The data center is not being built. Whether that changes anyone’s electricity bill is a separate question, and the honest answer is no.
Both halves of that sentence matter, and most coverage of local data center fights only carries the first. A council vote decides what gets built on a specific piece of ground. The number on a small business electricity bill is decided somewhere else entirely, by an auction that covers thirteen states, and it moves on a schedule that has nothing to do with any town’s zoning calendar. Knowing which lever is attached to which outcome is the difference between an owner who can plan around a rising cost and one who is surprised by it every June.
What New Brunswick actually won
In February 2026, hundreds of residents filled New Brunswick City Hall to oppose a proposed 27,000 square foot AI data center at 100 Jersey Avenue, and the council canceled it. The site is now slated for 600 apartments with 10 percent affordable housing, startup warehouses and a public park (Common Dreams). Local organizer Ben Dziobek’s line at the meeting was “It’s time to build communities, not data centers,” and New Brunswick NAACP president Bruce Morgan put the objection plainly: “Many people did not want this in their neighborhood.”
That is a genuine win over a genuine question. Land use is the one part of this whole industry that a town controls outright, and the residents used the power they actually had. Nothing below is an argument that they were wrong or naive. It is an argument that the power they hold and the cost they are worried about sit in two different places.
The price is set thirteen states away
New Jersey sits inside PJM Interconnection, the grid operator that runs the wholesale electricity market for more than 67 million people across thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Once a year, PJM holds a capacity auction: generators bid to promise they will be available on the hottest and coldest days three years out, and the clearing price becomes a charge that every utility in the region passes through to its customers.
The most recent one closed on July 14, 2026. It cleared at 325 dollars per megawatt-day, the maximum price permitted, procured 138,318 megawatts, and cost 16.4 billion dollars. It still came in 6,831 megawatts short of PJM’s own reliability requirement (PJM). PJM chief executive David Mills summarized it without much decoration: “demand for electricity continues to grow faster than electricity supply.”
Nothing in that auction asks where a data center is located. It asks how much total demand the region expects and how much supply has offered to meet it. A project blocked in New Brunswick and built instead in northern Virginia or central Ohio produces the same regional demand number and the same charge on the same bills.
The figure inside the auction that explains the decade
The single most useful number here is buried in the previous auction’s write-up. For the 2027/2028 delivery year, PJM’s forecast peak load came in about 5,250 megawatts higher than the year before, and nearly 5,100 megawatts of that increase was attributable to data center demand (PJM).
Read those two figures together and almost the entire year-over-year growth in projected peak demand across the largest wholesale electricity market in the United States is one customer category. Not air conditioning, not electric vehicles, not population. Data centers.
That is what makes the local fight and the electricity bill genuinely separate problems. The demand is regional and it is growing at close to the full rate of the region’s growth. Which town hosts the building is a real question about traffic, water, noise and what a neighborhood looks like in ten years. It is not the variable that sets the price.
Why your June bill looked calm this year, and why that is temporary
New Jersey businesses have already lived through the version of this that hurts. Each February the state Board of Public Utilities certifies the Basic Generation Service auction, which sets the supply price for residential and small commercial customers who have not switched to a third-party supplier, with new rates effective June 1.
The February 2025 certification produced increases of 17.24 percent at PSE&G, 20.20 percent at JCP&L, 17.23 percent at Atlantic City Electric and 18.18 percent at Rockland Electric, measured against an average 650 kilowatt-hour residential account (NJBPU). Board president Christine Guhl-Sadovy named the cause without hedging: “PJM’s recent capacity auction results are the main driver of these increases.”
The February 2026 certification looked nothing like it. Atlantic City Electric came in 0.11 percent higher, JCP&L 1.6 percent higher, while PSE&G fell 1.8 percent and Rockland Electric fell 0.7 percent (NJBPU). The Board’s own explanation of the difference is the part worth reading twice: winning prices still rose, “driven largely by increases in wholesale energy and the PJM Interconnection (PJM) capacity market,” but the totals stayed flat “in part due to the PJM collar.”
The collar is a price cap and floor on the capacity auction, 325 dollars per megawatt-day at the top and 175 at the bottom, which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved on April 21, 2025 after a complaint by Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. FERC described it as a “time-limited” measure and noted that without it, the cap for the next auction would have been roughly 500 dollars per megawatt-day with a floor of zero (Utility Dive). It originally covered two delivery years. On April 28, 2026, FERC accepted an extension covering the 2028/2029 and 2029/2030 delivery years as well (Troutman Pepper Locke).
