Utility profits grow along with anti-rooftop solar action

As an increasing amount of solar energy connects to the U.S. grid, the policies and procedures of corporate utilities are scrutinized. A report, Powerless in the United States: How corporate utilities drive energy unaffordability and climate chaos, is the result the national non-profit Center for Biodiversity’s ongoing project that tracks utility service disconnections and corporate profiteering.

The report looks at six utilities across the United States and their role in both keeping energy affordable while tackling climate change. At a time when costs are escalating for households and businesses, utilities are making record profits while also issuing increasing numbers of disconnect notices for customer non-payment, while suppressing distributed energy resources like rooftop solar.

The six utilities were chosen for the report because their shutoff data is available and they represent the largest regions in the country, collectively serving more than 200 million customers.

From January through September 2024, the utilities collectively increased shutoffs by nearly 21%, compared to the same period in 2023, the report states. The utilities disconnected power to homes and businesses over 662,000 times. The cost to cover the shutoffs could have been covered by 1.4% of the more than $6.8 billion the utilities spent on shareholder dividends from January through September 2024, the report finds.

From January to September 2024 the six utilities collectively raised their rates by at least $3.5 billion while taking in more than $10 billion in net income. The report focuses on Georgia Power, DTE Electric, Duke Energy, Ameren, PG&E and Arizona Public Service.

While energy demand rises due to electrification, increased number of data centers and more, the utilities are “doubling down on investments in methane gas, hydrogen, carbon capture and sequestration technologies (CCS), and other false climate solutions,” said the report. For example, the six utilities are planning to build at least 22 methane gas expansion projects.

As utilities toward the “false climate solutions,” the report finds that the utilities profiled find distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar, energy storage, electrification, demand response, and energy efficiency “a threat to their bottom lines.”

Georgia Power has doubled down on its reliance on methane gas while waging a full-fledged assault against rooftop and community solar, which the report contends helped bring in record profits in 2024, said the report. And DTE Electric, which serves 2.3 million customers in Michigan, provides “unreliable service and frequent shutoffs for nonpayment while relying on expensive, poisonous, climate-heating fossil fuels.”

Duke Energy, one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the U.S. with more than 4.1 million customers in seven southeastern states, has fought deployment of distributed renewable energy, the report said. It stated in an SEC filing that distributed energy threatens its bottom line.

Ameren, which serves about 3.3 million customers in Illinois and 1.2 million customers in Missouri, misconstrued language in a state law, the report said, to accelerate the end of solar net metering in Illinois. This occurred despite requests from the Illinois Commerce Commission to leave net metering rates untouched. Now the state’s net metering program is set to end, and compensation rates will be cut in half.

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), a California utility that serves more than 5.6 million customers across the state, “negligently manages its energy infrastructure, charges expensive energy bills, relies heavily on false climate solutions and tenaciously opposes rooftop and community solar,” according to the report. The utility’s actions were instrumental in ending a successful net metering program and lobbied to reject a community solar plan.

The report finds the anti-solar attitude of Arizona Public Service (APS), a utility serving 1.4 million customers, is evidenced in a proposed grid-access charge for solar customers. The good news is that the state’s attorney general denounced the fee’s discriminatory nature and called for a rehearing. However, APS was also successful in cutting the solar compensation rate, thus decimating the state’s community solar program, the report contends.

Policy solutions

The report concludes that as the Trump administration turns to a fossil fuel agenda, there remain policy actions that can be taken at the state level:

Tax utility profits, executive payouts and shareholder dividends to fund the expansion of utility shutoff protections, equitable debt forgiveness programs, distributed renewable energy incentives and targeted installations, and other related efforts to remedy energy injustices.
Establish performance-based ratemaking that uses financial rewards and penalties to tie utility profits to the fulfillment of community-defined resilience, energy, economic and environmental justice outcomes.
Eliminate fuel riders and force utilities to absorb the cost of methane gas price volatility rather than passing it on to their ratepayers.
Democratize public utility commissions by adopting reforms that hold them accountable to the “will and interests of the public.”

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