CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (September 15, 2025)—A new analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) reveals how millions of people across Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia are footing the bill for an additional $4.3 billion in electricity infrastructure projects approved in 2024 solely to connect wealthy private companies’ data centers.
This $4.3 billion was previously obscured through opaque utility filings and is on top of an estimated $9.3 billion in data center electricity costs to be paid between June 2025 and June 2026 by the 65 million people who are customers supplied by PJM, the regional utility operator spanning 13 Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley states plus the District of Columbia.
Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at UCS, uncovered these additional costs by analyzing last year’s filings from utilities in seven PJM states and identifying 130 projects that will connect private data centers directly to the high-voltage transmission system. Over 95% of the projects identified passed all of their transmission connection costs onto local people’s electricity bills, totaling $4.3 billion in costs previously undistinguished from other, more typical expenses to upgrade and maintain the electricity grid.
Jacobs’ seven state analysis found household electricity bills subsidizing the following in direct data center transmission costs approved in 2024:
- Illinois: $239 million
- Maryland: $107.5 million
- New Jersey: $14.5 million
- Ohio: $1.3 billion
- Pennsylvania: $491.7 million
- Virginia: $1.9 billion
- West Virginia: $215.8 million
“The big tech companies rushing to build out massive data centers are worth trillions of dollars, yet they’re successfully exploiting an outdated regulatory process to pawn billions of dollars of costs off on families who may never even use their products,” said Jacobs. “People deserve to understand the full extent of how data centers in their communities may affect their lives and wallets. This is a clear case of the public unknowingly subsidizing private companies’ profits. Utilities and regulators must do more to protect people from this outrageous practice that is already driving up household electricity bills for millions of people across the country.”
There are several ways state and federal regulators can reverse this subsidy, Jacobs explains, and these solutions could save people billions of dollars as data centers are projected to increase U.S. energy demand by 130% by 2030, potentially repeating these cost shifts in many more states.
You can read Jacob’s full analysis in a new policy brief and blog post and see a breakdown of state-specific utilities’ projects and costs in the appendix.