El Paso Electric Ranks 3rd In The Nation For Outages And Still Wants To Raise Your Rates

El Paso Electric Wants to Raise Your Rates AND Hand Your City to a Data Center.

El Paso Electric wants more of your money. El Paso Water is scrambling to hold its infrastructure together. And somewhere in Northeast El Paso, a $10 billion Meta data center is already under construction, on land that belongs to a city whose residents were never meaningfully asked if they wanted it there. This is a pattern, and El Pasoans deserve to call it exactly what it is.

El Paso Electric Just Hit You With a 23% Rate Hike. Power Is Still Going Out

Starting in May, El Paso Electric customers in Texas are seeing an average monthly bill increase of about $13, bringing the typical residential bill from around $98 to around $111. The residential customer charge, the flat fee you pay regardless of how much electricity you actually use, jumped from $9.25 to $13.71. Consumer advocates have pointed out that higher flat charges reduce incentives to conserve energy and hit low-usage households hardest. If you cut back, you still pay more.

All told, the Public Utility Commission approved about a 23% increase for residential customers. And if you're in New Mexico, it's not over: El Paso Electric also filed a general rate case with the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission in March 2026, seeking another base rate adjustment, with a decision expected by the end of the year.

Here is the thing they do not want you to connect: the lights are still going out. Right here in 2026 alone, El Paso Electric has racked up at least seven major, news-covered power outages affecting tens of thousands of customers:

January 16 saw up to 12,000 customers in the Sunland Park and South Mesa Hills areas lose power, with traffic lights along Mesa going dark and the cause never publicly confirmed. February 18 brought up to 70 simultaneous outages stretching from El Paso into Las Cruces, knocking out traffic lights across both cities. April 7 was the biggest single event of the year: 35 outages hit Far East El Paso all at once, including Horizon City, Clint, Sparks, and Fabens, affecting 37,820 customers. The cause was listed as under investigation. April 15 took out more than 5,000 customers across East and Far East El Paso near the Fountains at Farah and Eastlake Boulevard, the same substation area where two EP Electric workers were injured in an arc flash event that same day. April 26 hit 1,500 customers in Duranguito in Downtown El Paso. May 8 knocked out power for over 3,000 customers in Far East El Paso near Rich Beem and Montwood. And on May 13, a large outage hit Northeast El Paso near Dyer and Sun Valley, affecting more than 2,600 customers.

Seven outages in four and a half months. And now El Paso Electric ranks third in the country for total power outages among all tracked utilities. Third. In the nation.

So the question every El Pasoan paying a higher bill has a right to ask is: what exactly are we funding?

A $10 Billion Data Center You Did Not Vote For

Meta has expanded its planned El Paso data center from a $1.5 billion investment to $10 billion, and construction is already underway in Northeast El Paso near U.S. Highway 54 and Stan Roberts Sr. Avenue. To power it, El Paso Electric is building a brand new power plant. The nearly $500 million, 366-megawatt facility would rely on 813 small gas-fired generators that would emit pollutants including carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides.

Here is the part that should make your blood pressure spike: El Paso Electric's filings with the Public Utility Commission show the utility plans to shift the power plant's cost to all customers after an initial one- to five-year period where Meta would cover it. In other words, you get the bill eventually.

You always get the bill.

The city also handed Meta an 80% break on city and county property taxes for decades, plus $12.5 million in road infrastructure improvements immediately around the data center. No where else, just for the data center.

And while all of that was being negotiated, hundreds of citizens lined up at City Council meetings to voice their opposition. Community meetings were organized and packed. The response from the people who brokered the deal? Jon Barela, CEO of the Borderplex Alliance, stood before a room of supporters at the 2026 Global Border Summit and called the El Pasoans who showed up to those council meetings a "virus." He called their concerns "misinformation" and "bad data" and issued what he called a "call to arms" for supporters to pressure elected officials. All of this at a private industry summit, not a public forum.

"We can do economic development in other ways," one El Pasoan told city officials. "We don't have to sell our souls, our water and our energy to big tech corporations."

That is not a fringe opinion. It is the sentiment that has packed rooms from the Don Haskins Recreation Center to Wayne Thornton Community Center, from residents across every corner of this city.

