Protecting consumers, tackling high utility bills

Early this year, we heard from constituents that their monthly utility bills went up astronomically. e amounts were shocking and created real di culties for people struggling to keep up with food, rent and other necessities. And this didn’t just impact our homes and apartments. Our places of worship, our local shops, our schools and hospitals – all of the important community institutions and businesses across Je erson County –were also faced with these dramatic increases in their bills.

In response, we launched a special committee at the Capitol to hear from experts on what was driving these costs, and what we could do at the legislature to protect consumers in the future. Based on the testimony we heard from experts over the course of three committee hearings, we introduced legislation that will address some of the waste, ine ciencies and high costs that made heating and powering our homes and businesses so expensive this winter.

SB23-291 will ensure that ratepay-

GUEST COLUMN

Farmers do everything. ey are mechanics, botanists, naturalists, athletes and some even believe themselves to be meteorologists. In the age of the regenerative agriculture movement, farmers need to become biologists, or more speci cally, soil ecologists. Soil ecology is the study of the seemingly limitless universe beneath our feet. In just a teaspoon of healthy soil, there are over one billion bacterial individuals and more than six miles of fungal mycelium. It would take seven years to recite the names of all the bacterial species in a compost pile. How do the trillions of soil microbes interact? It’s likely we’ll never truly know. A broad understanding of the soil ecosystem, however, can change a farmer’s mindset. e most productive soil in the world from an old growth forest contains far less plant-available nutrients than are recommended for agricultural soil. How could

Lisa Cutter Chris Degruy Kennedy

ers won’t have to pay for utility expenses that have nothing to do with providing us safe, reliable heat and electricity. Currently, things like lobbying expenses, political donations, tax penalties and promotional marketing are paid for you by you. Utilities are natural monopolies, so ratepayers shouldn’t be paying for purely brand building ads.

e bill also raises the bar for the level of detail that investor-owned utilities, like Xcel Energy, need to provide to regulators when they’re arguing to raise your rates. We rely on the Public Utilities Commission

(PUC) to review proposals from utilities that will impact our bills, and ensure all proposed increases are reasonable and legitimate. But that can be di cult when utilities don’t always provide all of the data and assumptions they are using to justify the requested rate increase. Our bill will create a more thorough and transparent process, allowing regulators to more quickly and efciently understand the impacts to ratepayers and better evaluate the legitimacy of the proposed increases.

Our bill will also better align the interests of for-pro t utilities with the interests of energy consumers. Utilities like Xcel do not make any money o the cost of the fuel they purchase to heat our homes. So if the cost of gas (the fuel most commonly used) goes up by 40% like it did this winter, they pass that cost on to us dollar for dollar. As a result, they have no nancial incentive to seek ways to reduce these price spikes or, even better, to reduce our reliance on volatile fuels so we’re not exposed to big hikes to begin