In the sweltering Alabama heat, where a trailer home can feel like an oven during each new heat wave, Esther Calhoun’s electricity bill has doubled in recent years.
On a fixed income of about $1,300 a month, the 63‑year‑old Calhoun now pays roughly $350 monthly for electricity in rural Alabama.
President Donald Trump came into office promising to stop the astronomical increases seen in American’s power bills. He pledged that by July 2026, electricity prices would drop 50% compared to when he took office.
Instead, by the deadline, residential electricity rates have done nothing but skyrocket, up 18%. Since January 2024, utility bills have risen three times faster than the rate of inflation.
In Calhoun’s home state, residents spend a greater share on utility bills than any other state. She has had her power cut off before because of unpaid bills, but now she scales back on essentials like medicine instead, knowing that going without electricity in the summer heat — with her health conditions — can be a matter of life or death.
“Ain’t no damn utility going to give us a break,” Calhoun said, explaining how she has tried and failed to get support from her utility company, Alabama Power, via a program for low-income people that is at threat of disappearing. “Being poor right now feels like being stuck in hell.”
What’s happening in Calhoun’s trailer is a window into a national crisis that is falling hardest on Black households. Families are squeezed between Trump’s broken promise to slash electricity prices and a patchwork of aid programs that are disappearing just as extreme heat makes losing power more dangerous.
It is a situation that is only getting worse, in part because of the growth of demand for electricity caused by industrial companies and data centers. The amount of power needed for data centers is expected to double by 2027 and quadruple by 2035.
With that demand, states are building dozens of new power plants and investing in grid infrastructure, but instead of the industrial companies behind the data center growth footing the bill, the billions are being subsidized by ratepayers like Calhoun.
“It’s difficult to do everything right now,” Calhoun said. “It’s difficult to pay your light bill, it’s difficult to pay for your groceries, it’s difficult to go to the doctor.”
Not only are utility bills rising, but so are disconnections because of utility debts.
More than 1 in 10 Black households are currently carrying an overdue utility balance. This is three times the rate for white households and double that for Latino households. On average, Black people who are behind in utility bills carry a debt of over $900.
The strain is getting worse because of data centers. In Virginia, one longtime resident saw his bill jump from around $100 to nearly $300 in a single billing cycle after a data center came online nearby.
“It feels like a corrupt situation,” Calhoun said. In her state, efforts to expand protections around rate hikes and disconnections as these facilities and power plants come online have stalled.
In Albany, Georgia, a 80% Black city about 60 miles from the Alabama border, Corey Morgan, an organizer who works on labor issues with the organization 9to5, has seen an uptick in evictions because people “can’t pay $500 or $600 utility bills on top of rent.”
Across the state, regulators have recently approved an estimated $43 a month utility bill hike to help cover the billions of dollars needed to build new power generation for data centers.
“[Residents] are facing these crises with almost no policy protections around utility shutoffs,” he said.
Last week, Trump convened 200 elected officials, utility executives, and data center developments to craft a voluntary pledge to shield U.S. consumers from higher utility bills from data centers. The pledge calls on data center companies to work on becoming energy sufficient, but there is no mechanism in place to enforce it.
Black communities fight back against rising utility bills
From Las Vegas to southwest Georgia, Black residents fed up with soaring bills are increasingly taking their fight directly to the utilities and regulators they say have rigged the system against them.
Last month, inside a hotel ballroom in Las Vegas, mainly Black and Latino residents confronted NV Energy’s CEO and other utility executives, accusing the company of pricing families out of air conditioning in one of the hottest cities in the country. Security ushered them out within minutes, but not before Leslie Vega, a climate equity policy fellow who helped organize the demonstration, got her message across: “We’re not just asking for lower rates. We’re asking for survival.”
In southwest Georgia, that same anger has been channeled into campaign work. Two years ago, Morgan and 9to5 began preparing Black and brown residents in Albany to show up to something most people ignore: the city’s annual budget hearings. “We were able to help residents understand that this two‑month session of meetings, of the city setting its budget, is where you all can see forms of utility relief,” Morgan said, describing how his coalition trained members to ask commissioners directly for funding.
Over that summer‑long process, more than 20 residents gave public testimony demanding relief from high utility bills — and the city allocated $2 million in funding to help people make their homes more energy efficient. Black Americans are more likely to live in older, less efficient housing, which may require more energy use, making them uniquely vulnerable as electricity prices climb. That’s especially as federal and state regulators have allowed utilities to raise rates and cut assistance programs that once helped low‑income families keep up with their bills.
Still, Morgan argues the successes in Albany are proof that ratepayers can force accountability even when the rate‑setting system is stacked against them.
“The data shows that these companies are receiving millions of dollars of refunds and subsidies, but they’re still raising rates on customers year after year,” he said. “We won a $2 million allocation, but that kind of support is the exception, not the rule, and it shouldn’t take a campaign just to make bills survivable.”
The scale of that fight is growing alongside the crisis itself. For the sixth time, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating the $4.1 billion in supportive funding for low-income households struggling with bills, arguing states already have adequate protections in place. This comes even as new federal data shows 95 million utility customers received final disconnection notices in 2024 for being behind on bills, the most recent year for which data is available.
More than 70% of all disconnections in 2024 happened in the South, the same region where Black households are concentrated and where summer heat is now lasting longer and hitting harder each year.
“Folks are trapped and can’t even meet the bare minimum,” Morgan said.
Utilities, meanwhile, are asking regulators for more hikes. In the first half of 2026 alone, companies requested a combined $18.6 billion in rate increases, on top of $29 billion in hikes sought the year before.
Much of that pressure traces back to the explosive growth of data centers, which are straining grids faster than they can be rebuilt. Utility executives are openly warning that blackouts could hit some regions as early as next year.
Calvin Butler, chief executive of Exelon, the largest U.S. utility by customer count, said Americans could “absolutely” lose power next year due to the increase in energy consumption without investing in power plants and transmission lines.
As bills continue to rise and the threat of trying to make it through a heat wave or snowstorm with power grows, Calhoun hopes it inspires people to wake up and fight back, just like Morgan and others are doing.
“If we would come together and say the same thing and you get enough people, then you can make things move,” she said. “But these companies and politicians are stacking the odds against us.”
