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As Millions Endure Extreme Heat, Climate Group Tells Congress: 'Protect People, Not Data Centers'
"The reason the grid has so little headroom is that data centers are consuming electricity at a scale it wasn't built for, around the clock, every day of the year," said a 350.org campaigner.
Jul 03, 2026
With at least 250 million people across the Midwest and Eastern United States facing high temperatures on Friday due to what the National Weather Service dubbed a "prolonged, dangerous heatwave" that's expected to last through Fourth of July weekend, a leading climate group called on Congress to "protect people, not data centers."
Specifically, 350.org—an international movement for climate action founded nearly two decades ago—wants US lawmakers "to establish a moratorium on new data centers and ban utility companies from cutting off electricity access of American households who can't afford to pay their bills, as an emergency measure to protect lives."
The group on Friday shared an online tool that allows Americans to send an editable letter to Congress with the latter demand. It stresses that deadly summer heatwaves are "fueled by climate change," and "in 27 states, it's perfectly legal for utility companies to shut off your electricity if you fall behind on your bills, even on the hottest days of summer."
Candice Fortin, 350's energy affordability campaigns manager, said in a Friday statement that "no American should lose their life over an electric bill. Losing air conditioning in this heat isn't an inconvenience—it's life-threatening. Air conditioning in a dangerous heatwave is what keeps elderly people, pregnant women, and young children out of the emergency room, and higher use during summer heatwaves is something every utility plans for."
"Yet ordinary households are once again paying the highest price for a crisis they didn't cause," Fortin explained. "The reason the grid has so little headroom is that data centers are consuming electricity at a scale it wasn't built for, around the clock, every day of the year. And worse: fed by fossil-fueled energy sources that make heatwaves more frequent and more deadly."
As data centers contributed to the strain on US power grids on Thursday, Data for Progress released poll results showing that—along with billionaires, many of whom have made their fortunes from Big Tech—Americans see the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency companies that are driving the surge in data center construction as top villains to US society and the economy.
To reduce grid strain and the risk of blackouts, the US Department of Energy this week granted permission to PJM Interconnection, which serves 67 million people across 13 states, to force data centers to temporarily use backup generators if necessary. However, such systems generally run on diesel or gas, which means more air pollution for surrounding communities.
Fortin said Friday that "350.org is calling for a moratorium on new data center construction, to give citizens and their elected representatives time to put democratic rules in place to manage their impact on our energy, water, and land."
Two progressive firebrands, US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), recently introduced a bill to do just that. Their proposed Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act is endorsed by Food & Water Watch (FWW), which last year became the country's first national organization to call for halting approval of new AI data centers and, ultimately, in December, led a related letter to Congress backed by hundreds of other advocacy organizations, including multiple 350 chapters.
Since that letter, Big Tech has continued to make billions. Fortin noted that "Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta raked in net profits of over $80 billion in the first three months of 2026 alone. In fact, investor-owned utilities kept, on average, a profit of 14.6 cents on every dollar they collected from ratepayers. They can afford to wait while communities catch up."
The current heatwave "is a preview of every summer to come," she warned. "Our leaders must choose who they will protect: tech companies and investor-owned utilities, or people. Access to clean, affordable energy is a right, not a privilege. Real independence means no American is ever again forced to choose between a power bill they can't afford and heat they can't survive."
Over the past few years, calls for state and national bans on utility shutoffs have mounted, particularly during hot and cold spells. During another period of high temperatures last summer, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) led a pair of letters to Democratic congressional leaders as well as governors and mayors arguing that Republican US President Donald Trump "has put millions of lives at risk by dismantling federal agencies and lifesaving programs that help working families keep their homes cool and survive deadly heatwaves like the one this week."
The coalition—which also included FWW and 350—urged the New York Democrats who serve as minority leaders in the US Senate and House of Representatives, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, to fight for legislation that includes "a robust nationwide moratorium on electricity, water, and broadband shutoffs during months of extreme heat, and mandate that utilities reinstate disconnected services, waive late-payment fees, and forgive all utility debt for low-wealth households."
