Karlee Weinmann 
Itai Vardi Monopoly electric and gas utilities across the country routinely seek to charge their customers for lobbying, corporate brand advertising, perks for executives and employees, and engagement with Wall Street – expenses that do not benefit customers, and often work against their interests.
While utilities saddling customers with inappropriate expenses is nothing new, Power Trip: How utilities use customer money to fund lobbying, corporate branding, and luxury lifestyle expenses provides a fresh examination of the scale and cost of this problem. Additionally, it highlights legislative and regulatory interventions that can bring much-needed transparency and rigor to the utility regulatory process and protect customers from shouldering more than their fair share of costs.
Policymakers should pass tighter, updated rules to prevent utilities from even attempting to use customer money for inappropriate lobbying, advertising, and other expenses that do not benefit customers. Policymakers should also require regular, mandatory disclosures that provide greater visibility into utilities’ political spending, and set up explicit enforcement regimes to encourage compliance. These policy solutions result in real monetary savings for customers, increased transparency, and regulatory efficiencies.
Power Trip builds on previous work by the Energy and Policy Institute: the 2023 report Getting Politics Out of Utility Bills, which spotlights how utilities use money collected from their customers to fund political activities, influence regulators, and affect election outcomes – sometimes illegally – and the 2017 report Paying for Utility Politics, which documents how utility customers fund political organizations including utility trade associations.
Additionally, Power Trip broadens the universe of such inappropriate and insidious expenses, diving deep into utility lobbying and advertising as well as luxury travel, shareholder services, and more. It also affirms the case for passing legislation to codify expenses that utilities are prohibited from charging customers, and along with rigorous reporting and enforcement to ensure compliance.