An Ignoble Experiment: ⚡ Your electric bill jumped 7.1%. Why?

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Happy Friday, friend. Archaeologists always study ancient ruins, but maybe they should start with our home screens. We’ve all got app fossils on there. One for a concert venue. One for a restaurant loyalty program with 11 unused points. One airline app from a trip where the legroom was mostly theoretical.

Analytics firms have tracked this for years, and the ratio never improves. We hoard apps like canned goods.

📲 Out of roughly 80 installed apps, how many does the average person use per day? A) Nine, B) 20, C) 30 or D) All of them. Take your best guess, the answer is at the end.

🔍 60 seconds is all it takes: A stranger types your name into a search box, and your home address, phone number and family members come back instantly from sites you’ve never heard of. Run Incogni’s free exposure scan and see exactly what’s out there. You’ll find the link below. Get 60% off with code KIM60.* — Kim

TODAY’S DEEP DIVE

Power to the people

Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando

🤯 WOW! America’s biggest power grid set a record at its annual auction: $16.4 billion, paid by every household in 13 states. Texas’ demand is on track to nearly double by 2031. Data centers could eat 12% of all U.S. electricity by 2028. Your bill went up without you even having to plug anything in.

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

Your electric bill went up again. You didn’t buy a hot tub. What happened?

Here’s the part nobody explains. You don’t buy electricity from “your” power company. You buy it from a regional market. And every region just got the same houseguest.

💡 Watt’s really going on

In the East, the biggest grid, PJM, serves 65 million people across 13 states. Every year, power plants auction promises to show up on the hottest day, and every utility must buy in. This year’s auction set a record: $16.4 billion, passed to every person’s bill as a “capacity charge” you’ve never read.

Of the 32 gigawatts of new demand PJM expects by 2030, 30 are from data centers. A server farm plugs in near Washington, and Ohio and Chicago pay. The meter is on your house, but the price is set three states away.

Texas, your grid is your own. It’s not saving you. ERCOT (the Electric Reliability Council of Texas) expects demand to nearly double by 2031, and regulators are staring at 474 gigawatts of connection requests, mostly data centers. That’s more than five Texases.

In regulated states, there’s no auction. Your utility builds the plants, then sends everyone the bill. Georgia approved a massive build-out to accommodate data centers. Arizona’s biggest utility proposed rate hikes of 45% for centers and 15% for you. Meta’s new Louisiana campus will need three times the power of New Orleans.

Here’s the receipt: Families in seven states have already paid $4.3 billion just to hook data centers up to the grid. You bought the extension cord.

Add it up: Bills jumped 7.1% last year, double inflation. And data center demand will double by 2028. That’s like bolting Spain onto our grid.

All for an industry employing a total of around 23,000 people nationwide. Yes, you read that right. A data center the size of five football fields might employ maybe 10 people.

⚡ Ohm improvement: Fight back

Find the charge. Pull up your bill and look for “capacity” or “demand.”
Shop your supplier. In about a dozen states, you pick who supplies your power while your utility still delivers it. Search your state's name plus "electric choice" and use the .gov result. Texas calls it Power to Choose, Ohio has Energy Choice Ohio, Pennsylvania has PAPowerSwitch. Compare the price per kilowatt-hour, not the monthly estimate. Watch the contract length and skip anything with a teaser rate that balloons after 90 days.
Go off-peak. Ask your utility about time-of-use plans, then run the dishwasher, laundry and EV charger after 8 p.m. Same chores, cheaper electrons.
Send one email. State commissions are deciding whether data centers pay their own way through special rate classes or if you keep subsidizing them. Find your commission and drop a public comment.

The tech companies say they’ll cover their share. Sure. Watch the kilowatts. More power to you. Literally.

🎯 Send this to someone who opened their electric bill this month and said a word I can’t repeat here.

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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

What can a stranger find about you in 60 seconds?

Right now, your name, home address and phone number are sitting on sites you’ve never heard of. Data brokers collect everything about you and sell it to marketers, scammers and anyone else willing to pay. You never agreed to that. You probably never even knew it was happening.

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📺 YOUTUBE: THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW

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Picture this. You get a letter in the mail from a business you’ve never heard of. But it’s in your name. That happened to a listener. The letter even used his parents’ phone number. We tell him how to take it down.

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▶️ How to shut down a fake LLC. This scam is spreading! →

WEB WATERCOOLER

📦 Hiring the AI-laid-off: Get this. When big companies cleared desks over AI, smaller firms started hiring the people walking out. Your résumé needs Excel, AI and emotional recovery from a surprise calendar invite. General Assembly surveyed 526 HR professionals at small to midsize businesses. Some 47% had hired someone after a larger company layoff (paywall link), and 67% plan to keep adding workers. The catch? 40% rejected folks without AI skills. Learn the tools, because practical experience is becoming the new referral. Looking for a gig with great people? Join the Kim Komando Media team here.

🎒 First-day-of-school photo warning: Security researchers are warning parents: One proud post can reveal your kid’s school name, teacher, grade and daily schedule, everything a creep or scammer needs to sound convincing. Post the smile, skip the intel. Crop out the school sign, ditch the “Class of 2038, Mrs. Smith’s room!” chalkboard and set the account to private. Grandma still gets the photo. The internet doesn’t get the itinerary.

