When your utility asks state regulators to let them raise rates, they often hire expensive consultants and outside lawyers to help them make their case.
Then you, the ratepayer, foot the bill.
www.wbur.org/news/2026/04... @wbur.org #energysky
Pretty wild to see Tuberville advocating for BIGGER government. Especially considering we already have an energy department as part of ADECA!
(Un)fun fact: the State of Alabama has starved this energy division of funding. Maybe there’s a connection… 🤔
1819news.com/news/item/tu...
Long time Alabama PSC Executive Director and Chief Administrative Law Judge is retiring. www.al.com/news/2026/02...
Alabama Power is so scared of voters that they want to take away your right to vote for utility regulators. www.wbrc.com/2026/02/05/l...
If your thesis is 'trust the monopoly, the regulator will save you,' you should probably not be writing it on behalf of a group funded by monopoly utilities with notoriously lax regulators.
Real customer protection looks like transparent planning, hard prudence reviews, disallowing imprudent costs, ending automatic pass-through trackers, and not letting utilities socialize risk while privatizing returns.
So yes: cost overruns are a problem. But it’s hard to take the lecture seriously when it’s selectively aimed at competitors while the regulated-monopoly record includes some of the biggest overruns in modern U.S. energy history.
Georgia Power (Southern Company) is Exhibit A. Plant Vogtle’s two new reactors were approved around $14B and ended up north of $30B (AP reports about $35B). That’s the kind of customer protection that shows up as a line item for the next 30 years.
Cool. Now apply the same standard to the monopoly side of the house, especially Power for Tomorrow’s members.
Then comes the competitive transmission dunk: a New York project that bid 22% under the utility, then blew past its cost cap (about $74M) and landed at $249M (up 38% from the winning bid).
Also, where is this good regulation they keep bragging about? In Alabama’s regulated monopoly world, customers pay the 3rd highest average residential electric bill in the entire country.
If that’s the good version, congrats on the horror show!
The argument depends on pretending monopoly utility rates are not climbing. Meanwhile, 2025 saw a record ~$30.5B in utility rate hike requests.
www.rtoinsider.com/124520-us-ut...
The op-ed claims vertically integrated monopoly utilities “shield customers” and put “the customer front and center.”
Sure.
Like how casinos put the customer front and center, right next to the ATM.
RTO Insider ran an op-ed asking “Where are utilities best serving customers?”
Spoiler: the author is an exec at Power for Tomorrow, a utility-funded group that exists to tell you monopolies are good actually.
www.rtoinsider.com/123973-where...
executions in the street.
Irreparable damage has been done to American automakers by this Administration.
More journalists should join @emilypont.bsky.social imo and keep digging here on the unsubstantiated claims that lowering ROE rates will cause equity flight! Why is this commonly believed? What's really behind the claim? What happens? Who decides?
No.
This level of "confidentiality" is BS and completely arbitrary.
Shame on the utilities for hiding basic information like the estimated costs of a transmission line behind an NDA.
It was a (Not) Happy Thanksgiving for NextEra and Florida Power & Light!
Their dirty deeds with Matrix are back in the news with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against the company and kicking the case back down to the lower court.
jaxtrib.org/2025/11/28/r...
“The fine print shows it’s a deferral strategy, not a reduction,” Tait said. “It’s just a broken attempt to help the utility weather a storm of criticism for its high bills and abnormally high profits.”
insideclimatenews.org/news/2511202...
The most basic information is routinely redacted in Georgia and it is absolutely shameful.
Here, we have 15 potential projects totaling 7 GW of power and the public is not allowed to know how much they will cost, even in aggregate!
Dereliction of duty.
Your cat when you're choking to death in your apartment
Good news from TVA today!
TVA is greenlighting up to 1,500 MW of energy storage and slated to be online by the end of 2029.
🔋🔋🔋
"In Georgia, Tait said the lesson is bipartisan: “Monopoly investor-owned utilities are deeply unpopular.” And regardless of political affiliation, he added, “politicians need to think twice” about aligning with utility companies."
nice
“This was a referendum on Georgia Power and high electric bills,” said Daniel Tait, research and communications director at the nonprofit utility watchdog group @energyandpolicy.org
san.com/cc/high-elec...
This is a message from Tim Echols, a Georgia utility regulator who has announced a sabbatical. Echols lost his seat in last night’s electiin
Shoutout to @tiamitchell.com for flagging this email from the now out-going, veteran Georgia utility regulator Tim Echols, who announced in an email he is leaving the Public Service Commission immediately and taking a sabbatical
My key takeaway from last night: Utilities are deeply unpopular and honestly have been for some time.
Politicians in both parties should be extremely wary of taking utility money and tying their political futures to these monopolies. It is… risky, to say the least.
