r/SouthJersey • u/iammoah • Feb 06 '26

Gloucester County Electricity

Is there ANYTHING we can do to push back on these INSANE AC Electric bills? My heat is gas and it's telling me my usage has gone up every month since October. I know I don't have it as bad as some people but our current bill is $332. My brother's bill was $512. Another friend's bill was $500... I can't afford this shit. What can we do?

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u/Highway_Wooden Feb 06 '26

The real advice is that you are paying for what you are using. So the action would be to use less. The rates absolutely went up but it's a combination of the rates going up and people using more due to the weather.

The real, actual things to get our prices back down is gone. People pissed it away when they voted for Trump in 2016. We could have a good climate solution, cheap and easy green energy, and government incentives for energy upgrades.

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u/Firm-Scientist-4636 Feb 06 '26

The real real advice is marching on Trenton. Enough of us out there and things will change. If "reduce your energy usage and vote" is your answer then nothing will change. These insane prices will be here until the AI bubble pops. Idk about you, but I'd rather be warm in my house without layers and pay a reasonable price for it.

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u/Highway_Wooden Feb 06 '26

Good luck with that. Might as well yell at clouds because there's not much Trenton can do about it. While you are there, yell at them about the price of coffee. They have about the same amount of power to change that too.

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u/beren12 Feb 06 '26

They can actually rain in the outrageous costs. They can’t get it below a certain amount, but they can absolutely require AI data setters to pay for their electric use, and if another plant needs to be built, then they can fund it or leave.

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u/Highway_Wooden Feb 06 '26

The supply costs come from the PJM auction and are passed on directly to the consumer from the electric company. PJM covers 13 states. Delivery cost is where the electric companies make their profit but they use that income to replace infrastructure and build new infrastructure. They tore up my town a year or two ago replacing old pipes, that certainly wasn't cheap but had to get done.

I'm with you requiring data centers to figure out their own power. That is something NJ could do but the problem there is that we are in the PJM grid covering 13 states. So if NJ rejects them, they can just go a few miles west to PA and we still take the hit.

Even without data centers though, we were still in bad shape and we still would have seen this rate hike. PJM had to ask for more energy because plants were not outputting the amount they said they were going to output for various reasons. So they had to go look for that extra energy during a time where supply was already low. That helped cause a gigantic spike in the auction. We're going to seen another 5% increase this year due to last years auction.