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utility companies
Make Polluters Pay for the Poles and Wires
The companies that made billions selling the fuels that destabilized the climate can afford to help fix the grid that’s collapsing under it.
Oct 29, 2025
We talk a lot about the cost of energy, but not enough about what’s actually driving it. Across the country, electricity bills are climbing not because of regulation, as the industry claims, but because of the growing costs of the climate crisis itself. The storms, the fires, the floods, and the heat are battering an electric grid that was mostly built half a century ago, and the costs of repairing it are being quietly folded into our monthly bills.
The other side wants you to believe it’s “climate” that’s driving up prices, and they’re right, just not in the way that they mean. It isn’t climate mandates or clean-energy standards. It’s climate disasters. And the truth is, the fastest way to lower costs isn’t to slow down the energy transition, it’s to speed it up. Clean energy brings cheap, reliable power online faster and protects families from the kind of fuel price spikes that come with oil and gas dependence.
That’s where climate superfund laws come in. New York and Vermont have already passed versions that require the biggest polluters to chip in for climate damage. These laws follow the same principle that governs toxic-waste cleanup. If you made the mess, you help pay to clean it up. States are starting to realize that the funds from a climate superfund could cover part of the cost of hardening the grid, things like replacing wooden poles with steel, elevating substations that flood every few years, building microgrids so hospitals and schools can stay open during blackouts, and funding new and more reliable clean energy projects. These projects would help to ease the pressure on ratepayers while making the systems themselves more resilient.
For years, utilities and regulators treated big storms as one-off emergencies. A few poles went down, they rebuilt them, everyone moved on. But the “one-off” has now become, dare I say, the “new normal.” In Maine, the cost of storm recovery has risen more than 30 fold since 2020. Every time a nor’easter slams through the state, Central Maine Power spends millions to replace equipment and clear lines, and then regulators approve a new rider or adjustment that gets added to customer bills. It’s the same story across the country.
The next time a storm knocks out your power or a bill arrives higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis arriving as a tab in your mailbox.
In California, billions have gone toward wildfire mitigation after blazes sparked by utility equipment destroyed entire towns. To prevent future fires, power companies are burying lines, trimming trees, insulating wires—all necessary, and all very, very expensive. According to state filings, utilities’ wildfire-related costs are contributing to 7-12% bill increases for residential customers. What began as infrequent emergency response spending has become a permanent part of doing business for utility companies across the country.
A new national analysis from the Center for American Progress and the Natural Resources Defense Council shows how big this problem has gotten. Utilities in 49 states and Washington, DC have already raised rates or proposed to raise within the next two years. By 2028, those hikes will add nearly $90 billion to household energy bills. That’s billions with a b. And for many families, that means another $30 or $40 a month on top of everything else they’re already struggling to afford.
The reasons are tangled together. The grid is old and failing faster under stress. The price of natural gas has spiked again, partly because exports of natural gas have linked American prices to volatile global markets. And new power-hungry data centers are popping up so quickly that utilities are scrambling to build the power plants to feed them. But one of the biggest single drivers remains extreme weather. Each storm and heatwave adds another layer of cost to a grid that was never built for this world.
The Government Accountability Office has warned that climate change will stress every part of the energy system and that failing to adapt will cost billions of dollars more in the long run. Yet the way we pay for that adaptation hasn’t changed at all. Utilities rebuild, regulators sign off, and the public pays. Fossil-fuel companies whose emissions are fueling the disasters that make all this necessary contribute all of nothing.
It’s tempting to think of this as just another utility issue, a problem for regulators and accountants and not us. But to me, it’s really a measure of how far the climate crisis has crept into our daily life. The next time a storm knocks out your power or a bill arrives higher than expected, that’s the climate crisis arriving as a tab in your mailbox. We can keep pretending it’s inevitable, or we can start sending the bill to the companies that profited from creating the problem.
Climate superfunds won’t solve everything. But they’d at least start to balance the scales. The companies that made billions selling the fuels that destabilized the climate can afford to help fix the grid that’s collapsing under it.
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How to Make Sure People and the Planet Don’t Pay for the Data Center Buildout
Decision-makers must do their due diligence to prioritize the needs of a community before the needs of a data center.
