What’s a Utility to Do When Everyone Is Mad at Them?

Utilities sit at an uneasy intersection between private company and public service. Typically, it’s quite a profitable place to be: Investor-owned utilities get to be monopolies in order to provide electric service in a particular geography and then charge government-approved rates. But that also places them on the front lines of the consumer and political backlash to rising electricity prices.

Those prices are likely to continue to rise. The energy advocacy group PowerLines estimates that in 2025, electric and gas utilities requested some $31 billion worth of rate hikes. Spending on that scale translates into higher rates for consumers as utilities pass along their development costs to their rate base. S&P Global projects that electric and gas utilities will undertake $1.3 trillion in capital expenditures through 2030.

Utility executives are as much politicians as they are operators, as their entire corporate existence depends on a government relationship. So it was no surprise that Calvin Butler, chief executive of Exelon, the utility holding company with around 11 million customers spanning from the Chicago area to the Atlantic Seaboard, was speaking at an event on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly hosted by the foreign policy think tank the Atlantic Council on the same agenda as the foreign ministers of Spain and Romania and the prime minister of Syria.

As all this was going on, the White House and Congress appeared to be in the end stages (or at least the beginning of the end stages) of hashing out a deal on permitting reform. While the investor-owned utility trade group the Edison Electric Institute has been publicly supportive of a permitting deal since last year, several industry and policy insiders tracking the deal have told me this week that utilities’ relative political weakness is one reason why a deal might pass.

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That’s because an effective reform to transmission and permitting — especially to interregional transmission planning — could threaten utilities’ spending on serving their own individual territories.

“They are gonna get smoked in the Senate permitting deal,” one energy industry figure following the negotiations told me. When I asked why utilities aren’t opposing a deal, the insider told me, “They need too much from [the Department of Energy] the next few years. They can’t oppose this.”

"Rapid deployment of new energy infrastructure is essential to meeting growing electricity demand and ensuring customers have access to reliable, affordable power. Yet outdated federal permitting and planning processes too often slow the development of critical projects," an Edison Electric Institute spokesperson told me. "These delays can drive up costs for customers and create reliability challenges, underscoring the urgent need for permitting reform."

Butler didn’t weigh in permitting reform — I submitted a question at the event, but alas, it went ignored — but he was straightforward about the importance of maintaining good community and political relationships in the face of rising prices.

“We have to be connected to talk about siting of transmission, distribution lines, or substations. It’s what we do. I always say this: All politics is local,” Butler said. When it comes to local politics, Butler said that Exelon is at the “forefront of advocating responsible growth, responsible build-out, and community benefits agreements that benefit those communities.”

Butler also assigned some blame for the electricity price backlash to data centers and the technology industry, pointing to “people’s concern with AI, people’s concern that they’re going to lose jobs.” The tech industry, he said, “lost the narrative up front, and it’s tough to get it back.”

In the minds of the public and local government figures, however, utilities are very much a part of that story. Several governors or utility regulators in territories served by Exelon have opposed their rate increase requests, especially Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who demanded that Exelon subsidiary PECO withdraw a rate case, in a move he claimed saved ratepayers $510 million. North Carolina regulators also rejected a more than $500 million gas project proposed by Duke Energy, calling its price “staggering.”

When it came to how utilities affect everyone in their territory through the prices they charge, Butler was more direct and less cheery than his talk about community benefits. When asked if Exelon could “strengthen the grid” without raising prices, Butler plainly said, “No, you can’t.”

“We’re investing $41.7 billion,” he added. “I’m a part of that increase.”