America’s 200 supreme court justices of the energy system–also known as Public Utilities Commissioners–were once the authors of swift, lifesaving action to protect uninterrupted access to energy. At the start of Covid, the majority of these commissioners banned utility shutoffs. Their actions were unequivocal and unprecedented. And desperately needed for the survival and wellbeing of millions of people. Yet a mere 4 years later, Public Utilities Commissions oversaw utility execution of 10.3 million shutoffs in 2024. How did we go from the revolutionary affirmation that energy is essential to record breaking shutoffs?
One Step Forward
When the Covid pandemic hit, Public Utilities Commissioners (PUC) didn’t need explicit authority or new legislation to act. They declared: “It is beyond argument that the provision of public utility service is necessary for the safety of the public.” They took the mantle of problem solvers, appealing to their broad existing mandates to protect the public interest. They required no explicit directives from state legislatures or governors. In turn, these PUC commissioners were celebrated for their foresight, unity, and clear directives, and rightly so. If the previously uncelebrated task of keeping the lights on was important, being central to the nation’s public health response thrust these two hundred brave public servants into glints of limelight.
Their logic for Covid moratoriums on shutoffs was spot on. With an undeniable public health crisis unfolding, not having energy for heating hot water for hand washing or running oxygen machines or even charging cell phones and laptops while people were homebound was going to be devastating. Shutoff moratoriums were a literal life saver, and hundreds of thousands of Americans are still above ground because of them.
But the converse is that gaps in Covid era shutoff protections, including among municipal and cooperative utilities not regulated by PUCs, were deadly. By March, 2020, many, but not all jurisdictions had enacted a ban on utility shutoffs. Comparing infection and death rates between communities with bans and those without created a unique natural experiment to test the value of a shutoff moratorium. In just the first 8 months of the pandemic, researchers found that overall death rates were 14.8% higher than they would have been if a total, national moratorium on energy and water shutoffs had been in place. This translates to 30,000 people who died unnecessarily. Sit with that for a moment. In Hispanic communities, shutoff rates were 2.4 times higher than in white communities before the pandemic, but 4.7 times higher in the first two months. In 2020, Covid became the third leading cause of death among Black people and cut 2 years from their life expectancies.
Two Steps Back
But up from the trickle of shutoffs on their watches in 2020, Public Utilities Commissions oversaw utility execution of 10.3 million shutoffs in 2024. To my knowledge, nothing in the authorizing statutes of these commissions nor any other state law regarding the regulation of monopoly investor-owned utilities requires utilities or the PUCs who regulate them to shut off energy to households who can’t afford their bills. The people may be in debt, but it is the utilities, and particularly the PUCs who regulate rates, mandate affordability programs, and establish consumer protections who are on the hook.
The post-moratorium acceleration of shutoffs to levels that far exceeded those before Covid 2019 is rarely questioned. But we must realize that shutoffs are an unmandated construct, a practice we have unconsciously allowed to seem normal, without pressing whether there are better, more economical alternatives that simultaneously uphold energy as a human right. Shocking revelation: there are!
The idea that shutoffs can be stopped is not just theoretical, but proven by the recent experience of Covid moratoriums. The Covid moratoriums that swept across red and blue states alike are clear evidence that when a crisis arises, PUCs can very quickly mobilize the political will to protect the health and safety of residents.
Despite their vital role in saving lives, the moratoriums were rolled back in every single jurisdiction. Some expired as early as May 2020, while others persisted until July 2021. In November 2022, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) courageously passed a resolution affirming a right to utilities and stated that no shutoffs would be executed because people were too poor to pay their bills. That resolution carried weight through 2023, but some shutoffs resumed in 2024, albeit at a rate an order of magnitude below than the national average.
