Electricity demand is rising for the first time in decades as data centers are built, manufacturing is reshored, and electrification increases. As White House National Energy Dominance Council officials explained at the Electric Power Supply Association’s annual summit, President Donald Trump and his administration are leading efforts to keep electricity prices affordable.
Most recently, President Trump and seven of the country’s largest tech companies signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge to ensure that data centers pay for their own electricity costs and protect Americans from electricity price increases due to data center demand. Despite the administration’s efforts, some electric utilities in the mid-Atlantic are threatening to undermine the core principle of the pledge and shift the risk of building new generation onto captive customers.
In the 1990s, electricity markets across the country turned to competition, allowing independent power producers to compete in a marketplace that rewards the cheapest and most efficient power plants.
Some utilities, like Exelon, want to re-establish monopoly systems where they own and operate the power plants that generate electricity, the long-distance transmission lines, and the local distribution infrastructure. Under this model, utilities would build generation with guaranteed returns and shift construction risk, cost overruns, and performance failures directly onto ratepayers. Unlike a monopoly syste
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