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South Philadelphia resident Edoardo Vignani started tracking his utility bills when he lost his job in 2022.

Since then, he’s noticed many of his bills climbing higher each year. He worries most about electricity, which he uses for heating and cooling his house. One month this past summer, his PECO bill topped $400, he said.

Vignani is now working again, and he said he can afford his utility bills. But he worries the continuing increases could become unsustainable for him.

“That’s just kind of hard to budget for,” Vignani said.

Philadelphians were squeezed by multiple utility rate hikes in 2025. With water, electric and gas bills combined, the typical household is paying a little over $30 more per month. Another increase is around the corner in 2026 for PECO customers.

Here’s what to know.

Electricity bills shot up this year and will rise again in 2026

Over the past six years, average electricity prices have risen faster than inflation in roughly half of U.S. states — including Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

State regulators approved a plan for investor-owned electric utility PECO to raise distribution rates last year, mostly to pay for infrastructure investments. The typical residential bill rose 10%, from $135.85 to $149.43 in January 2025.

Demand for electricity is growing while a lot of the grid infrastructure is coming to the end of its useful life, said Abe Silverman, an energy consultant and research scholar at Johns Hopkins University.

“The cost of maintaining the system, the expansion of the system, these are all driving [prices up,]” Silverman said. “And inflation is just making it all very expensive at the moment.”

It’s not just the cost of transformers, wires and poles. Silverman said the cost of the electricity itself has also increased alongside the price of natural gas, which is used to generate most electricity in the region.

Separately, a supply-and-demand crunch on the regional electric grid has driven up capacity prices, which reflect the cost of paying power generators to commit to producing a certain amount of electricity in the future. An independent market monitor found that the expected growth of data center construction drove this price spike.

“The capacity prices have been going up just astronomically,” said Seth Blumsack, a professor of energy policy and economics at Penn State University.

As first reported by Bloomberg, China’s Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission issued a document Saturday that outlines proposed rules for anthropomorphic AI systems. The proposal includes a solicitation of comments from the public by January 25, 2026.

The rules are written in general terms, not legalese. They’re clearly meant to encompass chatbots, though that’s not a term the document uses, and the document also seems more expansive in its scope than just rules for chatbots. It covers behaviors and overall values for AI products that engage with people emotionally using simulations of human personalities delivered via “text, image, audio, or video.”

The products in question should be aligned with “core socialist values,” the document says.

Gizmodo translated the document to English with Google Gemini. Gemini and Bloomberg both translated the phrase “社会主义核心价值观” as “core socialist values.”

Under these rules, such systems would have to clearly identify themselves as AI, and users must be able to delete their history. People’s data would not be used to train models without consent.

The document proposes prohibiting AI personalities from:

• Endangering national security, spreading rumors, and inciting what it calls “illegal religious activities.”
• Spreading obscenity, violence, or crime
• Producing libel and insults
• False promises or material that damages relationships
• Encouraging self harm and suicide
• Emotional manipulation that convinces people to make bad decisions
• And Soliciting sensitive information

Providers would not be allowed to make intentionally addictive chatbots, or systems intended to replace human relationships. Elsewhere, the proposed rules say there must be a pop-up at the two hour mark reminding users to take a break in the event of marathon usage.

These products also have to be designed to pick up on intense emotional states and hand the conversation over to a human if the user threatens self-harm or suicide.