El Paso Water Is Not Ready for This Either

While the electricity conversation has dominated headlines, El Paso Water has been quietly having one of its worst years in recent memory.

On January 11, a 36-inch water main ruptured near Girl Scout Lane and Transmountain Road, draining multiple reservoirs and leaving more than 100,000 residents in Northeast and Central El Paso with little or no water pressure. Thirteen EPISD campuses closed the following day. Full repairs took until January 14, and a boil water notice was not lifted until January 15.

In March, a 670,000-gallon spill at the John T. Hickerson Wastewater Treatment Facility was contained on site. Then in April, a broken 30-inch sewer line on Railroad Drive sent an estimated 950,000 gallons of wastewater into an undeveloped area in Northeast El Paso. Residents who rely on private wells within a half-mile were urged to boil and test their water.

And then came something that should have been a five-alarm wake-up call: El Paso Water purchased a 300-acre tract in the Upper Valley without inspecting a 117-year-old dam on the property. That dam nearly failed. At its worst, crews had to deploy up to 16 pumps around the clock to remove approximately 17 feet of water and release it into the Rio Grande just to stabilize the structure. EPWater President and CEO John Balliew called it "a very close call with a near-dam collapse."

El Paso Water estimates the Meta data center will consume an average of 400,000 gallons of water per day. That is not a typo. 400,000 gallons. Per day. From a city in a desert that just had to set up emergency water distribution sites because a main broke.

El Paso Water also raised rates in 2026. The Public Service Board approved a 2026-2027 budget that includes an increase of about $10 per month on the typical residential bill, a 12% jump over last year.

What Data Centers Actually Do to the People Who Live Near Them

Supporters keep talking about jobs, which have proven to be near nothing after the centers are complete and who will mostly hire out of town construction workers during. What they rarely talk about is what it is like to live next to one of these facilities once the ribbon is cut.

AI data centers consume millions of gallons of water for cooling and some can use up to five million gallons a day, comparable to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. The cooling systems and generators run constantly, with noise levels that can exceed 105 decibels. That is as loud as a jet flying overhead, and it never stops.

Public health researchers have noted that because these facilities operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they generate persistent background noise. Chronic exposure to that kind of environmental noise has been associated with sleep disturbance, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and stress-related health outcomes.

And the problem is not just the noise you can hear. Residents living near AI data centers across the country are increasingly reporting a constant low-frequency hum measured as infrasound, sound below the human hearing threshold, that causes dizziness, nausea, vertigo, and sleep disruption. In Chandler, Arizona, residents near a data center that moved in during 2014 tried noise-cancelling headphones and earplugs with little effect. The complaints eventually led the city to adopt a zoning code amendment in 2022 making it harder to site new data centers there.

Wildlife will not settle within at least a mile of these facilities. The noise, the light, the heat, and the constant industrial disruption create dead zones in the surrounding environment. Hyperscale facilities require all-night lighting that disrupts the natural circadian rhythms of both humans and animals, affecting melatonin production and sleep-wake cycles. El Paso sits in a migratory corridor and is home to ecosystems already under strain from heat and drought. Nobody running this deal is talking about what a 24-hour industrial campus the size of a small city does to any of that.

The Question El Paso Deserves an Answer To

El Paso Electric is asking ratepayers to absorb a 23% bill increase while ranking third in the country for total power outages. It is simultaneously asking regulators to approve a $500 million gas plant to serve a single corporate client, with the cost eventually passed to every customer. El Paso Water just survived a near-dam collapse, is managing sewage spills in the hundreds of thousands of gallons, and is projecting 400,000 gallons a day siphoned to cool servers in a desert city.

And the residents who showed up to say something about it were called a virus.

"We don't have water, and we're not gonna have the water we promised them based on what is happening worldwide and statewide," one community organizer told a packed room at a city meeting. She was not being dramatic. She was reading the room, and the data.

El Paso is a resilient city. It always has been. But resilience is not a blank check. The people of this city have a right to know what is being traded away in their name, and they have a right to be heard without being dismissed as a public health threat for showing up.

El Paso Electric was contacted for comment prior to publication. This story will be updated if a response is received.