Months later, this past April, the US Energy Information Administration released a report showing that utility companies disconnected American households from electricity more than 13.4 million times in 2024—which, as CBD pointed out, came as "electric utilities raked in record profits of more than $54 billion and dividend payments of $34 billion," and "investor-owned utility executives were paid $530 million."
Jean Su, director of the CBD's energy justice program, said at the time that "this federal data is the most sobering portrait we have of the country's brutal energy affordability crisis... It's inexcusable for utility executives and shareholders to make record profits while families suffer climate extremes and get punished for being poor."
"We're grateful to Congress and the Energy Information Administration for establishing the first-ever study of how many millions of people are having their power shut off because they can't afford to pay," she added. "The only sure way out of this mess is to replace the price gouging of fossil fuel utilities with affordable, renewable community energy."
As Friday reporting from The Washington Post highlighted, it's not just potential utility shutoffs endangering Americans in the 23 states under an "extreme heat warning" from NWS. The newspaper found that although "about 93% of homes have air conditioning nationwide, as do 96% of households in the areas with high heat risk this week," around 3 million households currently impacted by soaring temperatures lack AC.
"Access and use of air conditioning is extremely important," Jaime Madrigano, associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. "We know that air conditioning is probably one of the only really proven effective strategies that we know actually does save lives when it comes to heat-related mortality."
Madrigano also recognized those who have AC units or systems at home, but are struggling to pay for them amid rising costs across the economy: "We know a lot of people are dealing with high utility bills. That's a very pressing crisis in this country right now," she said. "You may have to choose between food and medications or air conditioning, and the more pressing concern may be feeding your family."
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The Storm Bill Is Coming; Ratepayers Are Paying It Twice
Rising storm damage, opaque cost recovery, and inaccessible proceedings are making utility rate cases one of the defining economic justice battlegrounds of our time.
Mar 29, 2026
Across the US, electric utility customers are being asked to pay for the same storms twice. First, they pay the costs of the damage through rate increases and special adjustors that quietly appear on monthly bills. Then they pay again as infrastructure investment charges that utilities say will prevent the next storm from costing so much. The accounting for what happened with the money is rarely provided. When called to account, they are pointed to bureaucratic filing systems that require expert navigation to decode.
This is not a bug in the utility regulatory system. For utilities, it is a feature.
The evidence is hiding in plain sight. It’s available to everyone inside the regulatory dockets that govern what every household pays for electricity, but these documents are practically inaccessible. And inside them, a pattern is repeating across states, as utilities are collecting ratepayer money to manage storm risk, spending it in bad years, and then updating the recovery mechanism. Simultaneously, they request rate increases to fund infrastructure hardening they say will protect against future storms. The cycle repeats. The bills keep rising. The accounting stays buried.
What the Dockets Actually Show
In Vermont, Green Mountain Power (GMP) collected $6 million annually from customers beginning in fiscal year 2023 as a dedicated Major Storm Restoration Fund. It was established as a separate line item on customer bills to pre-fund major storm restoration costs. The mechanism made sense. Collect in the good years, draw down in the bad ones, smooth the bill impact of catastrophic weather events.
Politicians who want to talk about energy affordability need to understand regulatory proceedings. Saying utility bills are too high is easy. Doing something about it requires visible, deeper engagement.
Then came 2023, the worst storm year in GMP’s 11-year data record. The company incurred $53.6 million in total storm costs, including $45.2 million in major storm expense alone. And 2024 followed with $47 million in total storm costs. Two years of storms accounted for nearly half of all the storm damage GMP recorded over 11 years. The $6 million annual collection covered roughly 13 cents of every dollar in major storm damage incurred in those peak years.
By January 2026, GMP filed its FY2027 rate case, seeking a 7.5% increase, and disclosed that the storm fund would cease. The complete disclosure was one sentence. When Vermont’s ratepayer advocate formally asked GMP to provide a year-by-year table of fund collections and expenditures, GMP essentially declined. It pointed to quarterly filings spread across two separate regulatory dockets and told the regulator that the information was “already available.” No table or verification. They just pointed to a bureaucratic maze that most residential ratepayers would need weeks to navigate. The move suggests that utilities do not consider dockets a place where everyday people might need plain language guidance to understand what will affect their livelihoods.
