Electricity prices have been rising across much of the country, and Illinois is among the states seeing the sharpest increases. Over the past five years, prices have shot up by about a third on average across the state, and some regions have seen increases of nearly 50 percent. According to the Illinois Commerce Commission, more than 170,000 disconnection notices were mailed out in June alone — that’s up from approximately 46,000 for the same time last year.
In response to the skyrocketing utility bills, Illinois lawmakers passed a sweeping energy reform package last week. The Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, or CRGA, is expected to flood the grid with more power and bets big on battery storage. In a landmark shift, lawmakers also lifted the state’s nearly four-decade-old moratorium on the construction of new large-scale nuclear reactors in Illinois. The state legislature passed a law two years ago making an exception for small modular reactors. Nuclear power already provides more than 50 percent of the state’s energy mix. The state currently relies on a mix of fossil fuels and renewables for the rest of its energy, with solar and wind making up roughly 13 percent of the
To finance the buildout, Illinois ratepayers will face a surcharge on their electricity bills beginning in 2030. An analysis from the Illinois Power Agency, which manages how the state procures its electricity supply, found the program will cost approximately $1 billion to execute but will save consumers more than $13 billion over 20 years.
The bill comes as the state’s electrical system is in a crunch driven by a surge in demand from power-hungry data centers, a state law promising to phase out fossil fuel use for generating electricity, and federal funding cuts for clean energy. State lawmakers passed the bill during the last two days of an October legislative session, and Governor JB Pritzker has pledged to sign the bill.
Illinois is the first state to take significant climate action since President Donald Trump retook office, said Andrew Linhares with the Solar Energy Industries Association, a national trade group that advocates for solar power and energy storage.
“It is a response to the attack on clean energy and attack on Illinois consumers that is represented by the One Big Beautiful Bill, which is going to have the impact of raising prices on all Americans,” he said.
President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, provided tax credits and other incentives to help accelerate the transition to cleaner sources of energy like wind and solar and put the country on the path to net-zero carbon emissions. Illinois was expected to receive approximately $1 billion through the law. But the federal incentives didn’t last long. Earlier this summer, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill, which ended the climate-friendly tax credits. Energy analysts have predicted that the loss of those tax credits and other incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act will result in as much as $250 more in energy costs per year per household.
Trump, who has called climate change “a giant hoax,” also cancelled nearly $600 million in grants for Illinois earlier this month aimed at modernizing the state’s grid and catching leaks of methane, a planet-warming gas. Linhares said that the administration’s pro-fossil fuel agenda has spooked investors from clean energy.
The new bill tasks the Illinois Power Agency with drawing up a plan to incentivize developers to bring 3 gigawatts of additional battery storage capacity onto the grid. Batteries are crucial for a grid shifting toward renewable energy as they absorb excess electricity during the day when prices are low and save it for later when prices spike.
“It’s an incredibly exciting investment in climate progress,” Jen Walling with the Illinois Environmental Coalition said, adding that the bill does far more than fund batteries. It also dedicates funding for home energy efficiency programs, geothermal energy, and thermal energy network pilots, and helps expand electric vehicle charging stations. The new legislation also includes new authorities for the state’s utility regulator, the Illinois Commerce Commission, to make long-term plans about the state’s electrical supply.
Earlier this summer, Meta, the tech giant that owns Facebook, inked a 20-year deal to buy the entire electrical output of Constellation Energy’s Clinton nuclear plant in central Illinois to power its AI boom beginning in 2027. Constellation signed a similar deal last year with Microsoft to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear facility to power its Pennsylvania data centers.
Communities across the country have pointed to the rise of the always-on, power-hungry data centers to explain runaway electricity bills in recent years. But a recent study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the toll of data centers can vary from state to state.
“This is a very nuanced situation,” said Ryan Hledik with the Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm that contributed to the study. States like Virginia and North Dakota have seen tremendous growth in data centers without seeing increasing rates. The picture is less clear statewide in Illinois, but ComEd, which distributes electricity to the northern half of the state, is estimating an increase in demand by 40 percent by 2040 due in part to the data center boom. Whether it will translate to an increase in residential electricity costs remains to be seen.
Nationally, a key factor pushing rates upward is the rising cost of modernizing the aging distribution system — the power lines, poles, substations, and transformers that deliver power — and protecting it against climate change-fueled natural disasters. Nevertheless, the fundamental imbalance between supply and demand remains.
“What we are seeing is that as utilities or markets are running out of spare capacity, new investments are going to need to be made to continue to support load growth,” Hledik said.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Illinois takes steps to address high energy costs, betting big on battery storage on Nov 5, 2025.
