Utilities Make a Fortune Off Their Government Monopolies

All right, so there’s an interesting article from our friends over at the Indiana Capital Chronicle. They partner with an organization called Stateline that tracks state governments and the actions of state governments across the country. Stateline has an article out about how much money investor-owned utilities have made across the country over the past few years. Before we get into that, though, a couple reminders about why this matters. Utilities are legal monopolies granted by the government. Your gas line. Your electric. Your water. Your sewer. There’s only one option. You can’t shop around. You can’t price check it. You can’t pit one company against another. You use whatever the government says you use, and you pay whatever the government tells you to pay. Now, it would be one thing if all these companies were non-profits. If they were just recovering their costs. Or if they were government-owned like many water and sewer systems are, and the goal was simply to cover expenses. That would be one thing. But with many utility companies, that’s not the case. Many of them are for-profit, investor-owned companies. So you have a for-profit company operating as a government-granted monopoly. Think about that. A company that can essentially charge whatever it wants because you have no alternative. The only real backstop in Indiana is the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, the IURC. Over the past decade, though, the IURC has largely been a rubber stamp for utility rate increases. These companies are investor-owned. Their job is to make money. They’re not trying to provide a public service. They’re trying to maximize profit. Again, it would be different if these were nonprofit co-ops or zero-profit systems simply covering costs. But they’re not. They’re for-profit companies operating under monopolies granted by the government. So here’s what the numbers show. The Energy and Policy Institute, an energy watchdog group that tracks the fossil fuel and utility industries, analyzed financial disclosures from 110 investor-owned utilities between 2021 and 2024. They also looked at some available 2025 filings. Their report was published late last week. And remember, this report does not include nonprofit electric providers. Those are excluded. These numbers are only for for-profit companies. Last year, investor-owned electric utilities kept about $0.15 of every dollar they collected as profit. Fifteen cents. Think about your electric bill. Fifteen cents of every dollar you pay is not going to electricity. It’s not going to infrastructure. It’s not going to research and development. It’s going straight into someone’s pocket. Profit. And they’re allowed to collect that profit because the government grants them monopoly power. Let’s do the math. If you paid $200 for your electric bill — which is not unusual for a lot of households — about $30 of that bill went to corporate profit. Thirty dollars. And that profit margin has actually increased. It used to be about $0.13 per dollar between 2021 and 2024. Now it’s up to $0.15. These companies are making more money than they were before. More profit. Between 2021 and 2024, investor-owned utilities across the country collected about $186 billion in profits. One hundred eighty-six billion dollars. Meanwhile, people are struggling to pay their bills. A February report from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association found that one in six households are behind on their utility bills. One in six. Something has to change with how utilities operate in Indiana. And it has to be more than lip service from the governor. It can’t just be the governor saying, well, I appointed new people to the IURC. Because we’ve seen that before. He appointed new people to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation as well. And what did they do? The exact same thing the previous leadership did — handing out tax incentives to large projects like data centers. Appointments alone don’t fix the problem. There has to be meaningful legislative reform. The legislature needs to pass laws that prevent investor-owned monopolies from making more and more money simply because the government allows them to. Their profits exist because the government grants them monopoly power. Without the monopoly, they couldn’t do it. And at the end of the day, these are essentially taxes. You have to pay them. Unless you’re going to sit in the dark. Unless you’re going to turn off your water and never flush your toilet. You don’t have a choice. The same way with water and sewer — you have to pay it. Our government is effectively raising taxes by granting monopolies to for-profit utility companies. And that’s not right. It’s not fair. And if it keeps going the way it is, eventually people simply won’t be able to afford to live. Period. Full stop.