Colorado and Connecticut Saved Residents Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars on their Utility Bills

Source: Grist |  By Akielly Hu

People across the U.S. receiving rising utility bills aren’t just paying for the costs of gas and electricity: They could also be paying for corporate lobbying and advertising.  Such expenses add up to millions of dollars paid by customers toward utilities’ efforts to raise prices and stall climate progress. In some states, that’s starting to change. In 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed the first comprehensive laws to prevent utilities from charging customers for lobbying, advertising, and other political influence activities.  The three states’ laws also introduced limits or bans on invoicing customers for fees for consultants or lawyers hired to argue for rate increases, and required utilities to provide detailed annual reports on political spending to ensure that shareholders — rather than consumers — foot the bill. 

But in the absence of laws like the ones in Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine, it’s impossible to know exactly how much utilities are improperly charging customers, said Adria Tinnin, director of race equity and legislative policy at The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group in California. Under existing California rules, utilities can classify spending in even prohibited categories like promotional advertising or lobbying in vague or misleading ways, Tinnin said. Meanwhile, during rate cases, utility regulators and advocates are often working with limited information, because “utilities do not provide any information that they’re not legally required to,” said Tinnin. “If we don’t have transparency, we can’t know to what extent ratepayers are being ripped off.”