In New York, a parallel story is unfolding in New York State Electric and Gas’ (NYSEG) service territory. The utility filed for a 35% increase in electric delivery revenues last June. The filing landed on top of a separate Recovery Charge that had already begun appearing on customer bills last February, tied to $710 million in bonds issued to cover nearly a decade of accumulated storm costs. Customers are being asked to pay for the storms twice: once to retire the debt and again to fund the hardening investments the company says will mitigate increasing recovery costs. An independent audit released the same month as the rate filing found that NYSEG had missed its enforceable reliability targets for six consecutive years. And customers are already funding multiple rounds of rate increases explicitly justified as investments in grid resilience.
The pattern is a business model.
Who’s in the Room and Who Isn’t
Utility rate cases are decided in proceedings that look like courtrooms. There is testimony and cross-examination. Detailed exhibits are entered into the record. The parties with legal representation and expert witnesses are the parties with resources to sustain that kind of participation.
The people who are affected by the outcomes almost never appear in the case, because the barrier to participation is genuinely prohibitive. The dockets run to hundreds of thousands of pages. The filings reference prior proceedings going back years. Understanding what a utility is actually asking for requires the kind of institutional expertise that most people simply don’t have the time or resources to develop.
This is the accountability gap that utility regulation was designed to prevent and has done little in practice to close.
Why 2026 Matters
Rate increases of the magnitude being requested across the country are landing on kitchen tables at a moment when many households are already stretched. Utility affordability is not abstract for everyday people in 2026. It affects every household; disproportionately burdens lower-income families; and compounds with rising food costs, insurance premiums, and healthcare expenses.
Utilities are right that storms are worsening and are causing more expensive damage. But those facts do not resolve the question of who bears the cost, how the accounting is done, or whether the evidence supports what utilities are asking for.
Those questions are being answered right now, in regulatory dockets most people have never heard of.
Politicians who want to talk about energy affordability need to understand regulatory proceedings. Saying utility bills are too high is easy. Doing something about it requires visible, deeper engagement.
They need to demonstrate that they can find funding for ratepayer advocates to match utility resources. They need to push for plain-language disclosure requirements so that when a utility shifts storm funding tactics, the accounting isn’t buried.
The 2026 election cycle is the right moment to ensure utility ratemaking on storm cost recovery is transparent. Rate cases are decided in public proceedings. The decisions being made in those dockets right now will appear on customer bills beginning this fall, as voters head to the polls. Candidates who want to talk about affordability should be asked, specifically, what they intend to do about the system producing these bills. The playbook is in the docket. It’s time to open it.
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Power Bills Are Bankrupting DC Residents—but There's a Path to Affordability for All
Public ownership of power has worked for decades in thousands of towns and cities and is being actively pursued in the District and other communities across the country.
Jan 24, 2026
Affordability will remain a top issue in 2026, continuing to draw political attention and likely defining this year’s midterm election races. Among the principal contributors to the cost-of-living crisis are power bills. For millions, the cost of keeping the lights, heating, and cooling on feels like “a second rent,” a problem that the explosive growth in the development and use of AI and associated data center capacity appears poised to aggravate.
The nation’s capital is no exception. A quarter of residents in the District of Columbia are unable to pay their power bill and in debt to the city’s private electricity company Pepco, which prioritizes short-term profits over affordable service. In 2024, the utility sent disconnection notices to 187,000 customers, threatening to shut off their electricity if they did not pay their arrears in full and forcing them to choose between, for instance, keeping their home safe and comfortable and food fresh or making their car payment.
Thankfully, we have a proven alternative–public ownership of power–that has worked for decades in thousands of towns and cities and is being actively pursued in the District and other communities across the country.
Alongside rent, home prices, dining, and entertainment, our electric bills have shot upwards. The only difference? Our power rates are comprehensively regulated. To protect against the monopoly power of Pepco, we have the Public Service Commission (PSC): a three-person board that reviews Pepco’s costs when the company wants to raise rates. Officially, the PSC acts as our watchdog to protect consumers from being billed thousands of dollars each month and to ensure the lights stay on in an environmentally sustainable way. In reality, it’s a depressingly familiar story of corporate capture of government.
