It wasn't just the heat. Follow 36 years of real federal data through a bankruptcy, a Wall Street buyout, and the AI boom now knocking on the borderland grid.
Regulators approved higher rates in February and made them count from July 2025. Nine months of back-charges landed on spring and summer bills.
A fuel-refund credit had been quietly shaving about $18 off the average bill. It ran out in June — right as summer began.
June averaged 86.2°F with 17 days at or above 100°F. Cooling is most of a summer bill here, so every degree shows up as dollars.
One thing that did not cause this: data centers. The new money pays for 2020–2024 grid spending. The AI wave comes later — see below.
"The rate" isn't one number. A bill is four moving parts, and each moves on its own schedule:
In the desert, cooling is the summer bill. The average El Paso home uses 3× more electricity in August than in March. Most homes here cool with electricity and heat with gas — so summer bills tower over winter ones. Every 100°F day shows up as kilowatt-hours.
From May through October, the per-unit energy charge steps up — in 2026, about 13¢ for the first 600 kWh and 14¢ beyond it, versus roughly 10–11¢ last year. Peak-season power costs more to supply, so summer usage is billed at summer prices. Usage and price climb together.
The utility charges fuel at cost and squares up later: over-collections come back as credits (that ~$18/month refund that ended in June), shortfalls as surcharges. When world gas prices spiked in 2022, bills jumped with no rate case at all.
The underlying rate changes only when regulators decide a rate case — a step, not a drift, and sometimes backdated (this spring's nine months of back-charges). Add billing-cycle timing — your "June" bill may cover May 20–June 20 — and that's the wobble in any monthly chart.
This is why the same rate increase "feels" bigger in July: a 14% increase on a 400-kWh March bill is pocket change; on a 1,200-kWh August bill it's real money. If the swings hurt, EPE's Budget Billing plan averages the year into one flat monthly payment — only about 9% of homes use it.
This is the average price a home really paid per unit of electricity — credits, fuel charges and all — straight from the utility's federal filings. Five moments explain the whole shape.
Honest context: in inflation-adjusted dollars (tap "In today's dollars"), prices fell for 25 years and are still below the U.S. average. What changed is the direction — and who the money serves along the way.
Average residential price, read the way the grid bills you — the dials alternate direction like the real instrument, and the register carries the exact digits. Disk speed is editorial: it tracks each line's climb since 2019, not live load. From the module's Instrument Shop.
When the Infrastructure Investments Fund — a private ~$12B vehicle advised by J.P. Morgan — bought El Paso Electric in July 2020, customers got one-time credits as a condition of the deal. Since then, the dividends have flowed the other way.
For every $1 credited to customers in the deal, about $16.50 has gone out in dividends. The spending behind the rate hike is real — a new gas unit, poles, wires, substations ($1.55B since late 2020). The fight is over the profit rate on it: the company asked regulators for 10.7%; staff called that excessive; the final answer was 9.4% — near the national norm. That trimmed the increase from $23 a month to about $14.
The pace changed too: in the twelve years before the sale, two Texas rate cases. In the five years since — two more, the biggest ask since bankruptcy, and a ~50% base-rate request now pending in New Mexico.
Month by month, you can see the mechanism: prices bump along near 13–14¢ — then April 2026 spikes to 36.5¢ as roughly $60M of backdated increase hits two months of bills, before settling onto the new, higher plateau.
The fixed monthly fee — the part no thermostat can touch — jumped 48% ($9.25 → $13.71). The per-unit energy charge did the heavy lifting (+$26). Fuel was flat and two delivery riders actually fell: this spike was the rate case, not fuel.
New Mexico bills have actually been held down since 2023 — regulators ordered refunds after customers were overcharged relative to big users. Now comes the catch-up: EPE has asked for a ~50% base-rate increase.
