If you’ve noticed your electricity bill is higher than normal recently, you’re not alone. Power is getting more expensive everywhere, outpacing inflation. One major culprit? The flurry of new data centers being built to meet demand from the AI sector.

To find out more, I asked my colleague Umair Irfan, who covers energy policy, for Vox’s daily newsletter, Today, Explained. Our conversation is below, and you can sign up for the newsletter here for more conversations like this.

What’s been going on with energy prices lately?

Electricity prices have been going up pretty dramatically over the past year. In some places, they’re rising by double-digit percentages, and they’re projected to rise even further. We’re talking about prices that are paid by consumers, so this is actually showing up on people’s power bills, which is why it’s getting a lot of attention.

There’s a couple reasons behind this. One is that electricity prices were kept artificially low during the Covid-19 pandemic, because the electricity industry is heavily regulated. A lot of regulators were under public pressure to prevent the utilities from raising prices because we were already dealing with inflation and other cost-of-living issues. Now some of those restrictions have become uncorked, and we’re seeing a rebound.

On top of that, all of the inputs for electricity have gotten a lot more expensive. Materials costs are rising in general, and then the Trump administration’s tariffs on things like steel and aluminum are making it harder to get the hardware to do things like build power lines or even........

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