Your electric bill went up again this year. Mine did too — about $110 more than last year, which happens to land right around the national average increase. Meanwhile, the companies sending you that bill just wrapped up their best five years ever.
From 2021 to 2025, investor-owned electric utilities pocketed $244 billion in profit straight off customer bills, according to an Energy and Policy Institute review of 110 utilities. Not revenue. Profit. In 2025 alone, roughly 15 cents of every dollar you paid went straight to the bottom line — about $30 out of every $200 bill, just for being the only company legally allowed to sell you power.
Before anyone assumes this is a “utilities bad, government good” post, it isn’t. I’m fine paying for real shared infrastructure — roads, first responders, libraries, the power grid. Running six competing sets of power lines down every street would be insane, so we grant one company a monopoly and let a public commission decide what it can charge in exchange. That’s a reasonable trade. What isn’t reasonable is using a guaranteed monopoly to also lock in a 20%-plus profit margin, then going back to ask for double-digit rate hikes on top of it, year after year.
And that’s exactly what’s happening. AES Indiana asked regulators for a 10.1% rate increase this year — $193 million a year — while requesting a 10.7% return on investment. Guaranteed, not earned. PECO in Pennsylvania tried for 12.5% before public pressure forced it to back off. MidAmerican Energy posted a 27.2% profit margin over the past four years. Florida Power & Light and Nantucket Electric both cleared 23%. These aren’t struggling companies asking permission to survive. They’re already wildly profitable companies asking permission to be more profitable, and mostly getting it.
Some of this is real. AI data centers are pulling enormous amounts of power and straining the grid in a lot of regions, and somebody has to pay to build out capacity. Fine. But “we need to expand the grid” and “we deserve a guaranteed double-digit return while doing it” are two separate asks, bundled together like nobody will notice the difference. Arizona’s attorney general called it “the blatant corporate greed of our monopoly utilities.” Pennsylvania’s governor said flatly that “the 20th century utility model is broken.” Those aren’t fringe complaints. Those are the elected officials whose actual job is regulating these companies, saying the quiet part out loud.
Here’s my real problem with it. A monopoly is supposed to come with a leash. The company gets guaranteed customers and zero competition; in exchange, regulators keep the profits reasonable so it can’t just squeeze people who have nowhere else to go. When a monopoly starts posting private-equity-level returns anyway, the leash isn’t working. And a free market didn’t fail here, because there was never a free market to begin with. This is regulatory capture wearing a hard hat.
I’m not saying utilities shouldn’t turn a profit. Businesses are supposed to make money — I’ve said that about industries that make people a lot angrier than power companies do. But a company you’re legally required to buy from doesn’t get to operate like it’s competing for your business while quietly posting the margins of one that already owns it outright.
Two cents: if my only power company is also my only choice, its profit margin is my business too.