Tri-State residents see power bills skyrocket

CINCINNATI (WKRC) — If you are like just about everyone else in the Tri-State, your energy bills have increased significantly this year over last. In some cases, doubling or even tripling.

Hair stylist Kelly George says her Duke bill last January was $250. This year, it was nearly $800, and she can only cut so much from her budget.

“I’ve lowered [the thermostat] down to like 65, you know?” she said. “So you’re cold and then paying these huge bills on top of that.”

The cold this year was a huge factor in utility bills for two reasons — people used more energy to heat their homes, and that increase across the region created higher demand, affecting the energy markets. Kelly blames Duke.

Matt Martin, a Duke Energy spokesperson, defended his company.

“That is something that is outside of Duke Energy’s control,” he said. “We buy energy off of the market, and so, we pass those costs along directly to our customers. They pay what we pay.”

“You don’t mark it up at all?” Local 12 asked.

“Not at all.”

Martin says, in Ohio, Duke only makes money from its transmission fees — that’s getting the power from the grid to your home. And while transmission fees increased this year over last, it was a very small portion of your bill.

Utility watchdog Monitoring Analytics says there are three major components of a power bill. The cost of energy — that’s what the utilities pay for coal, natural gas and oil — has more than doubled since last January. The second component is the cost of transmission, with just a negligible increase this year. The third and most dramatic increase is “capacity.” It has gone up fivefold since last January. That is due primarily to the current and anticipated demand brought on by AI data centers.

“Data center load increased. The amount of generating capacity did not increase, and that drove up the cost of capacity,” said Joseph Bowring, Ph.D., president of Monitoring Analytics.

Bowring says if we want our bills to go down, competition for energy delivery needs to go up, and data centers need to provide their own electricity.