Private Opulence, Public Bill

On a saturday I could sleep in. On the days without work and without deadlines the routine

loosens, and to that routine I am attached; there is, however, a beautiful and very hairy flatmate, Ugo, who knows nothing of the calendar. Summer or winter, sun or rain, Christmas or an ordinary monday, he wakes at the same hour and begins to celebrate as if for the first time in his life, until we go out. Eyelids still heavy, because even geeks, on a Friday night, allow themselves a beer in company, I collect the coffee that Can has ready the moment he sees us round the corner. I let Ugo off the lead, sit on the bench, and while I sip I scroll the news and switch on my thoughts.

This morning the thought switches on around a reassuring number: zero. That is what the big AI companies promise you on your electricity bill. First Microsoft and OpenAI, then, in february, Anthropic declared they would cover the power-price increases their data centers cause; Anthropic pledged to pay 100% of the needed grid upgrades and to absorb the estimated price effects. On paper, the machine's bill never reaches your door.

It is a gracious line. It also points in the opposite direction from the one on the label.

Take PJM, the largest regional grid in America: thirteen states, from New Jersey to the Midwest. In the first quarter of 2026 its wholesale price climbed to $136.53 per megawatt-hour, up from $77.78 a year earlier, the steepest annual jump in the grid's history. Capacity, namely what you pay so that power is available and not what you consume, went from $28.92 to $329.17 per megawatt-day in two years. Eleven-fold. The independent market monitor ties 63% of that run-up to data-center demand: some $9.3 billion now landing on ratepayers. And this week the Department of Energy signed its third emergency order of the year, letting the grid push plants past their pollution limits and, as a last resort, shift the big data centers onto backup generators during peak hours.

The mechanism, taken apart, is plain. A regulated utility does not set its price on the open market; it recovers its costs from the rate base, which is to say from everyone connected. When a load that is enormous and constant hooks onto the grid, the upgrades (new lines, new capacity) enter that base and spread across those already there. Your refrigerator and a compute hall end up on the same invoice. Not because you use the model: because you share the copper.

It is the old asymmetry that John Kenneth Galbraith called private opulence and public squalor. Only here it has stopped being a figure of speech. It is literal: the windowless shed full of GPUs is the private opulence; the common grid buckling under a heat wave is the public squalor.

So back to that promised zero. The companies say: we will cover it. Good; but cover what, exactly, and verified by whom? A voluntary reimbursement, computed by the company itself on“estimated effects” and revocable like any courtesy, is not a rule about who sits inside the rate base. Anti-hype is not anti-everything. Paying for upgrades and building net-new generation is not a stupid idea; it is the floor. The trouble is that the promise arrives instead of the thing that would matter: transparency on how the costs are allocated, and the right, not the favor, to keep someone else's infrastructure off your statement. One more fencing of a common good, signed with a discount voucher.

Why should it land on you in particular? Because the figure is concrete and already dated: the average household inside PJM territory faces roughly $70 more a month by 2028. And because the backup generators, when the promise of zero meets a record-hot night, burn next to houses that have never once queried a chatbot.

Electricity has no ideology. It follows the copper and the tariff. They tell you the machine is nearly free; the expensive part has not vanished, it has merely been moved to the bottom of your bill, to the line where you hope not to look.