About & methodology
Who Pays for Data Centers republishes federal and grid-operator electricity data and links every data-center claim to its primary source.
Sources
- National price ($/kWh) & CPI: BLS series APU000072610, CUUR0000SEHF01, CPIAUCNS via FRED. Monthly.
- State prices, bills & usage: EIA Form 861M (keyless public-domain XLSX), monthly since 2010, ~2-month lag; recent months are preliminary and can be revised.
- Capacity prices: PJM Base Residual Auction results workbooks ("For Public Use"), parsed each build; .xlsx vintages (2020/21 onward).
- Water: national direct and indirect consumption and the per-kWh intensity factors come from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, the report to Congress required by the Energy Act of 2020. Colorado River apportionments and reductions are read from Reclamation's 2027-2028 Operating Guidelines, issued with the August 21, 2026 Record of Decision. Per-facility figures are company self-reporting or state filings, labeled per row.
- Curated layers: the state docket facts, tariff tracker, ledger and water layer are hand-curated; every entry carries the source URL it was verified against and the date it was checked. Entries without a fetchable source are not published.
Methodology
Average monthly bill = residential revenue ÷ residential customers, per state per month (EIA's own bill methodology, computed monthly instead of EIA's annual table). Average usage = sales ÷ customers. The U.S. average price is revenue-weighted across states. Rankings include the 50 states and DC. PJM prices are the published resource clearing prices; actual load-weighted costs differ (self-supply, credits), which is why we always label them wholesale.
Update cadence
The site rebuilds daily. BLS prices update monthly; EIA 861M monthly (~24th); PJM after each auction. Curated layers are reviewed quarterly and on major docket news (dated "as of" on each page). The water layer is reviewed on the same cadence and whenever Reclamation issues new operating guidelines, which are expected at two-year intervals through 2036.
What this site does not do
No forecasts, no advice, no invented numbers, no position on whether data centers are good or bad. Claims are attributed and linked; our own figures are parsed from primary data on every build and downloadable on the data page. If you find an error, tell us and we will fix it and note the correction.
Planned additions
MISO / ISO-NE / NYISO capacity results (hand-curated annually), per-utility bill-anatomy pages, and a state bill-impact estimator built on the numbers above. Nothing ships until it can be kept accurate.