In the past 18 months, I’ve talked to dozens of CFOs about energy costs and keep hearing a version of the same thing: “We have no idea what we’re actually paying, or why the number keeps changing.”
One told me they missed their quarterly earnings per share (EPS) target because of a single regional utility’s price change.
Energy used to be a fixed line item you budgeted once a year and forgot. Now it’s one of the fastest-moving costs on the P&L and the volatility that used to be a once-a-season weather event has become the baseline.
Commercial electricity prices increased by nearly 6% annually from 2020 to 2025, significantly outpacing the standard 2%–3% budgeting estimate used by most businesses. And power costs in PJM, the largest wholesale grid in the U.S., jumped 54% between 2024 and 2025, costing businesses and consumers $23 billion more than the previous year.
The stakes are enormous for large enterprises. A Fortune 100 company running a roughly $200 million buffer on their EPS could have an energy spend of $1 billion a year and a 5%-to-10% miss on that budget can take a large portion of the buffer — enough to send a quarter sideways.
Why energy landed on the CFO’s desk
The intelligence revolution that everyone is racing to win runs on electricity, and electricity is no longer cheap, abundant, or predictable. The grid is aging, older baseloads like coal are retiring faster than firm replacement comes online, and demand is surging, driven by data centers, electric fleets, reshored manufacturing, and building electrification. And all of this power is going onto the same grid stores, plants, hospitals, and warehouses are plugged into.
After roughly 15 years of flat demand, U.S. electricity consumption is climbing again — about 2% a year — and communities are forced to choose, for the first time, whether a data center or another business gets power first.
You can see the strain most clearly in the capacity markets, where companies pay just to keep power available for the peak. In the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), which runs the grid across 15 states, the summer capacity price jumped to $666 per megawatt-day in 2025 — more than twentyfold above the $30 it cleared in 2024. In PJM, covering the mid-Atlantic and Midwest, prices hit a record $329 per megawatt-day, record $329 per megawatt-day, and would have run roughly 60% higher without a regulated price cap. Efficiency alone can’t offset shifts like that.
The job nobody resourced for this moment
For CFOs focused on getting your energy line right, consider what your energy team is actually working with. A company with hundreds of locations can be dealing with hundreds of utilities, each a geographic monopoly with its own rate structures, billing cycles, demand-charge formulas, and surcharges. The tariffs that determine the bill aren’t published as data; they’re filed as PDFs and rewritten in proceedings most companies never see. A single rule change at one utility can ripple through earnings months later, surfacing only after the invoice is paid.
And your energy manager is expected to make sense of all of it with spreadsheets and utility portals that look like they were designed in 2008.
It is, frankly, one of the loneliest jobs in corporate America. The energy manager gets called when the bill spikes, but they don’t get credit when they quietly save millions renegotiating a supply contract. CFOs question why the numbers have shifted and the answer is hard to give, because the data arrives in dozens of formats from hundreds of providers and no single system holds the truth. Sustainability asks for clean Scope 2 data nobody can access. Operations wants to know why a walk-in freezer cycling during a peak window just triggered a demand charge that will haunt the bill for a year.
The job requires fluency in capacity charges, transmission charges, deregulated versus regulated markets, and real-time pricing — and it’s almost always under-resourced relative to what now rides on it: the budget you’re trying to defend.
The successor the AI boom quietly produced
A year ago, the most sought-after person in the enterprise was whoever understood AI. Boards wanted an AI strategy, CEOs hired chief AI officers, CFOs wrote checks for models and the data centers to run them. Those AI-focused roles mattered enormously, and still do.
But the AI boom has quietly produced a successor: the energy manager. At most companies, they sit several levels down, manage a team of one or two, and until recently, weren’t invited to the strategy offsite. For a CFO trying to defend a budget and protect a margin, the most important person in the building is increasingly the energy manager. When they get it right, growth stays on track — but when they’re flying blind, the surprises show up exactly where leadership can least afford them.
What the smart CFO does now
Here’s the part most leadership teams haven’t absorbed: the bottleneck isn’t a lack of effort or talent, and it usually isn’t even a lack of technology. It’s a lack of visibility. You can’t optimize what you can’t see, and most large enterprises still can’t see their energy use at the facility level, across every location. The fix is unglamorous but decisive: Consolidate the data.
Bring every bill, meter, market, and rate into one place, and decisions that felt impossible become obvious. Errors get caught, tariffs get optimized, procurement gets strategic instead of reactive, and the sustainability report becomes defensible because it’s built on the same numbers the finance team uses.
AI committees and consultants help tell leadership where the future is going. But the energy manager is the one who can keep the lights on, and the margins intact, while they get there. Smart leadership teams are already moving that person up the org chart, reporting to a CFO, giving them real tools, and putting energy strategy where it belongs: on the agenda, next to growth.
The companies that do it early will carry a structural cost advantage over the ones that wait for the next price spike to make the point for them.
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