Pittsburgh, PA — May 27, 2026 — As data center expansion drives new electricity demand across the country and pushes utilities to file rate cases that affect residential customers, a new public analysis finds that most large U.S. electric utilities are capturing only a fraction of the commercial and industrial (C&I) energy efficiency savings available in their service territories. The analysis, released today by BlastPoint, is available free at https://eeindex.blastpoint.com
The cheapest tool to absorb data-center growth
Data centers are driving the strongest four-year growth in U.S. electricity demand since 2000, according to a January 2026 forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The Department of Energy projects they will consume between 6.7 and 12 percent of U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4 percent in 2023. The bulk of that new load is commercial and industrial. To serve it, utilities are filing rate cases for new generation and transmission, and state regulators are pressing them on how much of those costs get shifted to households. The Colorado Public Utilities Commission recently ordered Xcel Energy to create a separate tariff for data centers, and the Virginia State Corporation Commission approved a new rate class in November 2025 requiring large-load customers like data centers to cover a higher share of grid costs. Similar proceedings are open in Pennsylvania and other states.
Commercial and industrial efficiency programs are the cheapest tool utilities have to limit how much new generation they need to build. A February 2026 study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that utility energy efficiency programs save electricity at a median cost of $21 per megawatt-hour, less than half the cost of generating it from a new gas plant. The question is how much room utilities still have to expand those programs.
Most utilities capture less than a quarter of what's available
BlastPoint's EE Savings Benchmark is the first to rank every U.S. utility that files commercial efficiency data with the federal government against its true peers. For each utility, it computes a Capture Score: the annual C&I kilowatt-hour savings the utility reported, divided by a bottom-up estimate of what its commercial and industrial customers could realistically save, modeled from the mix of businesses in the utility's territory and the efficiency improvements considered achievable for each type.
Across the 286 utilities studied, the typical one helps its business customers save just 23.8 percent of the electricity those customers could be saving. For every four kilowatt-hours of available savings, the program catches one and misses three. The 85 biggest for-profit utilities do better: the typical one helps its customers save 46.1 percent, or roughly half of what's possible. But even in that group, the top performer is capturing nearly four times as much of its available savings as the typical big for-profit utility. Fifty-seven of the 286 utilities are helping their business customers save less than 5 percent of what they could be saving.
DTE Electric Company and Consumers Energy, both large investor-owned utilities in Michigan, are standout performers, each capturing more of its commercial customers' available savings than the model predicted was achievable for a territory of its size. The other 83 big for-profit utilities of similar size can now see exactly where they stand against DTE and Consumers Energy with a single search.
"For the first time, a utility can see exactly how much commercial efficiency opportunity is still in its territory and how its peers are capturing it," said Tomer Borenstein, CTO and co-founder of BlastPoint. "The leaders are showing what's possible. For most utilities, that gap is the cheapest new electricity they could be delivering to their customers."
Five years of federal filings, ranked four ways
The full benchmark is publicly available at eeindex.blastpoint.com. It draws on five years of EIA Form 861 data (2020 through 2024) and ranks every covered utility four ways simultaneously: nationally, against utilities of the same size, against utilities in the same state, and against utilities of the same ownership type. Unlike state-level efficiency scorecards from organizations such as the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, the benchmark ranks utilities individually using their own federal filings rather than third-party scoring. Regulators, ratepayer advocates, and journalists can search any utility, compare peers within a tier, and request custom data cuts.
BlastPoint is a data analytics company that predicts human behavior at the household level. Its platform helps utilities identify which customers are most financially vulnerable, so energy efficiency outreach and enrollment efforts land where they matter most. BlastPoint works with utilities across the United States to improve program participation, reduce bad debt, and meet equity mandates with data, not guesswork. Learn more at www.blastpoint.com.
