Brionté McCorkle opened her latest Georgia Power bill and started doing some math to try to understand where her money was going.
The total was $233 — steep, but familiar for her and her neighbors living just outside Atlanta. Then she plugged the number into a new calculator built off a national analysis of investor‑owned utilities and watched a smaller figure pop up: $52.
“Roughly $52 of that bill is just profit for the power company,” she said last week, “and that is really high.”
Across the country, residential power prices have jumped more than 30% since 2019, rising faster than inflation, and a growing share of those hikes are going straight into the profits of utility companies.
A new report from the Energy & Policy Institute puts hard numbers behind what McCorkle and Black households across the South have felt for years.
Looking at 110 investor‑owned electric utilities nationwide from 2021 to 2024, researchers found companies kept about 13 cents of every dollar customers paid — roughly $186 billion in profit over four years.
Historically, that number hovered closer to 9 cents, but early 2025 data shows that climbing closer to 15 cents on the dollar. Utilities in the Southeast, where the biggest concentration of Black Americans reside, are averaging nearly 16 cents of profits per dollar paid, some of the highest margins in the country. Georgia Power has an even stronger profit margin. For every dollar a Georgia Power customer pays, the company rakes in 22 cents of profit.
A chunk of what you pay each month isn’t going to new infrastructure, workers, or grid upgrades, but to the people who own the utility — the shareholders.
For McCorkle, who leads Georgia Conservation Voters, that number isn’t abstract. She works with Black families and low‑income residents who are already “spending a huge part of their income just to pay the bills, keep the lights on.”
“Families in Georgia are already dealing with some of the highest energy burdens in the country,” she said, and each new utility rate hike forces people to choose between food, medicine, rent — and the utility bill.
For Black households, especially in the South, those extra dollars hit harder.
Research has long shown that Black, Latino, and low‑income families spend a larger share of their income on utilities than white and wealthier households. Nationwide, Black households spend roughly 40%–45% more of their income on energy than white households and face a higher energy burden even at similar income levels due to older, less efficient housing and the legacy of redlining in Black neighborhoods.
Most of the highest‑margin utilities operate in Southern states with large Black populations and long histories of disenfranchisement.
In Georgia, EPI’s data show Georgia Power ranking sixth out of 110 utilities for how much profit it pulls from customer bills.
How data center growth impacts electricity rates
Across the nation, those already‑high bills and increased profits are rising because of a massive buildout of fossil fuel power plants that regulators say are needed to keep up with data centers. Georgia is estimated to have between 100 and 200 data centers, making it one of the larger players in the data center boom.
In December, Georgia’s Public Service Commission signed off on $16 billion worth of new power plants. The expansion could add millions of tons of carbon pollution annually in Black neighborhoods, an analysis found last month, worsening health outcomes for nearby residents.
After the deal, which cemented an incremental increase in rates for large energy users like data centers, Kim Greene, CEO of Georgia Power, said, “Growth is good for Georgia and for communities of all sizes.”
The decision to build new power plants, she said, “will help keep our state competitive by demonstrating that we are ready to meet the energy demands of new businesses for years to come.”
A representative from Georgia Power told Capital B Atlanta in December that data center providers will foot the bill for new construction.
Regulators approved Georgia Power’s $16 billion‑dollar expansion with a pledge that booming data centers and other big users would generate at least $556 million a year in “downward pressure” on everyone else’s bills, reducing bills by roughly $8.50 a month for a typical household between 2029 and 2031. But regulators also warned that if Georgia Power built the full portfolio and data‑center demand did not show up, residential customers could see bills rise by roughly $20 per month, or about $3.4 billion in extra costs.
“The growth that we’re experiencing with data centers and with large-load customers is new, but it’s just like the advent of air conditioning,” Georgia Power spokesperson Jacob Hawkins told Capital B Atlanta. “We have to build out and make sure that energy is reliable and that it’s affordable. We are not taking our eye off the ball on affordability.”
Prior to the data center surge in Georgia and across the country, residential users had largely been subsidizing industrial growth. Nationally, residential electricity prices have risen more than three times faster than commercial rates in recent years, even as industrial users have seen prices fall.
“It’s designed for everybody else to pick up the cost,” McCorkle said about the buildout of new energy infrastructure for utilities. “They’re raising these bills and they’re padding their profits at the same time.”
And much of the new infrastructure for data centers could ultimately be funded by ratepayers — including, in many cases, households that see higher bills as data centers come online.
A Yale Climate Connections analysis of electricity prices found that as data centers have come online since 2022, commercial electricity prices for the facilities have risen by 3% while residential prices have risen by three times as much despite data centers consuming more kilowatts than ever.
Planning for more data centers
There are roughly 3,000 data centers operating nationwide, with an additional 1,000 estimated in the construction pipeline. The South is facing the largest buildout, according to multiple analyses.
With the number of these facilities expected to roughly double by 2030, the International Energy Agency projects data centers will drive roughly half of U.S. electricity demand growth over the period.
Utility companies are advocating for this expansion, researchers from EPI said.
As political debates over customer bills have increased, utility companies spent over $150 million on lobbying specific federal legislation around artificial intelligence, data centers, and energy regulations last year. This was their largest amount since 2010, and makes the industry one of the country’s largest lobbying interests, according to Dan Auble, a senior researcher at OpenSecrets, a group that tracks political spending.
The surge in large data centers is driving massive new capital spending on gas plants and transmission lines. The utilities’ trade association expects companies to spend $1.1 trillion in new capital over the next four years. That spending is financed up front by utility investors and bondholders, but paid back over time through customers’ electric bills, with an added profit margin set by regulators.
Because investor‑owned utilities earn a regulated return on every dollar of approved capital spending, each new billion‑dollar plant or high‑voltage line they build becomes a long‑term profit engine. Once regulators let that project into the “rate base,” the utility is effectively guaranteed decades of steady, high‑margin earnings.
These energy consumers stand in sharp contrast to those who get their power from nonprofit utilities. About 30% of Americans get power from nonprofit city‑owned utilities or co‑ops that do not collect shareholder profits and typically charge lower rates.
The rules that govern profits are written and enforced by roughly 200 state utility commissioners — some of which are elected positions. When you pay your bill, the profits they set flow to the company as net income. From there, executives decide how to distribute it to investors, mainly by paying shareholder dividends and buying back company stock, or by holding onto it in ways that increase the company’s value.
It is “squarely within” the jurisdiction of public service commissioners to lower utility profits in a reasonable way, former Connecticut utility regulator Marissa Gillett said.
For Black families in Georgia and across the South, the work of limiting utility profits could be the difference between a shut‑off notice and a livable summer. McCorkle has already seen how the current system allocates pain, she said.
As utilities and regulators green‑light new gas plants to power data centers, she worries that “it’s going to be residential customers who see their rates increasing.”
“There’s ways to do it that are cheaper, that are more affordable, that don’t result in bills going up as high, that allow the companies to still be profitable, but just not egregiously so,” McCorkle said.
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