Your Power Company Isn't Neutral; It's Buying Elections

Utility companies aren't just charging you for power. They're spending to elect the people who decide what they can charge.

Michigan's residential electricity rate hit 22.99 cents per kilowatt-hour in June, the highest in the Midwest and about 25% above the national average. Protecting that rate cost something too. Utilities gave Michigan lawmakers $421,100 in 2025 alone, and $1.6 million to state candidates during the 2022 election cycle.

More than 150 elected officials and candidates, from both parties, have now pledged to stop taking that money. This November, a ballot initiative, Michiganders for Money Out of Politics (MMOP), asks Michigan voters to bar utilities from making campaign contributions to the candidates and committees that decide their rates.

Utilities won't stop treating elections as a business expense until voters make them.

This isn't just a Michigan problem. Utility companies across the country pour millions into the elections that decide who appoints or elects the commissioners meant to police them, while electric prices climbed more than double the pace of inflation last year.

Those commissioners are often beholden to the industry they're supposed to police. A study of commissioners serving between 2000 and 2021 found that fossil fuel and utility veterans fill a quarter of state commissioner seats, and roughly half of those return to the industry once their public service ends.

We don't assume Exxon or Boeing is a neutral actor when it spends millions to influence the officials who regulate it. Utility companies shouldn’t be understood any differently. They are regulated monopolies, but they are also corporations with a financial interest in the rates, investments, and rules that regulators approve. Why should any company whose profits depend on a government decision get a say in who makes it?

Florida already saw what a bribed election looks like.

In 2020, a “ghost” candidate sharing an incumbent Democrat’s last name pulled over 6,000 votes in a state Senate race decided by 32 votes. It was part of a scheme Florida Power & Light (FPL), a NextEra Energy subsidiary, was accused of orchestrating to defeat a lawmaker it wanted gone. A former state senator was convicted for bribing the “ghost” candidate to run. FPL’s then-CEO wrote that he wanted to make life “a living hell" for the incumbent.

DeSantis-appointed regulators later approved FPL's $7 billion rate hike, the largest in US history. NextEra proposed a $150 million settlement over the scandal in June 2026, one of the largest securities fraud settlements in decades, but a federal judge rejected it in August, saying the companies hadn't provided enough information to justify it.

Now NextEra is trying to acquire Dominion Energy in a $67 billion deal. If it succeeds, the combined company would become the largest regulated utility in the world, covering about 10 million customers across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

The company accused of funding a scheme to fix one state Senate race is about to have the resources to influence elections in three more states.

It’s not just rates that utility companies are influencing. In 2018, lobbying rewrote how Michigan credits homeowners for rooftop solar, stripping transmission costs from the formula. The payback period for a typical residential system stretched from about nine years to 13, four more years of paying full price for someone who already tried to do the right thing.

Community solar, which would let renters and low-income households buy into local solar projects without installing their own panels, still has no statewide framework in Michigan, despite repeated bipartisan attempts to pass one. DTE and Consumers Energy are unequivocal in their opposition, and PACs tied to both utilities gave nearly $500,000 to the governor, legislators, and party funds in 2023, the same year a major clean energy package moved through Lansing without a community solar provision. Eighty percent of the legislature took the money.

MMOP’s ballot petition won't guarantee that bill passes differently next time, but it would take away utilities' ability to pay for the outcome.

Utilities won't stop treating elections as a business expense until voters make them.

Grantee partners including Michigan Peoples Campaign, We the People Action Fund, and Detroit Action have spent months organizing behind MMOP, the kind of work that flipped one utility board in Arizona.

Two years ago, we made a $20,000 bet: that elections for Salt River Project’s board, Arizona's largest utility, then low-turnout, could become a source of power for the families paying its bills. Grantee partner Poder Latinx knocked on 70,000 doors. This April, more than 35,000 people voted, four times the usual turnout, and a clean energy majority won control of the board for the first time.

Utilities count on nobody paying attention. This November, Michigan voters can prove them wrong.