Colorado Public Radio used a game-show veneer to keep this panel spiritedly chewing over the sort of nerdy but timely issue of rising utility bills
by Allen Best
The Energy Bill Blame Game. That name was a tipoff. So was the pink sports jack that Sam Brasch was wearing when I saw him outside Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Ricketson Auditorium.
“I feel like I’m not appropriately dressed for the occasion,” I told Brasch, the senior energy reporter at Colorado Public Radio, and his colleague, Ishan Thakore, who was similarly attired in festive clothing.
The duo and others at CPR had planned an event that was a cross between a TV game show and serious but fast-paced conversations about rising energy costs. “Why Costs are on the Rise and Who’s to Blame” was the tagline.
Then Jeff Ackermann walked up, wearing a hat that I never saw him wear when he was chair of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission from 2017 to 2021.
Others on the panel had similarly struck a festive theme with their choice of clothing. And once the program started, there was a revolving wheel to announce the next candidate for blame. An annoying loud buzzer announced the time for that certain subject had elapsed.
It was amusing, and as for substance, it sort of worked. Not very deep, but just enough for an audience culled from listeners to CPR who probably don’t spend their days reading PUC filings. As for the spin-the-wheel format, audience members lustily played along.
Six suspects had been identified by the CPR team:
- poles and wires
- data centers
- fossil fuels
- wildfire and extreme weather
- shareholder profits
- renewable energy
Thakore at the outset acknowledged multiple causes. “A lot of these forces are interconnected,” he said. “They play off each other,” added Brasch. The blame game, he explained, was intended to be a vehicle to educate about the complexities of energy bills and rising costs.
In addition to Ackermann, who is now senior policy advisor for the Center for the New Energy Economy, three other panelists had agreed to field questions:
- Alana Miller, who directs the climate and energy program for Colorado on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization.
- Andrew Bennett, the vice president for advocacy at Energy Outreach Colorado, an organization focused on impacts of energy costs to lower-income people.
- Paul Lundeen, a former state legislator and now a fellow at the Common Sense Institute, a conservative-trending Colorado organization.
Rising electricity costs are a national story. Utilities around the country are asking regulators to let them spend more than $1 trillion over the next few years, and that is going to increase your bills,” said Thakore.
For this panel, though, the attention was focused most specifically on Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest utility. Unlike electrical cooperatives and municipal providers, it is privately owned. And unlike most cooperatives, it is regulated by the state.=
Colorado Public Radio energy reporter Sam Brasch moderated the panel discussion.
As for the finger pointing, wildfires and extreme weather got blamed.
Ackermann cited a study that found that 30% of a California utility bill is weather related. The PUC recently gave Xcel Energy permission to spend up to $2 billion for mitigation from wildfire. To that point, Miller said the existing grid was “built for a different climate,” not the hotter, drier climate more prone to extremes that is emerging. Shareholders of privately owned utilities need to pay some of the costs, she said.
Lundeen described weather as an “accelerant to the policy choices we make,” an allusion to the effort to replacing fossil fuel generation with renewables and storage.
Bennett urged attention to the human costs when electricity is not available. He pointed to the heat wave in Chicago during 1995 in which700 people died, with losses greatest in certain zip codes with lower income and a higher proportion of racial identities.
Data centers? Yep, guilty, said Miller, pointing out that a single data center can use as much electricity as a small city but can come online much faster.
“The problem is that by default, utility costs are socialized, so the cost to build a new substation or power plant just to service the data center would be spread across all of our bills,” she said.
“So that means Meta’s infrastructure will be paid for by a school teacher in Aurora. That is what is happening in other regions, and bills are skyrocketing.”
Of course, as Miller pointed out, some technology companies have said they are willing to build their own generation. Lundeen pointed this out, too.
The Common Sense Institute’s Paul Lundeen idenified public policies as being a primary reason for rising electric utility bills.
As for Ackermann, he called for the utilities to engage data center customers in a new way. “You should set them free to negotiate a whole different type of tariff relationship. It depends on how it is done.”
Fossil fuels? No, said Lundeen, sticking to his talking point. As a society, he said, we have made the decision that we want to address climate change. And that is coming at a cost.
“It’s the choices we are making to achieve other outcomes that lead us to potentially a better policy outcome with regard to climate change or something of that nature, but catastrophic utility bills.”
Ackermann had an analogy of houses. We are building a house of renewables, the one that makes sense for both costs and emissions if we were starting from scratch. But, of course, we had an older house of fossil fuel generation. And, he said, it does not help that part of that house — Comanche 3, a coal-burning unit built at a levelized cost of $1.1 billion — keeps failing and needing costly repair.
“You’re owning two homes at once and paying two mortgages,” said Ackermann.
Lundeen described this analogy as imperfect. All things mechanical occasionally fail, he said of Comanche 3 — overlooking just how often the unit has failed. But he argued that renewables and storage, by themselves, are not what we need. We still need natural gas.