+$15/mo in Jan 2027 · +$27/mo more in Oct 2027
…if approved in full. The decision is expected late this year. The June hearing in Las Cruces drew an angry crowd — the comment window is the lever ratepayers have.
Meta is building a giant computing campus in Northeast El Paso. OpenAI and Oracle's "Project Jupiter" is rising in Santa Teresa. Neither is on your bill — Meta pays for its own power plant for five years, and Jupiter runs off-grid entirely. The thing to watch is scale: the utility expects to plug in 1–2 gigawatts of new data-center demand within three years. The most power this entire community has ever drawn at once is 2.38.
The firewall being built: a proposed special data-center rate would lock these customers into 20-year contracts, minimum monthly payments, and roughly $50,000 per megawatt in security — so if the AI boom fizzles, the companies (not households) eat the stranded costs. Regulators decide on it this fall.
The risk: whether Meta's plant stays off the public rate base after year five, whether "planning estimates" become half-built infrastructure, and what a floated Fort Bliss campus — described as needing more power than all of El Paso — would do here. Back east, in the PJM power region, data-center growth has already pushed up household bills.
Headlines from the region's newsrooms, matched to this beat — headline and link only; the click goes to the newsroom that did the work.
Biggest ask since bankruptcy, a push for a 10.7% profit rate, $492M in dividends in three years, and rate cases running in both states at once. Regulators trimmed it. They didn't stop it.
Backdated rate increase + vanished $18 credit + record heat. The April data shows the back-charges landing almost to the dollar.
Refund orders kept New Mexico prices low since 2023. The pending ~50% base-rate case is the catch-up: up to ~$42/mo phased in through 2027, if approved in full.
1–2 GW of new demand on a 2.4 GW-peak system is a second city's worth of load. Whether households stay insulated depends on the data-center rate regulators decide this fall.
How we measured. Prices are total residential dollars billed ÷ kilowatt-hours sold, from EIA Form 861 (utility 5701, by state), 1990–2025 (2025 = EIA early release); monthly from Form 861M (2025–26 preliminary — monthly figures include billing-cycle timing, credits and surcharges, which is why April 2026's 36.5¢ is a one-month landing of back-charges, not a posted rate). The U.S. line is computed the same way across all utilities and matches EIA's published averages within 0.04¢ everywhere they overlap. "Today's dollars" uses CPI-U, 2025 base. Usage per home = residential MWh ÷ residential customer count from the same monthly files, averaged over 2023–25, on a billed-month basis. This measure is what homes actually paid on average — not the tariff sheet.
EIA Form 861 annual files, 1990–2025ER · EIA Form 861M monthly respondent files · EIA state average prices (validation) · FRED CPI-U
EPE/IIF: final approval & Jul 29, 2020 closing · Utility Dive on the $4.3B deal & FERC · PUCT approval & credits · NMPRC approval ($8.7M credit) · El Paso Matters: $491.8M dividends, profit-rate fight, Newman 6 overrun
2015 case settlement (44941) · 2017 settlement (46831) · 2021–22 case settles at $13.5M · NM 2021 order & appeal · NM refund order, May 2023 · Jan 2025 filing ($93M) · PUCT approval, Feb 20, 2026 · Final order details: 9.4% profit rate, fees, solar charges · NM $70.4M / 50% filing, 2026 · Las Cruces public comment, Jun 2026 · NMPRC case page (25-00082-UT)
El Paso Matters bill explainer: components, fuel credit, heat · Heat's compounding cost · KVIA on the new rates
EPE's 1–2 GW forecast & large-load tariff · McCloud plant proposal · Meta's $10B expansion filings · Jupiter joins Stargate · $165B bond, Doña Ana County · Jupiter's 2.45 GW fuel-cell microgrid · 2023 record peak (2,384 MW)
File No. 1 in the Grid & Capital series on private capital, load growth, and electric rates · File No. 2: The Grid Buyout Ledger 🔌 · File No. 3: The New Mexico Ledger 🌶️