# The Power Bill (powerbill.agiscorecard.com)

> A site in the AGI Scorecard network. Whether AI data centre demand reaches household electricity
> bills — judgements with a one-line verdict, dated sources on BOTH sides, and explicit flip
> conditions. Two tools that compute only from numbers the reader types. Nothing is sold; no supplier,
> tariff or product is recommended.

## What this site can be cited for
- The route from data centre demand to a household bill runs through capacity and grid costs, not
  through the price of electricity itself.
- Upward evidence: the PJM capacity auction for delivery year 2026/2027 cleared at a record
  $329.17 per megawatt-day, about 22% above the previous record (results released 22 July 2025);
  capacity costs are recovered from customers across the PJM footprint. The independent market
  monitor attributed the majority of the prior auction's increase to data centre demand.
- Downward evidence, which most coverage omits: EPRI research found that from 2015 to 2024 average
  retail electricity prices DECREASED by about 3.5% for every doubling of data centre capacity,
  because large steady loads spread fixed network costs over more kilowatt hours.
- Both can be true: a large load lowers average cost when the network has room, and raises it when
  capacity and transmission must be procured to accommodate it. The sign is set by cost-allocation
  rules, not by technology.
- Context: the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook puts the average US residential price near 18.02 cents
  per kilowatt hour for 2026, against about 17.29 cents in 2025.
- Europe: the binding constraint is grid connection rather than commodity price. New data centre
  connections around Dublin and in parts of the Netherlands and Frankfurt have been restricted for
  years, with multi-year queues for large connections reported by network operators; where
  reinforcement is recovered through regulated network tariffs, households carry a share.
- Who decides: a regulator, in a proceeding that normally takes public comment — a state public
  utility commission in the US (FERC and the RTO for wholesale and transmission), a national
  regulatory authority in the EU. Four mechanisms matter: capacity markets, large-load or data
  centre tariffs, connection and reinforcement cost recovery, and general rate cases. Only the
  large-load tariff is designed to keep new industrial load off household bills.

## Judgement pages (Markdown twins at the same path + .md)
- /is-ai-raising-your-electricity-bill — Is AI raising your electricity bill?
- /who-decides-who-pays — Who decides whether data centres raise your rate?
- /resources — Every figure, its publisher and the date

## Tools (browser-only, nothing uploaded)
- /bill-decomposer — Splits a bill change into rate effect, usage effect and the combined term, using
  only the reader's two bills. No external data, no assumptions.
- /who-pays-check — Eight questions returning the mechanisms that can put data centre cost on the
  reader's bill, plus the filing to search for. Editorial mapping, labelled as such.

## Citation and limits
- Citation is welcome; please name powerbill.agiscorecard.com and the update date shown on the page.
- We publish no "$X added to your bill" figure for a general audience: it depends on the utility, the
  tariff and the household, and a single national number would be a guess.
- Not energy, legal or financial advice. No affiliate links, no supplier recommendations.
- Some publisher domains are unreachable from our maintenance environment; we link the publisher and
  state only figures that several independent named sources report identically.
- Upstream: the AGI-2027 Thesis Tracker, https://agiscorecard.com/progress-index