“We’re building not one, but four houses,” said Lundeen.
Poles and wires? A 2025 Lawrence-Berkeley study had identified that the need to replace aging poles and wires — the basic infrastructure of delivery systems as the most significant cause of rising electricity bills.
Ackermann did not disagree. “Every piece of that system is being reviewed to ask whether it functions the way it used to, whether it’s time to replace it, whether new types of meters as well as other new types of wire and substations are needed.”
Another pertinent question, he added, is “whether the system we want 15 years from now is the same that we had 50 years ago?”
And Miller thought a component needed to be whether utilities are working together on this infrastructure in a synergistic way. Evidence abounds that they often do not. .
Utilities often do not work together in creating transmission and other infrastructure.
Ah, but it was a blame game, right? Where do shareholder profits come in? In other words, the very premise of investor-owned utilities?
Brasch correctly sketched the history. In the beginning — of electric utilities, that is — there were many companies supplying power in New York City and presumably elsewhere, creating a maze of fires across the cityscapes.
The solution was for one utility, a monopoly, to create order from the chaos. But to have that monopoly, the utility had to agree to state regulation.
Xcel is one of two investor-owned utilities regulated by the Colorado PUC. Black Hills Energy is the other.
“Is it good to have these companies being owned by shareholders? Does that help us in some way, or is it just what we’re stuck with?” asked Brasch.
A few details were shared about Xcel. Its Minneapolis-based CEO gets $30 million in compensation. and has access to the corporate jet. Plus, its Colorado operators last year produced $900 million in operational profits.
“They are right now before the regulators asking for another half a billion dollars in rate increases,” said Miller. “So I think the question is still relevant. I’m not trying to villainize the utility for those reasons, but I think it’s still relevant to what is appropriate, and legislators and regulators should be having that conversation.”
Ackermann found the system greatly at fault. Lundeen was more inclined to blame government policy and regulation.
In his analysis, Ackermann sees the profit motive of investor-owned utilities subverting broader societal gain.
“That’s the magic that we haven’t quite figured out,” he said. “They know what they want to do. They want to maximize earnings. They want to make sure the shareholders are happy. They want profit. They want to kind of increase sales and reduce costs. That’s what profit is all about. The regulator is trying to push against that steadily in what is often a losing imbalance game. “
Boulder has tried to change that dynamic twice, he observed — and so far has failed. And municipalization of utilities elsewhere in the country has been sparse as well,
“There’s got to be another way to steer that motivation that is known as a pursuit of profit toward what society wants.”
Keep in mind that Ackermann was part of this “game,” as he called it, for four years at the PUC and, earlier in his career, on the PUC staff.
With Andrew Bennett listening, Jeff Ackermann strongly argued that incentives and risks are not properly aligned in the regulation of Xcel Energy and other investor-owned utilities.
Lundeen described Xcel responding to policy choices made by the state, a more complicated “policy environment” that poses risks of creating inefficiencies in the “regulatory environment.”
“The reality is, it’s not the profit motive that creates the problem,” he said.
A common complaint of many in the environmental community is that Xcel games the system, wanting to build infrastructure that can become the basis for asking for a return from customers. It’s called rate base.
“Are we allowing them to build too much? Are they building too little?” Brasch asked Ackermann.
“My answer is going to keep coming back to the incentives and where risk is allocated,” replied Ackermann. He used an analogy.
“If you’re a baker and you bake too much bread, you have to sell it as day-old bread,” he said. A utility, in contrast, will return to state regulators and say that it was a good guess — but it still needs its earnings, it needs a return on its investment. It takes no hit for miscalculating.
The free market needs to be used more to secure new generation, said Ackermann. “We’ve had some interesting games done at the Legislature to cut deals that say 50% of all new generation replacing fossil generation will be owned by the utility,” he said. “That has no rationale other than the utility wants a controlled part of the market.”
All this was about electricity, only some of which is produced by burning gas. What about gas pipelines to homes and businesses for heating? The alternative, of course, is electrification — something Colorado is pushing hard as part of its decarbonization effort.
Lundeen returned to his distrust of policies. “As we’re choosing winners and losers, we have to become omniscient and omnipotent to make sure we don’t make mistakes in where we’re driving those policy choices.”
Ackermann said utilities can change their businesses, if told to do so, from gas to electricity. “It has to be consistent over long enough that they can trust that market will be there and that the (financial) return will be there.”
Amid the last of the buzzers, Ackermann delivered one more dig at the profit motive for utilities. And once more, he had an analogy, this time of a 30-year-old college student living in the family’s basement. “They keep saying, why don’t I keep getting an allowance?”
The analogy led to a utility getting a return on investment of 9.5%. Some companies do much better, of course, but then some also fail. Investor-owned utilities, almost never.
For a very deep dive on many of these same topics but from a national perspective, see “It’s the Age of Electricity and America isn’t Ready,” by Robinson Meyer, the founding editor of Heatmap, in the New York Times.
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