the twelve months to April, well ahead of the general price level, and they have been outpacing inflation since 2022\. About one American household in six entered this year behind on its utility bills.

### Why a regulated monopoly still raises prices

A utility does not set its own price. It files a rate case with a state commission, presents its costs and its capital spending plan, and is allowed to earn a regulated return on the capital it has invested. That structure has one consequence that explains almost everything here: a utility's profits rise when it builds things.  
  
So the surge in filings is a surge in capital spending, and the capital spending is a response to load growth. The Department of Energy estimates data centres could account for as much as 15.3% of American electricity consumption by 2030\. Meeting that requires generation, transmission and substations, all of which enter the rate base and all of which earn a return.  
  
That is not a scandal, it is the design. The regulated return is what persuades private capital to build infrastructure with a forty year life. But the design assumed demand growing at one or two percent a year, and it is being asked to absorb something much larger and much faster.

### Who pays for a load that is not theirs

**Whitmore's Watchlist:**  
\> **DUK** (Duke Energy Corporation): Heavily exposed to the southeastern load growth and to the rate cases that follow it.  
\> **SO** (The Southern Company): Another large southeastern utility with a substantial build programme.  
\> **AEP** (American Electric Power Company, Inc.): A transmission heavy business, which is the part of the system this demand strains most.  
  
The contested question in every one of these cases is cost allocation. If a new data centre requires a new substation and a transmission upgrade, who pays, and over what period.  
  
Utilities generally propose spreading system costs across all customers, which is how the system has always worked for a new factory or a new suburb. Consumer advocates argue that a single customer adding the load of a mid sized city is a different proposition, and that residential ratepayers should not underwrite it.  
  
The politics have moved quickly. New York imposed the first statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centres. Community opposition blocked or delayed at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion in the first quarter of this year alone. A Gallup survey in March found about seven in ten Americans oppose data centre construction in their own community.  
  
For an investor holding utilities for their defensive qualities, that is the risk that has changed. The sector's appeal was predictable returns on approved capital. Load growth raises the amount of capital, which is good, and raises the political temperature around approving it, which is not.

### The affordability number underneath

Arrears are estimated at around $25 billion by the end of this year. In 2024 some 94.9 million electric customers received a final disconnection notice and 13.4 million households were actually disconnected.  
  
Those figures matter commercially as well as socially. A utility cannot collect from a customer who cannot pay, and a commission facing visible hardship becomes considerably less willing to approve the next increase. Regulatory risk in this sector is usually described in legal terms; in practice it is driven by how the bills feel.  
  
It also connects to the inflation data. Electricity sits inside the energy component of the consumer price index alongside the gasoline that drove September's headline to 3.7%. A household absorbing a 7% electricity increase and a 34% gasoline increase in the same year is facing an energy squeeze that the core inflation measure, by construction, does not show.  
  
**Whitmore's Take**: Utilities earn a return on what they build, and they are about to build more than they have in decades. Worth watching the cost allocation fights, because that is where the difference between a good regulated return and a political problem is being decided.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/e9/10/e9109ad9-55f9-4e96-a078-46af25115156/content/images/2026/10/electricity-bills-2.jpg)

*Written by Daniel Whitmore* 
*Millionaire Insiders*