Jul 24, 2025
Data centers—the places used to host servers and computers that are needed to process various IT tasks like AI queries—are booming. And the corporations that build them want a lot more land and a lot more power to make them run. These plans continue to grow in scale, and there are no signs of a slow-down.
So, how much energy will data centers need in the future? Nobody is 100% sure, but some experts estimate it could nearly triple in just 5 years, with data centers representing up to 12% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2028, up from 4.4% in 2023.
Greed Is Fueling Short-Sighted Policies
U.S. President Donald Trump’s Department of Energy has put forth its own forecasts in a recently-published report on resource adequacy and grid reliance, which looked at multiple sources to arrive at a midpoint estimate of around 50 gigawatts (GW) of new load additions needed to meet data center energy demand. Unfortunately, the report uses flawed assumptions that greatly exaggerate projected load growth and retirements of existing fossil plants, while significantly underestimating plans to add new cleaner generation to address potential reliability concerns. This type of misleading, fossil-fuel-friendly narrative is not new for Donald Trump and his administration. This past Independence Day, he signed the reconciliation bill into law, followed by an executive order that promise devastating impacts for the future of clean and affordable energy.
Politics matter here because they set the rules of the game. Without regard for our climate or health at the highest levels of government, data center developers are happily jumping at the chance to meet the energy needs of their facilities with new gas, nuclear, or even proposing to bypass utilities altogether in order to quickly connect to the grid. Despite claims that fossil fuels are needed to keep the lights on, our analysis has shown that it’s actually renewables that support a more resilient grid.
Utilities play a role in this too, of course. In states like Wisconsin, where various data centers have been proposed, utilities are throwing new gas plants at the problem in a poorly planned attempt to keep up with energy demand predictions. They have failed to understand the paradigm shift that load growth from data centers represents, and are instead attempting to solve new problems with old tools.
So much of this reliance on methane gas hinges on corporations following through on their data center plans (which seems antithetical to maintaining commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that many of these companies still hold). But who pays for all this gas infrastructure? And what other risks and costs can we expect if plans fall apart as quickly as they came together?
Ratepayers Bear the True Risk of Fossil Fuel-Powered Data Centers
Utilities are allowed to recover costs and rake in profit via customers’ bills when building new infrastructure like gas-fired generation facilities. This puts ratepayers on the line financially for utilities’ short-sighted decisions, which are often lacking in transparency.
A report from Harvard Law experts recently identified subtle ways in which the costs of data centers are shifted to ratepayers through mechanisms like special contracts, which are offered to big customers by utilities in the form of unique and negotiated rates, but which risk cost recovery shortfalls that all other ratepayers have to later subsidize via higher bills. In other words, utilities cut deals for data centers which increase everyone else’s bills.
Additionally, when data center growth triggers the need for investment in the transmission system, those costs may also get passed down to ratepayers unless state regulators intervene.
The problem isn’t just data centers—it’s what’s powering them, and that dirty power is costly in so many ways.
In short, there are a number of ways in which our current approach to regulating energy systems is not structured to protect ratepayers in the face of this fast-paced tech boom. Profit-driven policies that benefit the already rich, along with little to no transparency into the weedy details of who pays for what, make for a dense and unforgiving mountain of obstacles in the way of an equitable energy future.
But the problem isn’t just data centers—it’s what’s powering them, and that dirty power is costly in so many ways.
A Wisconsin utility got approval to build two gas-fired plants, priced at $1.2 billion and $280 million, which will be repaid through charges added to customers’ electricity bills for the lifetime of the plants. Beyond this upfront cost lies a set of costs that doesn’t often get factored in. RMI, a non-profit focusing on energy systems, argues that the increased reliance on fossil gas brings additional cost risks from bottlenecks in supply of both gas and equipment that are borne by consumers. If these plants turn out to be obsolescent (due to overestimates of load growth or cheaper wind and solar power, for example), the utility’s customers will still have to pay all the utility’s stranded costs.
In addition to this are environmental costs of data centers and the huge health impact costs that come as a result of gas plant pollution.
A massive construction price tag, the costly risks of stranded assets, and the health-related expenses associated with just this one example in Wisconsin should give us pause.
