Rising utility bills have Americans worried

Yahoo

23-04-2025

As electric and gas bills rise across the country, a poll released today finds that an overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. are concerned about growing energy costs — and experiencing greater financial stress because of them.
In a nationwide survey of about 2,000 adults, conducted by the consumer education nonprofit PowerLines and the polling company Ipsos in late March, 73% of respondents reported feeling concerned about rising utility bills. Nearly two-thirds of surveyed billpayers said they have seen their gas and electric bills rise over the last year, and 63% reported feeling more stressed as a result of energy costs. The results held consistent across the political spectrum, with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike expressing similar levels of concern.
The findings arrive as the Trump administration's continued attacks on clean energy — and its support for coal and other fossil fuels — threaten to raise utility bills even higher, according to energy experts.
'Bottom line is, American energy consumers are hurting and they're stressed out,' Charles Hua, executive director of PowerLines, said of the survey's findings.
Yet according to the poll, most Americans aren't familiar with the state entities in charge of regulating energy utilities and setting those prices: public utility commissions. That's a problem, said Hua, because a lack of public participation prevents consumer interests from being fully considered when state regulators receive and approve rate-hike requests from utilities.
In the survey, 60% of respondents said they aren't familiar with the state or local authority that oversees gas and electric bills. Around 90% of people couldn't name their public utility commission as the correct regulatory body.
Meanwhile, these relatively unknown regulators have approved ballooning utility cost increases in recent years. In 2022, state utility regulators collectively approved $4.4 billion in bill increases; in 2023, they approved $9.7 billion. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, gas and electric utilities requested or received rate hikes totalling about $20 billion. Residential electricity costs have grown by nearly 30% since 2021, while gas prices have risen by 40% since 2019, far outpacing inflation, according to a separate report released today by PowerLines.
The reasons behind these fast-rising rates vary by utility and state. Still, Hua singled out one driver of higher electricity rates in particular: utility spending on transmission lines and distribution systems — in other words, the poles, wires, and lines that deliver power to customers.
Utilities have spent increasing amounts of money to replace aging infrastructure and repair or harden the grid after storms, wildfires, and other disasters made more likely by climate change. State rules guarantee investor-owned utilities a rate of return on those investments, creating a financial incentive to overspend on grid infrastructure that some researchers have estimated costs consumers billions of dollars each year. Volatility in global gas markets has also contributed to rising gas bills.
The extent to which customers are suffering proves that the current regulatory system isn't working, said Hua. 'Eighty million Americans are struggling to pay their utility bills, and that issue is not only not going away, but it's only going to get significantly worse in the coming years.'
Households that struggle to afford utilities often have no choice but to sacrifice needs like food, medicine, or basic physical comfort in order to pay their energy bills. Total utility bill debt in the U.S. has reached $17 billion, according to PowerLines, and power shutoffs due to nonpayment have risen across the country, posing potentially deadly health risks.
Four in five respondents to the poll said they felt powerless to control increasing utility costs. Around 60% — across all political affiliations — said they don't think their state governments are sufficiently protecting consumers when regulating utilities.
For that to change, public utility commissions need to better engage the communities they serve, said Hua.
They could, for example, hold public meetings virtually or at night so that more people can attend, he said. Commissions could also allow consumers to comment on regulatory proceedings online or in person, and could provide intervenor compensation that covers the legal fees of advocates and stakeholders so that more groups can get involved in ratemaking cases. Hua added that states should invest in expanding the staff and capacity of public utility commissions and consumer advocacy offices, which are often vastly out-resourced by large investor-owned utilities.
Other consumer advocates have called for a range of reforms to rein in high rates, such as implementing performance-based ratemaking, which rewards utilities for reaching certain environmental or equity goals. States could also prohibit utilities from charging customers for trade association and lobbying fees, and lower the rate of return utilities can earn on infrastructure investments.
Electricity and gas bills may rise even more under the Trump administration's energy policies. Several reports have found that repealing the clean energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, which some GOP lawmakers have promised to do, would significantly raise household energy costs, given that solar and wind are now far cheaper sources of electricity than coal, oil, and gas. President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs — now on pause for most countries except China — and recent executive orders to keep aging, unprofitable coal power plants running would make energy costs even more unaffordable.
The administration has also targeted a popular federal assistance program that helps more than 6 million U.S. households pay for their heating and cooling bills. Early this month, Trump officials laid off the entire staff running the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and a budget proposal leaked last week eliminates the program altogether. States are still waiting on about $378 million in funding this year for utility bill assistance, and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have called for program staff to be reinstated.
'At a time when so many families are struggling to make ends meet — and tariffs are poised to drive prices even higher — it's unconscionable to rip away the help that Congress has already offered to people in need,' Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, told USA Today.