Electricity Bills Were Higher Than Ever in July

July is typically the season of high electricity bills, and this year is no exception.

Nationally, the average electricity bill spiked to $217, an all-time high, according to new data from Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub. That’s up from $177 in June, and $215 last July. Meanwhile, electricity rates were 19 cents per kilowatt-hour, virtually unchanged from June and slightly higher than July of last year.

Throughout the country, many ratepayers are seeing higher costs and charges in the portion of their bill covering the cost of power generation.

Once again, some of the most notable electricity price and bill trends were seen in the mid-Atlantic region, the heart of the data center boom and the anchor area of the PJM Interconnection. The region also includes Virginia, where Florida utility and energy developer NextEra is attempting to acquire the commonwealth’s dominant utility, Dominion.

In July, Dominion customers saw typical generation charges rise to $155 a month, up from $124 a year ago. Overall bills for Dominion customers were about $259 this past month.

The higher bills are in part due to the “fuel charge rider” that went into effect this past month to help recover about $1 billion in additional generation costs claimed by the utility. Those charges stem in part from higher fuel costs this past winter, when natural gas prices spiked to their highest level since the winter of 2022-23, Dominion officials said in a filing to the state’s utilities regulator. The MIT researchers estimate that the fuel charge added around $53 to July bills, up $12 from July of last year.

In neighboring Delaware, bills were $216 a month in July, a record high, while prices were around 19 cents per kilowatt-hour. Customers of the state’s main utility, Delmarva Power, saw a near 20% hike in the supply charge in their standard service offerings, as prices rose from around 16 cents per kilowatt-hour from last year.

The Delaware Public Service Commission voted at the beginning of last month to allow an interim rate increase of about $3 per month for the typical customer, which went into effect July 9. Soon after, Delaware Governor Matt Meyer signed a law giving the state’s regulators more discretion to reject putting certain utility costs into the rate base and thus limit subsequent price hikes requested by utilities. The governor’s office described the law as a mechanism “to prioritize prudent spending over unchecked cost recovery.”