For the average Columbus household, electric bills were $52 higher this July than during the same month a decade ago.
It hasn’t been much better in Cincinnati, up $49 in the same time frame.
For Clevelanders and Toledoans, the increase has been a more tolerable $20 and $25, respectively.
That’s according to a monthly utility rate survey administered by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, which has logged customers’ billing history dating back to 2007. The figures in this story are based on the PUCO’s assumption that households use 750 kilowatt hours per month. (For comparison, the federal government estimates average households use 900 kWh per month.)
The data tracks utilities’ standard service offer for customers, not those enrolled in aggregation programs or who choose their own electric supplier, which can lead to a slower rate of increases.
Signal Ohio analyzed electric bill data from Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Toledo. On average across all those cities, bills increased from an average of $107 per month in July 2015 to $139 in July 2025.
Why rates have been climbing
Different sources pointed to different factors driving up costs. Ohio is part of PJM, a 13-state regional grid operator. Its most recent capacity auction for wholesale power hit a 22% increase this year, after an 800% increase last summer, Reuters reports.
That’s driven by massive new demand from a spread of new data centers built in the Midwest, coupled with retirements of coal-fired power plants in the region, according to Asim Haque, a former PUCO chair who’s now a senior vice president of PJM.
“Supply is decreasing due to federal and state decarbonization policies that have forced generators off the system, as well as some economic-based plant retirements,” he wrote in a recent op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch. “In any market, when demand is up and supply is down, the net result is an increase in pricing.”
PJM has also been far too slow to cut into a backlog of renewable energy projects in queue to join the electric grid, according to Neil Waggoner, a campaign manager for the Sierra Club. Others, including Tom Bullock of the Citizen’s Utility Board, a nonprofit advocating for lower ratepayer costs, have criticized PJM for favoring the interests of utilities over their customers, which PJM denies.
Individual utilities’ power auctions, similar in function to the PJM capacity auction, are oligopolies that lack enough competition to drive down prices, according to Noah Dormandy, an energy economist and policy analyst at Ohio State University. He said bidders can be incentivized to abstain from joining the utility auctions, which can raise prices that the suppliers gain from in selling to other markets like aggregation programs.
And like other goods, electricity prices tend to rise with inflation, especially in the long run. However, the U.S. Energy Information Administration has found electricity prices have surpassed inflation rates in recent years.
