In a stunning statement last week, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Republicans are “going to get blamed” for soaring energy prices. I hope he’s right.On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump vowed to cut Americans’ energy costs in half by the end of his first year in office. Instead, Americans’ energy costs are skyrocketing. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]As a result, millions of Americans are sweating through heatwaves and opening electricity bills that feel just as scorching. It’s what I call a “heatwave economy,” in which extreme heat collides with corporate-driven utility price spikes, and working families foot the bill while trillion-dollar tech companies profit.Across 13 states, residential customers are seeing their electricity prices rise by $17 to $27 per month. That’s more than $300 a year in extra household costs on energy alone. The culprit isn’t just your air conditioning. AI data centers are consuming record amounts of energy, driving up electricity prices, and straining an already fragile energy grid. So far this year, utilities have requested $29 billion in rate hikes as a direct response to AI demand.Trump and the Republican Party promised to lower costs for Americans. But in gutting clean energy incentives and encouraging Big Tech to rapidly expand energy-intensive AI infrastructure with minimal oversight, they have sent energy costs sky-high. And this is just one part of the GOP’s broader agenda of deregulation and privatization that prioritizes corporate profit over public well-being.AI data centers, the massive warehouses of equipment powering large language models like ChatGPT, require constant, high-intensity energy. Companies likeAmazon, Microsoft, Meta, and xAI are building them at a scale and speed that utilities weren’t designed to handle. U.S. data center energy demand is on track to nearly double by 2030, reaching up to 9% of total U.S. power use. These energy demands are reshaping the grid in real time, forcing utilities to delay clean energy upgrades and restart fossil fuel plants. Some tech firms, such as Amazon Web Services, are even lobbying to connect existing baseload power plants directly to their facilities, diverting supply from the public.In many regions, electricity prices are set through competitive wholesale markets. When demand spikes, so do prices. Monopoly utilities—especially investor-owned ones with a guaranteed rate of return—pass those higher costs straight to consumers. In the PJM grid region alone, which spans parts of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, data centers helped drive capacity auction prices up by more than 800% this summer, increasing wholesale electricity rates by 22%. Residents could face rate increases of up to 60% over the next five years. Without additional grid capacity or clean energy alternatives, those costs will keep hitting household budgets.Rising energy costs fall hardest on low-income households, renters, rural communities, and communities of color who already face the highest energy burdens in the country. And the harm goes beyond higher bills: in Memphis, an xAI data center has drawn backlash for polluting the air through 35 unpermitted methane turbines emitting greenhouse gases and carcinogenic formaldehyde above federal limits in a majority-Black neighborhood. In Northern Virginia, the explosive growth of data centers has strained the grid so severely that local officials have warned of power reliability risks. And across central Texas, Microsoft AI water usage is believed to be contributing to droughts, forcing residents to take shorter showers.Meanwhile, the companies fueling these costs are posting historic profits. Nvidia, the chief supplier of chips for AI data centers, recently hit a $4 trillion valuation. The very infrastructure that’s driving up utility prices and polluting frontline communities is generating historic wealth for corporations and shareholders. It didn’t have to be this way. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was designed to meet rising energy demand by massively expanding clean, affordable energy. As a former Senior Advisor at the U.S. Treasury, I helped implement IRA tax credits that supported grid upgrades, distributed solar, and public power. These investments were already lowering household energy costs while preparing the grid for new technologies like AI. But this July, Republicans repealed or significantly rolled back those incentives, just as AI demand is surging. In their place, a new federal agenda is promoting the rapid growth of data centers with little environmental or economic accountability. If AI companies want to build their future on public infrastructure, they must do their part by paying their fair share of energy costs, funding clean energy buildout, supporting public policies that accelerate that transition, and investing in grid resilience and the communities most affected by rising bills. Some states are proposing new rate structures that make large energy users pay more. That’s a start, but we need a national strategy now.This isn’t about opposing all data center development, which is a necessary part of the country’s economic growth. It’s about rejecting a system where Big Tech offloads financial and environmental costs onto working families. It’s about calling out extractive corporate power, political shortsightedness, and demanding accountability that protects the public interest. The AI boom is here, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept a model that will deepen inequality, drain our grids, and lock households into subsidizing corporate greed.Secretary Wright is correct. Republicans should be blamed for this—because they’ve earned it.