When we talk about abolishing shutoffs, full stop, some people look at us in complete disbelief. But we believe a world without shutoffs is possible, and we just need one place to show us how – why not Colorado?
Pedal to the Metal
Back in 2025, we heard about RMI’s STAR Accelerator – an opportunity to bring together a diverse team to take on a pressing utility regulatory challenge. Obviously our minds immediately went to shutoffs. We wanted to identify a state with relatively low shutoffs and a fairly friendly regulatory and political environment, and game it out – what would it take for this state to end shutoffs once and for all? Colorado quickly came to the forefront as a good place to start. We had worked with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission before on their Equity Framework and we knew that Colorado had already taken some steps in the right direction, including a Percentage of Income Payment Plan program and disconnection protections for heat, cold, and vulnerable households. We also knew that extreme heat and wildfire smoke meant that ensuring uninterrupted access to power for all Coloradans was more important than ever before.
We wanted to use the structure of the Accelerator to answer some fundamental questions:
- What are the current costs (i.e. collections, human impacts) and benefits (i.e. reduced uncollectibles, community stability) of shutoffs?
- What resources could be used to prevent shutoffs from happening?
- What would a permanent end to shutoffs look like and require, from policy, regulatory, and economic perspectives?
- How would we address shutoffs by munis and coops?
- How would we communicate the rationale to build buy-in and positive public sentiment?
EEP came together with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, the Colorado Energy Office, Energy Outreach Colorado, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment to try to answer these questions. The Accelerator gave us the opportunity to articulate many of the structural dynamics at play in the shutoff problem, including chronic and widespread energy insecurity disproportionately impacting communities of color and renters, insufficient assistance programs, and mental barriers like the deserving-undeserving binary that would have to be addressed. The team quickly landed on prototyping a “lifeline” or universal basic utilities model – a system in which shutoffs would be replaced by a minimum basic allotment of energy designed to meet a household’s basic needs. Read more about the idea in the Energy Democracy Project’s Utilities for All Playbook.
A Hitch in the Plan
After the Accelerator, we got a bit of a gut punch. The previous data we had showed 8,334 shutoffs in 2023, but when the US Energy Information Administration released their 2024 Residential Utility Disconnections Report in April 2026, we learned that 138,966 shutoffs were executed in Colorado in 2024. This makes it 25th in the nation for the total number of residential gas and electric shutoffs and 30th by shutoff rate. We also found out that although Xcel Energy, the largest for-profit utility, accounts for the highest volume of shutoffs in the state, the Munis and the Co-ops have significantly higher rates – 9% and 7% respectively, more than double the 3% rate among the state’s IOUs. See images below for some quick facts about the energy landscape in the state.
Getting the Band (Back) Together
At this point, we knew it was time to pull together a larger and more diverse team, ideally bringing together folks from community based organizations and nonprofits focused on meetings folks’ basic needs, clean energy, healthy air and water, racial justice issues, teachers unions, renter advocates, and more. We wanted to discuss ending shutoffs with a group of folks with diverse voices that had a vested interest in building a more just energy system, who could bring their expertise and existing work into this conversation to build effective strategy and take on this uphill battle. That’s where our partnership with the Colorado Chapter of the Sierra Club came in handy – helping us identify organizations that might be interested and facilitating introductions.
So in August of 2026, we held an in person workshop, the bulk of which revolved around a Points of Intervention exercise intended to identify places in the shutoff system where we can take action to make change. Major themes quickly began to emerge:
- pushing for more distributed, community-controlled energy generation
- fighting back against a utility system that concentrates wealth at the top by extracting wealth from low-income communities
- recruiting folks impacted by the injustices of the energy system as storytellers and leaders
- using unusual tactics to push the Munis and Co-ops outside of typical regulation; and
- fighting the themes of scarcity mindset, free ridership, individuality, and the myth that the current system is set in stone.
Below is a summary of the key takeaways from each Point of Intervention:
Production: We identified the 3 types of utilities, fossil fuels, and renewables as key points of production with community and household solar floating to the top. Interventions included meaningfully changing the structure of our energy system so that distributed energy resources (DERs) like community and household solar are incentivized, updating the grid to be more resilient and hospitable to DERs, and prioritizing investments in low-income and disproportionately impacted communities.
Destruction: Our discussion around the Point of Destruction hinged on how current economic conditions concentrate utility wealth (data center wealth, transmission and generation company wealth) by extracting the wealth of low-income households. Once caught in the system, it becomes harder and harder to escape due to lack of access to wifi, language justice etc as well as reconnection fees, predatory loans, and other penalties. Meanwhile, smart meters have made it cheaper and easier for utilities to execute shutoffs and profit from reconnections. We identified interventions centered around leveraging community power to win community benefits, demanding reparations for environmental harms, demanding robust and transparent implementation of protections, and funnelling fees for utility non-compliance into funding universal basic utilities.
Consumption: We identified various points where consumers most affected by utility shutoffs can be reached, but the most popular ones were online/social media, smart devices, friends and family, and local news and radio. Interventions at the consumption level mostly fell into the categories of narrative building recruiting impacted folks as storytellers, educating the public, improving household efficiency, and improving accessibility of assistance programs by reducing barriers to access and prioritizing disproportionately impacted communities. Additionally, one participant proposed a non-profit utility model in which individuals could donate excess household renewables to other consumers through a virtual power plant.
Decision: Workshop participants identified government, regulatory bodies, utility leadership, and everyday people as decisionmakers in the shutoff system. For each utility type, participants identified key decision makers – the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), shareholders, and utility executives for Investor Owned Utilities, city councils for munis, and co-op utility leadership and member-owners for co-ops. Top strategies identified included legislation, public participation with teeth, pushing for universal basic utilities, targeting the municipal utilities, and adequately staffing agencies like the PUC.
Assumption: When discussing assumptions around shutoffs, participants were quick to note common themes around scarcity mindset, free ridership, and individual responsibility, as well as the seeming unchangeability of the current system. Participants also pointed out that munis and coops are assumed to be more just and that heat is assumed to be less dangerous than cold. High impact interventions to counteract these assumptions included centering energy as a basic human need and right that should be affordable and guaranteed for all and that we must show the human face and the human impacts of shutoffs.
This workshop was a fruitful opportunity to build relationships, think about the system, and brainstorm near and short term strategies to make abolishing shutoffs a reality. Plus we got to make some really stunning prints and that certainly brightened my day!
Next Steps
In the near term, we’re excited to build on this momentum and form a local working group to start chipping away at this big, audacious goal–to be the first state that ends shutoffs for good. We want to start by answering some important questions about what solutions are best suited to the Muni and Co-op utilities, and identify which Munis and Co-ops could be good targets to focus our efforts on – perhaps those with progressive leadership and low shutoff rates. We’re also prioritizing building the messaging and getting more public support through recruiting storytellers and getting more press coverage. Encouragingly, many folks have expressed interest in continuing this work, and EEP is certainly in this fight for the long haul. Maybe it’s the rarefied air, but we really believe that together, we can build an energy system that meets the needs of all Coloradans.