The latest producer price index notwithstanding, inflation is still kicking around this economy. Consumer prices were up 2.9% in August compared to a year ago, according to Thursday’s consumer price index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

The category that’s up the most since last year? Energy services, which includes electricity, up 6.2%, and utility-delivered natural gas, up 13.8%.

One reason electricity costs so much right now is the economy just needs more of it. 

“Demand is actually skyrocketing all over the place,” said Ellen Wald, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

She said that’s a new trend in the past couple years. “It used to be that electricity demand was actually fairly consistent. It didn't really go up all that much,” Wald said.

Now though, there’s a push to electrify machines that burn fossil fuels, like cars and furnaces. 

And then, Wald said, there’s the data centers. Artificial intelligence firms are tripping over themselves to build them. Those copious energy needs are usually met by electric utilities, said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University.

“They make these investments in new generation capacity and wires, and they pass that on to their rate payers,” she said. Rate payers including you and me.

Jaffe said growing exports of natural gas are also raising prices for domestic consumers. And that’s happening just as utilities are spending more in the wake of climate disasters, said Arvind Ravikumar at the University of Texas at Austin.

“With hurricanes that have been devastating in Houston, there's been discussions of burying power lines, which is expensive,” he said.

Even in places not recovering from disaster, Ravikumar said wear and tear is starting to show in electricity distribution systems. 

 These are the poles, the wires, the substations, that supply electricity to our homes.  

For decades, many utilities have focused on building new infrastructure, he said. That has left a lot of deferred maintenance on what’s already there.

“ Upgrading and maintaining of sort of local distribution systems, have needed to be done for a long time. We have just postponed the problem and kicked the can down the road,” he said.

Ravikumar said now, utilities can’t do that anymore. And we are gonna keep feeling it in our energy bills.