Illinois data center boom tied to rising utility bills, experts say

CHICAGO - There's a price to pay for all that swiping, clicking and streaming we do every day when living our digital lives. We aren't talking about your cellphone bill but rather your water and electric bills.

In a FOX Chicago special report, Bret Buganski takes a look at how they are increasing due to the data center building boom.

The backstory:

A hundred years ago, Route 66 put Illinois on the map. Today, it’s considered "the" place to build a data center.

According to the Joyce Foundation, about 20 percent of U.S. data centers are located in the Great Lakes region, with more than half in Illinois and Ohio.

The private, nonpartisan philanthropic organization began tracking data center growth in the Great Lakes last year.

It also found Illinois has 115 operational data centers with most of them located in the Chicago area and the state has another 67 planned data centers in the works, which they say represents the largest increase in energy demand in the Great Lakes region.

What they're saying:

Jeremy and Emily Brzycki live in Joliet, where the city council just approved plans to build a 795-acre data center just south of the Joliet Speedway.

"Our water has been excessive and increasing. It's typically about $180 a month, which is kind of a lot," said Jeremy Brzycki, a Joliet resident.

Emily Brzycki added, "I think that running water is a modern marvel that we take for granted, frankly. And every time that someone is sick or there's a lot of dishes to be done, honestly, I thank goodness that we have this."

With two young boys at home, there's always dishes to be done or laundry to wash.

Environmental experts are also concerned about data centers affecting your utility bills.

Andrew Rehn is the climate policy director with the Prairie Rivers Network.

"The red flag that I can definitely highlight is that we don't have a handle on our water usage in Illinois, and we have a major water user coming in and coming in at a really large scale, those data centers. And we don't really have a hand on ways to track or understand water usage broadly in Illinois," Rehn said.

The downstate, non-profit environmental advocacy organization's mission is to protect water and land resources.

"I think we are, as a state, vulnerable here to having... this large user come in and start to squeeze in areas where we weren't anticipating water resources being squeezed," Rehn said. "We don't have the tools to address that problem at a society, at a state level."

When it comes to their electric bill, the Brzyckis say it's just plain terrible.

"Obviously, temperatures are getting warmer and warmer every year and it's harder to cool our house. So we've seen a lot of growth in our electric bill over the years and to the point it's becoming a significant thing that we have to worry about. And knowing that we're putting these essentially these power sucking data centers so close to us is very concerning," Jeremy said. "In terms of how are we going to budget for that?"

Rehn says consumers started to feel that "squeeze" last summer when they saw their electric bills take a big jump.

Until then, the average U.S. consumer's bill was around $142.

For the Brzyckis, they say their electric bill is sometimes more than $500 a month during the summer when they need to run the air conditioning.

"I think everybody probably saw last summer our electric rates went way up. Part of what gets baked into that is the grid operator is doing a look forward on what are the demands that we're seeing coming to this region. And that gets baked into your prices because what they essentially need to do is create price signal to build more energy and they do that by having the capacity payments, which show up in your bill. It's not in a line item. It's baked into your, the rate that you pay is the cost of the capacity market, which is how we pay for capacity," Rehn said.

He says that price signal is coming from proposed data centers that aren't even built yet.

"Really, we've never seen this amount of proposed new energy demand being added all at once ever before," Rehn said.

Sarah Moskowitz is the executive director for the Citizens Utility Board (CUB) of Illinois, a consumer watchdog group keeping an eye on how the data center building boom is impacting your utility bills.

"Supply prices for ComEd went up by about 50% back on June 1st of 2025," Moskowitz said.

We asked her to help explain where this significant price jump in your electric bill came from.

"The independent market monitor over at PJM looked at the results of that capacity auction and determined that a lot of it was the result of demand for electricity associated with data centers," Moskowitz said.

PJM Interconnection is the entity that operates the nation's largest power grid.

It is one of several regional transmission organizations or independent system operators in the U.S. that create the energy markets by overseeing the flow of electricity from companies that generate it to the companies that deliver it to you.

Entities like PJM set the wholesale price of power, which directly impacts the price you see on your power bill.

Parts of Illinois, Indiana and Michigan sit on PJM’s grid while the other parts of those states sit on Midcontinent's ISO grid – referred to as MISO for short.

PJM’s grid runs from Chicago all the way to New Jersey and serves 67 million consumers.

With increasing energy demands from data centers, the nation's power grids are becoming strained, which can lead to higher electricity prices and, possibly, reliability problems.

