Trump vowed to slash electricity prices. They’ve risen instead

(NewsNation) — Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to slash electricity prices by half within 18 months, but Americans are paying more for electricity now than when he took office.

The average residential electricity price rose 18% between Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and April 2026, the latest month for which Energy Information Administration data is available.

The increase isn’t necessarily Trump’s fault, since many of the forces driving electricity prices higher were already in motion when he took office. But those same pressures also suggest his promise to cut prices in half would have been difficult to achieve.

Recent electricity price increases reflect a combination of factors, including rising utility spending on grid upgrades, growing electricity demand from AI data centers, and severe weather events that have damaged power infrastructure.

To recover some of those costs, electric and gas utilities have continued to seek rate hikes from regulators. In the second quarter alone, they requested $9.2 billion in rate increases — 26% more than the previous second-quarter record, according to a recent analysis from PowerLines.

Altogether, electric and gas utilities have requested $18.6 billion in rate increases so far this year.

Much of the investment driving those rate requests is tied to efforts to increase grid capacity to meet rising demand from power-hungry data centers.

The Energy Department projects data centers could consume as much as 12% of U.S. electricity by 2028, nearly triple their share in 2023.

In response, some states are adopting policies designed to prevent households from shouldering more of those costs.

Last month, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order to require any company opening a data center or AI facility to fund the costs of new power generation and transmission infrastructure.

Earlier this month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order temporarily pausing construction of the state’s largest data centers for one year.

But even with state-level action, data center demand isn’t going away anytime soon.

The U.S. had more than 3,000 operational data centers as of April, with more than 1,500 in various stages of development nationwide, according to the Pew Research Center.

Currently, 38% of Americans live within 5 miles of at least one operational data center, Pew said.

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