The expiration of Covid moratoriums didn’t just bring back a small number of shutoffs, it spurred shutoff executions to unprecedented levels. It was as if utilities, and the commissioners who regulate them, believed they had erred in heeding their humanitarian impulses to ensure access to life-saving energy. Now that the virus was in check, they acted with strange compulsion not just to return to “normal,” but to aggressively get the house in tighter shape than ever before. Patient Wall Street investors were clamoring to get paid back their uncollected revenues. Funny, with or without shutoffs, investors weren’t ever taking a hit for unpaid bills; those get passed on to other customers. What was actually at stake for them was the revenue from an array of financial penalties that precede shutoffs–late fees, reconnections fees, and elevated deposit requirements. Ameren IL noted to the SEC that these are an important form of (unregulated) revenue, bringing in about $32 million per year. More on how “the house always wins” in a moment.
With more ubiquitous smart meters, the crack down on past-due bills accelerated. From gold-plated headquarters, utilities remotely clicked off the smart meter for debts that were often less than $100 and 30 days past due (and sometimes for literally less than a dollar). Warnings about escalating utility debt were weaponized in service to an unfounded theory that without the stick of shutoffs, customers would simply refuse to pay for energy. There was an urgency to purge the imaginary freeriders from the system for fear that they were costing financially responsible customers (many of whom receive energy subsidies and tax credits themselves) a heavy burden.
And here is where the initial heroic actions of the PUCs and the cooperating utilities unraveled.
What Went Wrong
Rather than recognizing that living without energy, regardless of whether there is a pandemic or not, imperils families, the PUC commissioners seemed to forget, disavow, or bury their recent words on the necessity of energy for survival, well-being, and basic participation in American civic and community life. Yes, people especially need energy during a pandemic, but also during periods of extreme heat and cold, when the air is choked with wildfire smoke, when a family member gets suddenly sick or loses a job, when there is an elder or young child or pregnant or nursing mom at home, or even when someone can’t afford to have all the food and medicine in the fridge rot every few months because of a shutoff. In other words, Commissions were right in 2020 to see that shutoffs were unsafe. What they needed to affirm, critically, is that shutoffs are always unsafe–and inhumane–regardless of the season or the strain of a particular microbe.
Misinterpreting the rationale of Covid moratoriums through a narrow, virus-specific lens was the first misstep in allowing the resumption and unparalleled escalation of shutoffs. The second misstep was conceding to a faulty logic about the economic necessity of shutoffs. No one likes the idea of a household, especially the children and the elderly, sitting in the dark with no heating or cooling or hot water while their immediate neighbors enjoy the free flow of electrons and gas into their home.
The utilities’ claim that the only backstop preventing people from taking advantage of the utilities and impoverishing others who continued to pay is baseless. Their logic; If you just give energy away or have no recourse for nonpayment, obviously nobody, or only the suckers, will pay. But theory often diverges from reality. Just ask the medieval doctors who were assured in their habit of bleeding the demons from their patients until they became corpses.
I have yet to see a study that proves the link between the threat and execution of shutoffs and better financial outcomes for other utility customers. (Utility execs, please enlighten me!) In fact, most of the limited data that we are unearthing tilts in the opposite direction. Take the testimony of my colleague Gabe Chan, associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and a regular expert witness before the MN PUC. In a recent Xcel Energy rate case, Chan determined that for every dollar in uncollectibles (bills residents cannot afford to pay), Xcel was exacting 83 cents in harm from the customers it shut off. And this is a conservative estimate. The harm stems from costs like late and reconnection fees, additional deposits, the need to take out predatory payday loans, lost days of work and school, rotted food and medicine after losing power for refrigeration, etc. The emotional toll of shutoffs are enormous, but not included in Chan’s figure.
Shutoff Incentives
Several utilities have responded in formal discovery requests that unlike the fluff of their rate case testimony (“protecting our most vulnerable customers is our top priority, we swear”), they actually haven’t bothered to analyze or propose alternatives to shutoffs. Are these multi-billion dollar cash cows just not smart enough to run affordability programs and prevent shutoffs? Or, perhaps, could there be something more insidious than ineptitude? Why, in fact, do utilities espouse a religious zeal for “The Way of the Shut Off” and lean on a system rooted in punishment?