So the calm June was not demand cooling. PJM describes both of the last two auctions as having cleared at the ceiling, which is the market’s way of saying it wanted to charge more and was not permitted to. The measure that flattened the bill has a scheduled end, and the last delivery year it covers is 2029/2030.
What is actually on your desk
Three of these are real and checkable today, and none of them require you to attend a council meeting.
The date is February, not June. The BGS auction is certified in mid-February and the new rate lands on June 1. Both the 2025 and 2026 announcements followed that pattern. That gives an owner roughly three and a half months of warning on the single largest scheduled change to their supply rate, which is enough time to move a price, renegotiate a lease clause, or simply put the right number in a forecast instead of discovering it.
Find the line called the Price to Compare. New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities runs NJ Power Switch, which explains that this figure on your utility bill is what you currently pay for supply and is the only number a third-party supplier’s offer can honestly be measured against. The site tells you to request a standardized contract summary form, and to ask whether a fixed rate can change, whether a variable rate is capped, what the cancellation fee is, and how long the term runs, comparing everything tax-inclusive (NJ Power Switch). The Board’s own caveat is the most useful sentence on the page: “Shopping for Energy may save you money on your electric or natural gas utility bill, however, this is not always the case.”
Treat it as a cost line, not a news story. A supply rate that rose 20 percent in one June belongs in the same ranked list as insurance, card processing and waste hauling, worked in dollars rather than percentages, which is the method in our playbook for protecting margin when costs rise. A regulated utility rate is one of the few lines with no negotiation in it at all, and knowing that in advance is worth something, because it stops you spending your best week on the one bill that was never going to move.
Where we land on this
The residents of New Brunswick were not confused, and the reflex to describe this kind of vote as irrational obstruction gets the story backwards. A community deciding what belongs on its own street is the part of this system that still works as designed. What has quietly stopped working is the connection between that decision and the bill, because the cost was moved up to a regional market years ago and most people never noticed the move.
The uncomfortable part is that the industry’s growth is currently being financed, in a small and diffuse way, by every business in thirteen states, whether or not any of them ever host a building or type a prompt. A cap is holding that visible cost down for four delivery years. It is a smoothing device rather than a supply solution, and PJM’s own results say the underlying shortage widened while the cap was in place: the 2027/2028 auction fell 6,623 megawatts short of the reliability requirement (PJM) and the 2028/2029 auction fell 6,831 megawatts short (PJM).
We asked a version of this question at the end of our guide to AI’s environmental footprint for small businesses, wondering whether any local policy conversation had started connecting data center growth to commercial rates. New Jersey has now answered it twice, in opposite directions, in eighteen months. The date to put in the calendar is mid-February, every year, when the auction is certified and you learn what June costs. The date to put in the back of your mind is the end of the 2029/2030 delivery year, when the cap that has been absorbing the difference runs out.
Frequently asked questions
Does blocking a data center in my town lower my electricity bill?
No. Capacity costs in this region are set by a single PJM auction covering thirteen states and the District of Columbia, based on total regional demand rather than on where any individual facility is built (PJM). A blocked project that gets built elsewhere in the region produces the same demand and the same charge. Local votes decide land use, which is a real and separate question.
How much of the demand growth is actually data centers?
For the 2027/2028 delivery year, PJM’s forecast peak load rose about 5,250 megawatts against the prior year, and nearly 5,100 megawatts of that was attributable to data center demand (PJM). That is close to all of the year’s growth in projected peak demand.
Why did New Jersey bills jump in 2025 and stay flat in 2026?
The June 2025 increases ran from 17.23 percent to 20.20 percent depending on the utility, and the Board of Public Utilities named PJM capacity auction results as the main driver (NJBPU). The June 2026 results were close to flat, between minus 1.8 percent and plus 1.6 percent, which the Board attributed in part to the PJM collar, a temporary cap and floor on capacity prices (NJBPU).
Should a small business switch to a third-party electricity supplier?
Sometimes, and the state does not promise it. NJ Power Switch instructs customers to find the Price to Compare on their bill, request a standardized contract summary form, and check whether a fixed rate can change, whether cancellation fees apply and how long the term runs, comparing tax-inclusive figures. Its own caveat is that shopping “may save you money on your electric or natural gas utility bill, however, this is not always the case” (NJ Power Switch).
