The AI boom's first casualty might not be jobs, it's everyone's power bill, and factories are getting hit first.

> Belden Brick, Ohio: monthly capacity charge up from $1,600 to $12,000. Now pricing its own power plant to get off the grid.
> Plaskolite, a plastics maker, went from $200K to $1.2M a year.
> Pennsylvania: industrial power up 31% in twelve months.
> Ohio: up 26%. National average: 7%.
Upstream of all of it: PJM capacity prices went from $28.92 -> $329.17 per megawatt-day in 2 auctions =>11x.
The grid's own market monitor says data centers drove 63% of the spike, $9.3 billion in one year, billed to everyone else.
Nobody voted to reallocate America's electricity to inference. The capacity auction did it automatically, and it can't tell a factory from a data center. It just clears to the highest bidder.