have a hypothesis. When pressed in formal regulatory proceedings by watchdogs, utilities acknowledge collecting $15-$34 million1 in late fees in the last six years, or something on the order of $8 million per 1 million customers. Back of the envelope, there are about 160 million residential gas and electric IOU accounts; extrapolating puts the late fees alone at a $1.3 billion source of unregulated profit. Add in reconnection fees and other penalties and the outline of a multi-billion dollar shutoff racket starts to take shape. These pure profits are not reported on state or federal disclosures like the main Energy Information Administration reporting form required of all utilities, even though they can account for a significant chunk of a household’s energy bill. The smoking gun economics of shutoffs are dollar signs, not a lack of integrity by people to pay a reasonable energy bill. If utility debt goes away, so too does the potential to cash in on late fees. Again, to the utility execs reading this, please enlighten me with data that tells a less incriminating story!
When utilities are occasionally pressed by regulators and advocates, suddenly their imaginations and economic analyses shift. Consider a new pilot program by Alliant Energy in Wisconsin, which determined that enrolling low-income customers at risk of shutoff in affordable payment plans would reduce costs to other customers by 17%. I’d love to put money in a stock that had a 17% return and a huge social and humanitarian impact. These people can now live without the fear of being powerless and resume their contributions to their families, communities, schools, and workplaces.
The reason Alliant’s numbers show universal affordability as the cheaper option is that people are already paying what they can manage. They don’t have savings or generational wealth to fall back on, so they get shut off despite knowing how painful it is; then they accrue additional penalties. In 2024, two million households were never reconnected, unable to pay off debts that mounted with fees and the extra deposit required to restart service that are frequently more than $500 (equivalent to two months’ advance payment). Their credit takes a nose dive, wage garnishments ensue, and 25% interest loans are the last possible resort–for a time. Then, the ballooning debts they couldn’t ever afford get written off by the utilities as uncollectibles. Those uncollectibles get passed on to other customers anyway, but only after inflicting the massive harm–including some tragic deaths–of hundreds of thousands of shutoffs. See the diagram below on how utilities recover those costs – spoiler alert, the house always wins.
Shutoffs are fundamentally about preserving a utility’s ability to overcharge and penalize, while simultaneously imposing uncollectibles on paying customers. Utilities, not surprisingly, petition the PUC commissioners to preserve the practice of shutoffs, and since the expiration of Covid moratoriums, the commissioners have mostly assented.
1According to its discovery response, DTE Electric (MI) collected nearly $100 million from 2019 to 2025; Ameren Gas (IL) collected $34 million per year in 2021 and 2022, as reported in a footnote on its 10-k submission to the Securities & Exchange Council (SEC).
Source: Alex Antal, Regulatory Assistance Project, June 16, 2026
Injustice is Baked Into the System
Other sprinklings of data expand my understanding of shutoff economics further. In upstate New York, Niagara Mohawk made an ugly case for increasing its spending on shutoff crews by $10.5 million each year, rather than putting that money toward affordability programs. he company said, its only method for determining who to shut off was geographic convenience. Their claim: It’s much easier to shut off a whole block of gas customers/ residents in the majority Black and Brown neighborhoods in cities like Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany where smart meters have not been installed than it is to drive into the sticks for the one house at the end of a long, hilly road. Nationally, shutoff rates among Black, Brown, and Indigenous households, especially in cities, are 2-3 times higher than among white households. They remain significantly higher even when controlling for income.
Stories of wrongful or accidental shutoffs abound. Although I’ve catalogued several of these,most go unreported. Utilities generally apologize for these untimely careless mistakes (although sometimes they and their PUCs adamantly deny all responsibility), but almost never face criminal or even civil penalties.
In Michigan, a change in billing software resulted in more than 4,000 wrongful shutoffs. Wrongful shutoffs, it turns out, are prevalent enough that an industry consultant was brought into the investigation by DTE to present evidence that actually, a 0.4% wrongful shutoff rate is the industry standard. In a city or county or state of one million people, that’s 4,000 people every year being shut off for no reason by their utility. The victims received zero compensation, and even the paltry fine just went to the state’s general fund.