Make Data Centers Pay Their Fair Share
In many places we’re seeing the ways in which policy and regulation is attempting to keep up with ‘Big Data Center’ plans. There is wide recognition that the solutions must include ratepayer protections. Namely, implementing policies that direct large electricity users like data centers to pay for any incremental grid infrastructure and operating costs needed to meet their power demand.
Policymakers and regulators, as well as utilities themselves, have proposed plans to create unique electricity rate structures, or tariffs, for large users. What that means is a big electricity user such as a data center would be subject to rates, terms, and conditions that are more appropriate to how they use energy and their impact on the grid. Even when utilities do initiate a plan like this, stakeholder engagement is crucial to ensuring that protections for ratepayers are well thought out. Requests for contested cases at the regulatory level, such as this one from the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin (CUB), allow for a more transparent process that keeps utilities accountable to their customers.
In Oregon, the state legislature passed a bill called the POWER Act, which shifts the infrastructure and service costs associated with rapid load growth to large users. It also includes language requiring data centers to sign long-term payment contracts with their respective electric utilities in order to decrease the risk of data center project developers ducking out early, creating stranded assets, and forcing others to foot the bill of new investments that ultimately aren’t needed.
These democratic processes play an important role in achieving fair and just rules, especially when we remember that this rapid growth in large data centers is unprecedented, speculative, and that the uncertain future of this technology puts those responsible for planning around their energy needs in a complicated position. Utility costs have long been assigned to the customers that cause those costs, at least in theory.
Say ‘No’ to Dirty Data
This trend in planning for proactive rates and contracts for new data center demand is encouraging because it acknowledges that most energy customers are not massive corporations seeking to ride the next big tech breakthrough to profits. Utilities and regulators must also provide stakeholders with transparent information on data center energy and water usage so that ratepayer advocacy can be informed by the most accurate and up-to-date information.
And let’s not forget that at the crux of this conversation lies a critical issue that we previously discussed: the steep cost of using fossil fuels, like gas and coal, to power data centers. There are certain costs that most tariffs don’t cover, including damage to our health due to polluted air, continued overreliance on unreliable sources of energy, and a price too high to conceive at the expense of our planet and future generations.
Ratepayers should not bear the burden of hosting dirty gas plants that put their health at risk, nor should they be responsible for paying higher energy costs to meet data center demand.
In Michigan, stakeholder groups are petitioning for regulations (using the contested case mechanism that I mentioned earlier) that would direct utilities to give priority within data center interconnection requests to those with clean energy plans. Other recommendations from stakeholders include transparent reporting and guidelines for keeping these data centers accountable for their clean energy promises. For a more detailed explanation of these efforts in Michigan, check out this blog from my colleague, Lee Shaver.
Minnesota, meanwhile, passed a bill last month that resulted in mixed feelings for many. The legislature extended tax breaks to 2,042 for data centers in the state, which would benefit big developers and likely bring more projects to the state. However, the bill also revoked a tax exemption on electricity bills, making data centers more accountable for their energy use. Utilities will also be prevented from passing on these costs to their other customers or avoiding the state’s 100% clean electricity mandate. Not only that, but a new data center fee was introduced that would direct funding toward weatherization programs for low-income residents to make energy-efficient upgrades. The bill did fall short on robust commitments to issues like natural resource protections.
People-First Solutions
There doesn’t seem to be a singular right way through these challenges (see Elon Musk’s xAI project in Memphis for an example of the wrong way), but some guiding principles might help:
- Decision-makers must do their due diligence to prioritize the needs of a community before the needs of a data center. The benefits of economic growth should be distributed through equitable and just channels.
- Ratepayers should not bear the burden of hosting dirty gas plants that put their health at risk, nor should they be responsible for paying higher energy costs to meet data center demand.
- Utilities must prioritize the use of renewables, efficiency, energy storage, and other grid-supporting technologies to meet new demand, relying on viable and adaptable long-term planning rather than an arbitrary urgency that risks further overreliance on fossil fuels.
- Utility plans and data center information should be made accessible and transparent to the public, including any grid impacts resulting from data center energy demand.
The cost of doing business with dirty fossil fuels isn’t worth it. The fight to put people over profits always is.
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As Heatwave Cooks US, 150+ Groups Urge Leaders to Ban Deadly Utility Shutoffs
"Millions of lives are at risk this week as extreme heat scorches our country," said one campaigner. "Trump and his billionaire buddies will have blood on their hands."