"So Illinois is a restructured state, which means that our local utilities can't own generation. So the part of the bill that ComEd makes money off of is the delivery part of a bill. But the part our bill that covers the cost of the electricity itself, the juice itself, is set by wholesale market. And here in northern Illinois, we belong to a regional transmission organization called PJM Interconnection. And PJM runs the markets that establish the price per kilowatt hour of the electricity itself. So it complicates matters for state regulators when it comes to finding ways to push back against the supply demand imbalance that is created by data centers," Moskowitz said.

According to CUB, large data centers can increase costs for consumers through different levels of the power system.

From local distribution wires, to high-voltage transmission lines, to big power plants, it says each level is run by a different combination of state, regional and federal entities, and policy changes are needed across the board to keep utility bills affordable.

Without them, residential consumers can be covering the data centers' costs for energy and energy infrastructure – instead of the data centers paying for it themselves.

"We are seeing the impacts on our bills before these data centers are even being built. The way that the market works is it tries to incentivize the development of new generations to meet future needs. And we have questions about how those forecasts are put together and we have reason to believe that we're seeing data centers, like maybe the same data center show up in various utilities' forecasts. So we could be anticipating a giant increase in demand for electricity associated with data centers, but it's very likely that only a portion of those data centers are actually going to show up and need that power. Meanwhile, however, we're already paying in advance for that power," Moskowitz said.

CUB says that’s because potential power needs from "data centers drove up PJM's demand forecasts and capacity market prices without sufficient safeguards against overbuying and overbuilding capacity to meet potential demand."

So who pays for power that's generated but doesn't get used?

"That falls on the existing customers like you and me," Moskowitz said.

Dig deeper:

What happens if too much power is generated and not all of it is used, but it's already paid for by consumers?

"So this is where we're getting into kind of how markets work and thinking about utilizing markets to ensure that we have enough power online should we need a whole lot more power in the future. And it's really a gamble. How much power are we going to need in the future?" Moskowitz said.

To answer that question, you need to know how much power can be made or will be available in the future.

"How do we incentivize the development of more power generation? By sending price signals, which means increasing the price, which we're all paying, even though we don't even know if those data centers are going to connect and are actually going to need that power," Moskowitz said.

Because of being a part of this grid, your electric bill can go up whether or not a data center is being built near your home.

"Essentially what that means is when these markets are run, the prices can apply to the entire grid, or they can apply to different parts of the grid, and certain parts of the grid that are seeing more of a strain between supply and demand could actually have a different price from the rest of the states that belong to our grid," Moskowitz said.

When it comes to how power forecasting is done for the grid, Moskowitz says, "It's hard to tell if, say, a data center developer is shopping around the same data center across different utility territories. And we suspect that that's happening. Meanwhile, all of these different utilities are counting that data center as part of their forecasted load, and they're reporting that to the wholesale market operator. But in fact, only one of those data centers is going to get built and so that has skewed the market dynamics."

We asked PJM about their process for making future power projections. They told us, in a statement, that says in part: "Our long-term load forecast reflects extensive input from our members, forecasting models, national trends, publicly available information, and historical performance in the areas that already have data centers."

While agreeing forecasting is critical, PJM also said in its statement it, "recently standardized the process for requests to add or remove large loads in the next annual long-term load forecast."

And that they are, "instituting a number of forecasting improvements as part of a set of directives from the Board of Managers and the governors of our 13 states."

With those changes, PJM says its 2026 long-term load forecast "does slightly decrease the expected load growth for near-term years" but at the same time, they continue to see "significant growth in electricity demand over the next 20 years."

"What I'm worried about, we're already seeing, we are already seeing the impacts of this new challenge play out in our bills and people are suffering already. I am concerned that the complexity of the issue and the number of different jurisdictions that it falls under could end up in a form of gridlock or a form of inertia… And I'm concerned that the consumer voice will get drowned out," Moskowitz said.

When we asked PJM about ComEd prices going up about 50 percent last June, they told us, also in a statement, "PJM does not set retail rates. This would be a question for ComEd."

What's next:

Recently, Gov. JB Pritzker joined a bipartisan coalition of governors across the PJM region calling on the entity to ensure data center electricity use does not drive up energy costs for consumers.

The coalition sent a joint letter to PJM outlining continued efforts to bolster its consumer protections for working families.

If you're wondering if there's anything you can do about increases in your electric bill due to rising data center energy demand, consumer advocates suggest contacting your state and federal lawmakers to ask them to support proposed legislation designed to better protect customers.

There are several proposed measures that have been introduced on both levels just this year.

In the meantime, there are online resources to help you try to reduce the cost of your bill.

Special ReportsChicagoJolietConsumerMoneyJ.B. PritzkerNews