🏡 Your home can be stolen while you sleep: No gun. No locksmith. A scammer forges your deed at the county recorder’s office, and legally, your house belongs to them. You won’t find out until it’s too late. Home title fraud is exploding, and reversing it takes an average of 12 months of lawyers and court dates. I use Home Title Lock to monitor my title 24/7. Get your free Title History Report plus a free 14-day trial. Start now.*

Zinc different: Scientists built a zinc-iodine battery that charges in about three minutes, lasts 60,000 cycles and won’t catch fire like lithium can. Your phone battery may manage roughly 1,000 cycles, so this could mean decades without replacing it. It’s still in the lab, not headed for next year’s phone or EV. But faster charging, fewer replacement bills and a calmer garage? I’ll take all three. Someday “letting it charge overnight” is going to sound like “rewind the VHS.”

📎 Swipe right to hire: I couldn't think of a way to make LinkedIn weirder. Then singles turned it into a dating app with employment verification. A survey found 22% of professionals had sent or answered a romantic message there (paywall link), and one in four say that's fine. The appeal is obvious: clear photos, real job history, mutual contacts and proof the person owns pants. LinkedIn bans romance. Nothing says chemistry like “You both know Greg in accounting.”

KIM’S DAILY DEALS

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Prices and deals were accurate at the time of publication.

DEVICE ADVICE

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Want a Facebook photo without all the buttons and junk around it? Skip the screenshot. In the mobile app, tap the photo to open it, hit the three dots, then choose Save to phone. It drops straight into your gallery, full quality. No cropping required.

🚗 License, meet Apple Wallet: Patting your back pocket in the driveway is not a filing system. Your iPhone carries your driver's license in 14 states and Puerto Rico, with more coming. Open Wallet > tap the + button > Driver's License and ID Cards > follow the prompts. TSA takes it at over 250 airports, but still wants the plastic one on you as backup. Your wallet gets a day off. Your face still has to show up.

📺 Netflix without internet: Going somewhere with bad Wi-Fi? Prep your entertainment. Open the Netflix app and go to My Netflix > Downloads > See What You Can Download. Pick a movie or show, then tap Download. You can grab a whole season. Later, head back to Downloads and watch offline. Let the guy in 14B pay for the spinning circle.

😱 They stole your phone and saw the passcode: That’s a nasty combo. On iPhone, go to Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Stolen Device Protection and set Require Security Delay to Always. On Android, open Settings > Google or Security and privacy > Theft protection. Now draining your accounts takes an hour and your face. Thieves hate homework.

👀 Windows finally gets the Spacebar trick: Mac owners have had this forever, but QuickLook brings it to Windows for free. Select an image, document, video or audio file, then press Spacebar for a big preview without opening the app. Press Spacebar again to close it. One click, quick peek, back to work. It’s Friday. Meet me at the Space Bar.

🎁 I made merch. It drops tomorrow.

I never thought I'd say this. All these years of telling you to reboot your router, and here we are: I made merch.

Four pieces, one week only. The "Do Not Disturb: Buffering" hoodie. The "I Have Read the Terms & Conditions (I Have Not)" tee. The "No Data Leaks Here" mug. And a KK logo hat for the days your hair has its own privacy policy.

Every piece pokes fun at the stuff I call out on the show every single day. You'll see all of it in action when the show airs Saturday.

No restocks. No reprints. Once it's gone, it's gone. Unlike your browsing history.

✅ Mark your calendar. Shop opens tomorrow. Don’t miss out!

WHAT THE TECH?

Image: WDRB

🗺️ State of confusion

A Louisville mom opened her son's new school planner and found a map of a country that does not exist. Kentucky was Venecky. Illinois was Vitoiis. Alabama, Alotome. The periodic table was mangled. Parents pay a $10 instructional fee for this.

Nobody has admitted AI made it. Nobody has to. The tell is that it looks finished. That's AI's whole trick, and somebody at Farnsley Middle School shipped it to kids without reading page one.

The district's fix? Teachers told students to tear out pages 19 through 36.

Fifty states. AI found five more. Overachiever.

Give it a gander here. Ridiculous.

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LOGGING OUT …

🎓 What you learned today: AI data centers are pushing electric bills into “maybe let’s keep the AC off” territory, first-day school photos can leak your kid’s routine, new batteries could make overnight charging feel ancient, and class assignments still need humans. Not bad for one email. Tomorrow, I’m sharing insider tricks for hidden airline seats, hotel upgrades and easy fixes before you pay for help. This one can save you real money.

😣 The answer: A) About nine a day and around 30 different apps over a month. The other 50 are just sitting there, holding permissions. Camera. Contacts. Location. The parking app from 2023 doesn’t need to know where you are at all times.

Here’s the purge.

iPhone: Settings > Apps > App Store > Offload Unused Apps. It removes dead apps but keeps your data if you ever return.
Android: Play Store > profile icon > Manage apps & device > sort by “least used.” Ruthless is the word.

Then the permission audit.

iPhone: Settings > Privacy & Security > App Privacy Report.
Android: Settings > Privacy > Permission manager. Anything unused with location access gets stripped or deleted.

Eighty apps, nine in the rotation. Your home screen is a retirement community with great views of your data. Time for some evictions.

🗂️ Your information has already been sold: Data brokers collected your name, address and phone number and sold it to anyone willing to pay. You never agreed to that. Scroll up to today’s Incogni article and run their free exposure scan. It takes under a minute and shows you exactly how exposed you are. Get 60% off with my deal now.*

One last thing. Tomorrow, I’m opening a small merch drop. Four pieces, available one week only.

💪 You’ve been through things much rougher than today, and you made it. Take a deep breath, you got this! — Kim

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

🏆 THE KIM CHALLENGE: Forward this to ONE person who needs to hear it today. Pick the person who popped into your head while reading. You know who it is

HOW’D WE DO?

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, addlon, Google

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