A White House pledge asks the companies building America’s data centers to promise something no regulator has ever required of them: covering every dollar of the power infrastructure their machines need, so the bill does not land on a household account instead. Two hundred sixty-three million Americans now live somewhere covered by that promise, and…

The federal program that helps millions of lower-income households cover winter heating bills opens its new grant year on October 1 without a single dollar appropriated to run it. That gap sits next to a separate fact reported this year by the grant recipients and trade groups that track the program closely: the administration’s budget…

Somewhere on most phone bills, wireless or landline, sits a line usually labeled “Universal Service” or “Regulatory Recovery Fee.” Few people know what funds it or who runs it. The Federal Communications Commission just opened a formal review of exactly that question, asking whether the company that administers the multibillion-dollar universal service program, and spent…

Buried inside a much larger utility rate order is a single percentage that shapes what every Rhode Island Energy customer pays for years to come: 9.275 percent. That’s the annual return regulators say Rhode Island Energy is allowed to earn on the equity portion of its investment in the state’s electric and gas delivery system,…

Rhode Island regulators have told the state’s dominant utility to build an entirely new pricing category for its biggest electricity customers, the kind of scale a data center or a large industrial plant represents, and to have it ready before the year ends. It’s a narrow, technical directive buried inside a much bigger rate case,…

More than $170 million in bill credits are about to move through Rhode Island Energy’s electric and gas accounts, and the first ones land with the bills customers get this October. The Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission closed out the company’s base rate case on August 21, 2026, and Rhode Island Energy confirmed four days…

Most of a home’s natural gas bill has nothing to do with the price of the gas itself. Federal data published August 31, 2026 show the residential price of natural gas averaged $24.09 per thousand cubic feet in June 2026, while the wholesale citygate price, what a local utility actually paid to receive that same…

The average U.S. household paid noticeably more for electricity in June 2026, even though it used a little less of it. That’s the finding inside the Energy Information Administration’s latest Electricity Monthly Update, released August 26, 2026 with June 2026 data. Residential electricity sales edged down for the month, but the average price residential customers…

The White House’s budget blueprint for the fiscal year that begins October 1 calls for eliminating the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program entirely, zeroing out the roughly $4 billion a year the federal government sends to states to help households cover heating and cooling bills. The request lands just as state energy offices wrap…

California households now pay nearly three times as much for electricity as households in New Mexico, and the gap is only getting wider in parts of the country. Federal energy data covering June 2026 puts a 19.54-cent-per-kilowatt-hour spread between the priciest and cheapest states in the lower 48, while Hawaii’s average electricity revenue jumped more…