We Power DC, a local campaign for energy democracy, has a simple demand: replacing Pepco with an electric utility that belongs to the people of the District.
In just the past few years, Pepco has jacked up rates while slow rolling climate action and energy efficiency. According to a 2023 PSC report, Pepco obtained only 16% of its power supply from renewable energy sources, while it thwarted the adoption of rooftop solar across the city. In response to this bad behavior, the PSC rewarded Pepco: approving a $147.2 million dollar rate increase in 2021 and a $123 million dollar rate hike in 2023. These dollars flow out of the District and into the coffers of Pepco and its holding company owner, Exelon of Chicago.
Despite a wide-ranging outcry from the community, industry experts, and even landlords, the PSC in November 2024 largely approved Pepco’s latest proposed rate increase. Commissioner Richard Beverly wrote a blistering dissent in which he said the other two commissioners were essentially approving the case “because Pepco said so.”
The effects of the rate increase were immediate and expected. Following a cold winter, the additional 5% bump on bills slammed DC residents, with some customers seeing their bills double or triple. Public anger forced Pepco to suspend shutoffs for the first few months of 2025—but both bill collection and the rate increase stayed in place.
Meanwhile, Exelon flaunted the rate hike in DC as a major success, all the while an impending recession looms across the city and the country at large. Even in bleak times, the pursuit of profits by Pepco (and utilities like it) is relentless.
Unfortunately, the District is not an outlier: Regulators across the country rubber-stamp requested rate increases, despite the lack of economic logic. State regulatory agencies liberally reward utility shareholders even though they assume little risk by parking their money in a safe and stable industry.
Fortunately, there is an alternative for all of us. In towns and cities across the country, utilities are not controlled by shareholders—instead, they are governed by the communities that they serve and run on a not-for-profit basis. Public power is a proven model that altogether supplies electricity to about 55 million Americans in around 2,000 towns and cities across red and blue states, including Los Angeles, Nashville, and Seattle. On average, publicly owned utilities provide electricity that is cheaper and more reliable than their shareholder-controlled counterparts. Public power is not foreign or experimental but firmly established in the United States.
Affordable power is not the only argument in favor of public ownership. The urgency of the climate crisis means that we cannot rely solely on cajoling private utilities to remake our power grid. Despite the declining costs and rapid growth of wind and solar over the past 15 years, decarbonization of the American power sector is not happening quickly enough.
Furthermore, for the next few years, the responsibility of cleaning up the power sector will largely fall to state and local governments. Congress’ gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act in the One Big Beautiful Bill means that federal tax credits for wind and solar will soon dry up. Instead of trying to bribe the private sector to invest, we should take control of the climate transition through direct public investment. New York did exactly this in 2023 when it enacted the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) and empowered the state-owned New York Power Authority to build large-scale renewable projects and lead a just transition to a clean electric sector.
Inspired by the successful movement behind BPRA and determined to end the unbearable burden of power bills for hundreds of thousands of residents, We Power DC, a local campaign for energy democracy, has a simple demand: replacing Pepco with an electric utility that belongs to the people of the District. A utility governed by us could provide reliable service at lower rates; provide high-quality union jobs; and be a leader, not a laggard, in the fight against climate change. On top of its grassroots organizing, We Power published a report describing in detail how DC would benefit from a publicly owned utility, and how we can get there. While the road to public power can be long, the report outlines key intermediate steps that DC should pursue, including commissioning a study on municipalization of Pepco, taking control of grid planning, and building and operating community solar projects.
We Power is accompanied by fights for public power in places as far flung as Ann Arbor, Michigan; Clearwater, Florida; and Tucson. Last month, a financial feasibility study found that power customers in New York’s Hudson Valley would save money right away by converting their private utility to a locally controlled public power authority. At a moment in which climate action and our political institutions are under full-frontal assault at the national level, We Power is one of many fights to build democratic and sustainable utilities.
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