Even when shutoff protections are required by regulators or state law, utilities implement a swiss cheese of policies and practices. My local utility, DTE, said a medical protection could only be approved before being shut off, but could not be issued to restore service (multiple call center reps misquoted–and were likely mistrained on–the state consumer protections rules.) Hours after giving birth, a mom with asthma and a baby with an oxygen line feeding her tiny nose were denied restoration of power while sitting in a hospital bed. There is no such thing as a safe shutoff. Contrast this with the French publically-owned utility EDF, which stopped executing shutoffs altogether, preferring to guarantee a limited but uninterrupted flow of electricity sufficient to live on. Oui oui, universal basic utilities are already a reality in some places.
It’s Time to End Shutoffs, Once and For All
So if shutoffs are rife with failures, some of which kill people directly and indirectly, why do PUCs keep loading the chamber of the six-shot revolver with one bullet and allowing utilities to pull the trigger willy nilly? There must be some sense to this, right?
Well, if the economic justifications are in tatters, then the practice of executing utility shutoffs belongs on the chopping block. We’ve been sold a thin shell of unsubstantiated theory that purports utility shutoffs are necessary. Rubbish. Let’s bring the guillotine to shutoffs, not the people who can’t afford their energy bills.
“I wish every corporation commissioner had to sit in a house that that had no electricity when it’s 95″ – Joanne Pearson, Director of the Helping Hands Ministry in Tulsa, OK.
It’s finally time to bring the stars of this play back to center stage. The PUC Commissioners were once in the spotlight for taking courageous action to ensure no one was without power during a crisis. Then they backpeddled, and shutoffs skyrocketed, hitting a national rate of 10.6%, far beyond what we imagined was possible.
New data is stretching our understanding of the issue. On one hand, we see that shutoffs are an epidemic, with one shutoff for every three households in the state of Oklahoma and two shutoffs for every three households in Memphis, TN. In some zip codes, especially in majority Black and Brown communities like Detroit, the average shutoff lasts more than 2 months. Deaths from these targeted involuntary power outages will rise like our superheated seas, as people wilt in extreme heat waves and suck in more wildfire smoke, forced to choose between broiling or opening their windows and letting in the pollution from faraway fires.
Our new data has a hopeful side, too. It shows that for all of the financial costs of shutoffs (let alone the human and public health tolls), the economics of shutoffs amount to fuzzy math at best. If anything, their economic value is to enrich only the executives and investors, while merely passing on the costs of an overbuilt shutoff and collections architecture to other customers. Perhaps counterintuitively, it’s actually cheaper to ensure everyone can afford their bills and access universal basic utilities than it is to overcharge them and then come knocking for extra fees and penalties. At least that’s what emerging data says. These pilot programs are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with putting people with exorbitant bills in line for benefits like community solar and storage and participation in virtual power plant programs.
Conversations about the costs of energy are so pervasive they put the socialist mayor and the Truth Social president in agreement about the need to bring down the profits of Con Ed. Energy affordability matters because energy bills drain 15-20% of the household budgets of millions of working class people. Energy costs strain every other basic need and are outpacing inflation. The strings of these fragile family budgets are starting to snap. Alongside the affordability crisis, we see a crisis among Americans, who, despite the ubiquitous powerlines entering their homes, are increasingly slipping back into the dark ages. What needs to snap next is the brutalist logic that the poor deserve to be punished and deprived of human rights in order to buttress billions in record-breaking profits for monopoly utilities.
If commissioners know in their core that shutoffs are unsafe and inhumane [many have said so off the record], then their task is to affirm those conclusions to the public. To don thick skins to the baseless utility tantrums that their multi-billion dollar profits are at risk. As public servants, commissioners have a duty to respond to the evidence that has crystalized–shutoffs cause widespread harm and are utterly and economically preventable. Robust actions, like the urgent, life-saving moratoriums they issued in 2020, must follow. To merely document the toll of shutoffs and tinker with marginal protections is to forsake the public interest and forget the lives of people like Linda Daniels, Kate Korman, Rodney Todd and his seven children.
It is time again for the 200 PUC commissioners to use their broad authority and discretion to declare a public health and affordability emergency with no end in sight. It is time to end utility shutoffs and establish a permanent right to universal basic utilities.