Your Power Bill Rose. Your Usage Didn't.
If you cut consumption last year and the bill still went up, the program worked and the measurement failed.
Here is a conversation that happens every fall. A facilities team spends a year tightening schedules, fixing economizers, and pulling overnight load out of a few hundred buildings. They do real work and they get real results. Then the annual energy spend comes in higher than the year before, the CFO sees one number, and the next time somebody proposes an energy project the answer is that we tried that.
Nothing in that story is dishonest. The bill really did go up. But the bill is the wrong instrument, and using it as the scorecard has quietly killed more energy programs than bad equipment ever has.
Rate and load are two different things
Your utility bill is roughly the product of two numbers. How much energy you used and when you used it, which you control. And what you were charged per unit, which you do not.
Commercial electricity averaged 14.19 cents per kilowatt-hour in June 2026, against 13.54 cents in June 2025. That is up 4.8% in twelve months, and nothing a facilities team does moves it.
Zoom out and the trend is steeper. Retail electricity prices have climbed nearly 40% since 2021, the fastest stretch of growth on record.
So an operator who did nothing at all absorbed the full increase. An operator who cut load absorbed less than the full increase. That difference is the entire return on the program, and comparing this year's bill to last year's bill hides it completely.
Where the increases are coming from
This is not a temporary spike working its way through the system.
In the first three months of 2026, utilities asked state commissions to approve $9.4 billion in rate increases. That followed 2025, when utilities requested $31 billion for the full year, more than double the $15 billion sought in 2024.
A large share of that traces to capacity costs. Data center load growth has driven capacity market prices sharply higher, with current and projected data center demand accounting for a $9.3 billion increase, or 174%, in PJM capacity costs for the 2025-26 delivery year. Parts of Pennsylvania saw commercial price increases of up to 29%.
Operators are naming it out loud on earnings calls. TJX CFO John Klinger told investors that in "the back half, we are seeing higher fuel rates comparatively speaking, which is expected to impact third-quarter gross margins." Walmart CFO John Rainey put a number on the broader energy exposure: "We now expect more than $2 billion of incremental fuel-related costs this year above and beyond our original guidance assumptions."
None of those companies has a lever on the rate either. What they have is scale, which means the same percentage increase costs them more.
Measure against a modeled baseline, not against last year
The fix is to change what you compare against.
Instead of asking whether this year's bill is lower than last year's, ask what this year's bill would have been if you had changed nothing. That is a modeled number: take the building's consumption pattern before the work, adjust it for weather, occupancy, operating hours, and the rate you were actually charged, and project what the site would have spent.
The difference between that projection and the real invoice is the result. It survives a rate increase, because the rate is in both sides of the comparison.
This is not a novel idea. It is how utility efficiency programs have measured savings for decades, and it is why they measure that way instead of reading the meter year over year. What is new is that rate volatility has gotten large enough that a facilities team using the simpler method now regularly looks like it is losing when it is winning.
Two practical notes. The baseline has to be weather-normalized, because a mild summer will flatter you and a brutal one will bury you. And it has to be built before the work starts, or you will be accused of drawing the target around the arrow.
What this changes about the pitch you make internally
When you go to the CFO, the sentence is not "our energy spend went down." It is "energy rates rose 4.8% and our spend rose 1.9%, and the gap is what the program returned."
That is a harder sentence to say and a much harder one to argue with. It also survives next year, when rates rise again.
There is a second lever worth knowing about. Utility demand response programs pay for reducing load during specific high-demand windows, and a multi-site operator with centralized control over HVAC is unusually well positioned to participate, because the reduction can be spread thinly across many buildings instead of taken hard out of one. GlacierGrid participates in utility demand response. Whether a specific program is available to you depends on your utility and your region, so treat it as a question to ask rather than a number to budget.
What to do next
Before your next budget cycle, pick the ten sites where you did the most work this year and build a weather-normalized baseline for each one. Compare against that, not against last year's invoice.
You may find the program did better than the bill suggested. You may find it did worse. Either answer is more useful than the one you have now.
Start a free 90-day pilot and get a measured baseline on your sites before the next rate increase lands.