Jun 24, 2025
With extreme temperatures fueled by human-caused global heating gripping much of the United States, a coalition of more than 150 advocacy groups on Tuesday urged federal, state, and local elected leaders to ban potentially deadly utility disconnections, increase worker protections, and tax polluters to finance renewable energy.
The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) led two letters—one to Democratic congressional leaders and another to governors and mayors—arguing that U.S. President Donald Trump "has put millions of lives at risk by dismantling federal agencies and lifesaving programs that help working families keep their homes cool and survive deadly heatwaves like the one this week."
"Since taking office Trump has stripped Americans of access to lifesaving measures, including the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program, which help more than 8 million working families pay their utility bills," CBD noted.
"Every day of extreme heat in the United States claims about 154 lives."
The Trump administration has also laid off staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, "crippling the agency's ability to help communities before and after disaster strikes. And the country's first-ever proposed federal heat standard, which would prevent heat-related illness and injury in workplaces, is stalled after staff cuts at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration."
CBD said that extreme heat is the deadliest weather-related phenomenon, "claiming more lives each year than hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods combined."
"Every day of extreme heat in the United States claims about 154 lives," the group added. "In the past seven years there has been a nearly 17% increase each year in heat-related deaths. Among those most harmed by extreme heat are outdoor workers and children."
The diverse groups signing the letter—which include Climate Justice Alliance, Food & Water Watch, Free Press Action, Friends of the Earth U.S., Sunrise Movement, and Utility Workers Union of America—centered the voices of people who are most vulnerable to exposure to extreme heat, including outdoor workers like José, a Florida roofer.
"I've felt dizzy, weak, unable to breathe, with cramps, and my heart beats very fast, desperate," the 24-year-old said. "The heat suffocates me and many times I've been close to going to the hospital. While working on the roofs, it feels like the heat is over 110°F or 115°F and we only take one or two short breaks. I need this work to survive, but as the summers get hotter, I worry that one day I will collapse."
CBD senior attorney and energy justice program director Jean Su said in a statement Tuesday that "millions of lives are at risk this week as extreme heat scorches our country. Trump and his billionaire buddies will have blood on their hands."
"Corporations are taking advantage of working people and stripping them of access to lifesaving utilities, clean water, and a safe and resilient future," Su added. "Congress and especially state leaders must deliver emergency relief and tax greedy polluters who are endangering our lives and the climate. Everyone deserves heat-resilient homes, schools, and workplaces."
Will Humble, executive director of letter signatory Arizona Public Health Association, said: "We're not asking for the moon here. We're just looking for state and federal officials to help keep people alive during the summertime."
"Heat kills as many people in Arizona as influenza and pneumonia, and every one of those heat deaths is preventable," Humble added. "The least our elected officials can do is make sure people have places of refuge from these deadly fossil fuel-driven heatwaves. We also need stronger limits on summertime electricity shutoffs, so people aren't dying because the utility company has turned off their power."
"We're just looking for state and federal officials to help keep people alive during the summertime."
Last week, Oregon became the latest of more than two dozen states to ban power disconnections during high summer heat. However, as CBD and others have noted, utilities still find ways to shut off utilities during hot periods.
Six major investor-owned utilities—Georgia Power, DTE Energy, Duke Energy, Ameren Corporation, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Arizona Public Service—"shut off power to households at least 400,000 times during the summertime," according to a CBD report published in January. Those six utilities raked in $10 billion in profits while collectively hiking their customers' rates by at least $3.5 billion since 2023.
"Mayors and governors must act now with bold, local solutions, including expanded public transit and community-centered strategies like neighborhood cooling hubs," Climate Justice Alliance executive director KD Chavez said in a statement. "We also urge stronger labor protections, including municipal and state-level heat standards, to protect postal workers, farmworkers, and all outdoor workers who are increasingly exposed to deadly heat without adequate safeguards."
"Extreme heat has been endangering communities across the country," Chavez added. "We're feeling it closely this week and know it will only get worse. Our growing dependence on aging buildings, air conditioning and a fragile, fossil fuel-dependent power grid is putting lives at risk, especially in frontline, low-income neighborhoods and U.S. territories without government representation."
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