By Jason Charles Guck, Business Development, Delta Edge CI
A tracker published by the Center for American Progress with the Natural Resources Defense Council, last updated on August 5, 2026, puts a number on something commercial operators have been feeling for two years. Since January 2025, at least 275 electric and natural gas utilities have implemented, been approved for, or proposed rate increases. The tracker estimates those increases at more than $101 billion in additional revenue through 2028, split roughly $78.9 billion on the electric side and $22.5 billion on gas.
Large numbers are easy to quote and hard to use. This one is worth understanding properly, because the methodology determines whether it means anything for your buildings, and there is one detail in it that most coverage leaves out.
What the number actually measures
The tracker is a compilation, not a forecast. Its authors identify rate cases from utility filings and from records of decisions in state public utility commission dockets, covering increases that took effect or were proposed to take effect from January 2025 onward. Every entry traces back to a public docket that anyone can read.
Four qualifications come with it, and the authors state all four themselves.
- It mixes approved increases with requested ones. A proposal in an open docket is counted alongside an increase already in effect. Commissions frequently approve less than a utility requests, so the approved total will land below the tracked total.
- It projects to the end of 2028. Where a utility was granted an annual revenue increase, the tracker assumes that increase persists through 2028 and prorates accordingly. That is a reasonable convention for comparing cases with different terms, but it is an assumption, not a filing.
- It is explicitly not comprehensive. The list is periodically expanded as more cases are identified, which is why the total has climbed with each update rather than settling.
- Reporting requirements differ by state. Each commission has its own rules about what a utility must disclose regarding bill impacts, so the underlying entries are not uniformly detailed.
None of that makes the number wrong. It makes it a specific kind of number: the scale of what utilities are currently asking for, not a bill you can expect to receive.
The detail that matters for commercial operators
Almost all reporting on rate increases is written about households. The headline figures are residential monthly bill impacts, and the tracker notes that some residents in states including Arkansas, New York and Massachusetts could see increases of $40 a month or more.
But read the methodology and there is a single sentence that changes the audience. The revenue totals, the authors write, include additional revenues to be recovered from all customer classes, including residential, commercial and industrial.
That is the whole point for anyone running commercial buildings. The $101 billion is not a residential number. Commercial and industrial customers are inside it, and they are the classes least likely to see a press release about it. A utility announcing a rate case will publicise the average residential monthly impact because that is what regulators and reporters ask for. The corresponding impact on a general service or large general service class is in the filing, and almost nowhere else.
An operator who follows this topic through the news is therefore watching the one customer class they do not belong to.
The trajectory is the real signal
The single most useful thing in the tracker is not the current total. It is that the same methodology has been applied repeatedly, so the updates can be read as a series.
As of late November 2025, the tracked total was nearly $85.8 billion. By early February 2026 it was more than $92 billion. By mid March, nearly $93 billion. By mid May, more than $95.3 billion. By the end of July, more than $101 billion.
Some of that growth is new filings and some is the authors identifying cases they had previously missed, and the two cannot be separated from the outside. Either way the direction has been consistent across five updates: roughly $15 billion added to the tracked total in eight months, with no update reversing the trend.
That matters more than the absolute figure, because a budget does not need to know the national total. It needs to know whether the pressure is easing. On this evidence it is not.
Federal forecasting points the same way from an entirely separate direction. The Energy Information Administration’s September 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook has commercial sector electricity sales rising 3.3% in 2026 and 2.7% in 2027, and the average retail electricity price rising from 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2026 to 18.6 cents in 2027, even as it forecasts the Henry Hub natural gas price falling from $3.43 to $3.28 per million Btu. Two independent sources, one an advocacy compilation and one a federal statistical agency, describing the same pressure on delivered price.
What an operator should do with this
A national total is not actionable. Your own utility’s docket is.
- Identify your service classification, in writing. It is printed on the bill, usually as a rate code. Every figure in a rate case is reported by class, and without knowing yours you cannot read a filing that applies to you.
- Check whether your utility has an open case. Every state commission maintains a public docket search. A filing states the requested increase, the classes affected, and the proposed effective date, generally months before anything reaches a bill.
- Read the class-level tables rather than the summary. The press release gives the residential average. The filing gives the increase by class, and the commercial and industrial numbers frequently differ from the residential one in both size and structure, particularly where demand charges or fixed charges are being restructured rather than simply raised.
- Put the effective date in the budget, not the announcement date. Commissions often suspend effective dates for six to twelve months while a case is heard. That interval is the planning window, and it is routinely wasted.
- Treat the notices as data. The habit of reading rate filings rather than reacting to bills is the practical version of all of this, and it is covered in our earlier post on fall utility rate filings.
The part that is worth being careful about
The tracker’s authors also offer an account of why rates are rising, covering data centre demand, grid modernisation costs, weather, gas prices and federal energy policy. Those causes are contested, and an operator does not need to resolve them to act. This article deliberately takes no position on them.
What is not contested is the mechanism underneath. Rates change through a public regulatory process with published filings, stated effective dates, and class-level detail. That process is slow, documented, and available to anyone willing to read it, whatever one concludes about the causes.
Which leaves a straightforward conclusion. A number in the tens of billions tells you the environment. Your own docket tells you the amount, the class and the date. The first is worth ten minutes of reading. The second is worth building into how the budget gets made.
If you want your service classifications identified and your utilities’ open cases tracked against your renewal and budget calendar, that is work we do at Delta Edge CI.