A single big AI data center campus can pull as much electricity as a small city. Not a building. A city. And the people building them are not slowing down.
Last year, data centers ate close to half of all the new electricity demand in the United States. The IEA expects them to keep eating about that much through 2030. Total data center power use in the country could roughly double between 2025 and 2028, from around 80 gigawatts to 150. By 2028 they could be pulling something like 12% of all the power the country makes.
That is the spectacle. Here is the part that lands on your kitchen table.
The grid is a shared pipe
Think of the grid as one big pipe everyone drinks from. When a giant new customer plugs in, somebody has to pay to make the pipe bigger: new lines, new substations, new power plants. The fight over who pays is the whole story of your electric bill right now.
Nationally, power bills are already up about 40% since 2021. Last year utilities asked regulators for more than $30 billion in rate increases, touching 81 million Americans. In the PJM region, the grid that covers 67 million people across 13 eastern states, the average bill is set to climb around 15% in 2026. A lot of that is the cost of getting ready for loads that have not even switched on yet.
This is happening up the road
You do not have to look at Virginia or Texas to picture this. It is being negotiated in our backyard.
As of late May, one data center company is in active talks with Escambia County to build a facility a couple hundred thousand square feet, somewhere in the middle of the county. The head of Florida West Economic Development says five different data center companies have asked about building in Escambia in the last two years. Nothing is signed. The county says no deal is set in stone, and Santa Rosa County, where our shop sits, has said it is not interested right now. The interest is real, and it is local.
Now the rate backdrop. In November, the PSC approved a settlement that lets Florida Power and Light raise rates by about $7 billion over the next few years, the largest utility rate hike in US history. For a typical home using 1,000 kWh a month, the 2026 bill goes up about $2.50, from $134.14 to $136.64. Small this year. The direction is the thing to watch.
The state's answer to the data center question sounds reasonable. DeSantis signed a law, and FPL has its own policy, that makes the data center pay the full cost of any new electrical infrastructure it needs. Cost-causer pays. On paper, you and I are not on the hook for the servers. In practice, watchdog groups are not convinced the line between the data center's costs and everybody else's stays as clean as the press releases say. Big shared upgrades have a way of landing on shared bills.
Nobody knows yet how this splits. That is the honest answer.
The part you actually control
Here is what I keep coming back to. You do not get a vote on PJM. You cannot call the PSC and reset your rate. The grid is going to do what the grid does, and the trend line on the bill points up.
What you can change is how much of that bill you depend on.
A home solar array makes power on your roof at a price you set the day you buy the gear. A battery lets you store it and run on it when the grid is expensive or down. You are not unplugging from the world. You are taking a chunk of your supply off the table so the next rate hike hits a smaller number. The more you make yourself, the less a data center boom two states over shows up on your statement.
I will be straight about the limits. Solar is not free, the payback depends on your roof, your usage, and your local rates, and your site is what decides how a system rides out a storm. Watching your meter run backward feels like a magic trick. Up close it is just gear, sized right for your roof, and we show you every number. But the logic holds: when the price of something you cannot avoid keeps climbing, owning your own supply is a hedge, the same way a well is a hedge against the water company.
The AI build-out is the biggest change to the power grid in a generation. Most of it happens far from your house, in places you will never see, paid for in ways nobody has fully sorted out. The one piece of it sitting on your roof is the piece you get to own.
If you want to see what that looks like for your house, the system builder sizes an array and a battery to your roof and your bill in a few minutes. Start there, and you will know your number before the next rate notice shows up.