By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
Every week, Carlos H. sits down with his bills and works out what his family can go without.
Some weeks it is dinner. “I just opt out to say, hey, okay, maybe won’t be cooking up something tonight, so we can just make ends meet,” the Denver father said. Some weeks it is gas—a quarter tank instead of a full one, and the math of whether that gets him to the next payday. He has a 14-year-old daughter and a baby due in February.
His electric bill runs $120 to $150 a month. A proposed Xcel settlement could push it higher.
“We don’t have an affordability crisis,” Robert Kenney, president of Xcel Energy Colorado, told the House Energy and Environment Committee on April 23, arguing against a proposal to give regulators more power over how utilities finance new projects.
He said the company’s below-average rates made the measure unnecessary. The state’s consumer advocate, speaking for the same measure Kenney testified against, had told the committee the opposite—that Colorado utility customers are facing an affordability crisis.
Xcel has asked the Colorado Public Utilities Commission to approve a major electric rate increase. It first sought about $356 million in new revenue. A settlement with the commission’s trial staff and other parties would trim that to roughly $225 million.
Even so, the state Office of the Utility Consumer Advocate says, the proposed settlement would still produce the largest single-year base-rate increase ever approved for a regulated Colorado utility.
If approved, the settlement would add $6.13 a month to the average residential bill, a 5.86 percent increase. It would affect about 1.4 million residential customers, three-quarters of whom also buy their gas from Xcel and face a second increase already moving through the same commission.
Carlos said some people received a postcard about the proposed rate case, but he did not. He learned about it only after someone else asked what he thought. “This is the first I’m seeing it,” he replied.
The shutoffs
Carlos knows the experience behind those numbers. In April testimony, Tricia Anstey, the affordability manager on the Colorado PUC staff, reported that residential electric disconnection events for nonpayment rose from 9,731 in 2023 to 78,337 in 2025—a 705 percent increase. Those events involved 55,712 customers, nearly a third of whom were cut off more than once.
Carlos has lived it. “I had my electricity shut off before in the past too,” he said. “And then not only that, but waiting for someone to reconnect you. Now you have a fee on top of that.”
Asked about the increase, Xcel said disconnections are “a last resort” and named several assistance programs, including its RED Trucks—mobile units that travel the state so customers can talk with its Customer Care representatives in person. In its response to RMV, Xcel did not explain the jump or address the smart meters that now let it shut off power remotely.
In contrast, Anstey testified that Public Service began remote disconnections through smart meters in June 2024 and that the technology made shutoffs cheaper and more routine. Gas shutoffs, which still require someone to come to the property, rose just 34 percent over the same span.
Andrew Bennett says he sees the consequences every day. He is vice president of advocacy at Energy Outreach Colorado, the nonprofit that helps income-qualified Colorado households pay their utility bills.
In a July 10 interview, Bennett said demand had never been higher. Energy Outreach Colorado had seen more than a 10 percent year-to-date increase in the number of families receiving assistance since its program year began Oct. 1.
“Energy Outreach Colorado is serving more households with more money than we ever have,” he said, “and we are likely to run out of funding by the end of the month for Xcel.” The program year runs through the end of September.
The average person seeking energy assistance from EOC, Bennett said, is a single mother with two children earning less than $25,000 a year.
He described what falls away when the bill comes due. “People go without in order to pay their utility bill. They may go without a meal. They go without medicine. They may keep their temperature at an unsafe level.”
Interviewed separately, Carlos described the same strain in his own words. “It can be not just only a struggle in our wallet,” he said. “It’s also a struggle mentally.”
What the company says
Xcel measures the same bills differently. Its residential customers, spokeswoman Sydney Isenberg said, spend on average about 1 percent of their household income on electricity—“the lowest ‘share of wallet’ rate in the country”—and pay bills that stay well below the national average.
Since its last rate case in 2022, the company said, it has put about $3 billion into the system: new poles, transformers, transmission lines, substations and generation. Isenberg said Xcel recognizes that many Coloradans are facing difficult economic times, and said it is “committed to keeping costs as low as possible.”
Cory Skluzak, a rate analyst for the consumer advocate, has told the commission the wallet-share number flatters the utility. Colorado’s median household income ranked fourth in the nation in 2024. Measured against incomes that high, he testified, Xcel’s bills look smaller than they feel to the people paying them.
For Carlos, the below-average comparison misses the point. “It’s one thing to look at the numbers,” he said. “But honestly, they don’t really understand all the other things that we have, all the other struggles, and all the other bills that we have to pay.”
The money
The proposed settlement would expand aid for income-qualified households. It includes a one-time $5 million shareholder contribution in 2027.
Much of the ongoing assistance is funded by customers themselves—an energy-assistance charge of about a dollar a month on residential bills, which raised $26.6 million in 2024. Energy Outreach Colorado supports the expanded aid in the settlement but told the commission, in a July filing, that the deal “does not resolve all affordability issues” in the case.
Carlos said the assistance program he used could be tapped only once a year. “You can only apply only once, once a year,” he said. “If you run into another situation again in the future, you have to find another way.”
Stuck with each other
What Carlos wants from Xcel is a reason to trust it. He cannot take his business elsewhere—Xcel is the regulated utility for his area, and he cannot switch—and he described a relationship that runs one way.
“How am I gonna trust that they’re gonna have some form of best interest also for my personal needs,” he said, “as they are continuously receiving payments from” about 1.4 million customers.
He would like someone from the company to come talk with people like him, and then come back. “There’s also a follow-up to see what happened to that feedback, ’cause that usually never happens,” he said. “They just come in, and they just take all this information, and then, okay, we’ll see you guys, bye.”
Carlos also noted that his Spanish-speaking friends get their notices in English only. Xcel said rate-case information is available in English and Spanish, and that it is working with the commission to expand outreach in other languages.
Xcel said it notifies customers when it files a rate case, through required bill notices, emails, online-account messages and digital ads on the Colorado Sun and Denver Post websites.
The settlement is opposed by the consumer advocate, AARP and the city of Boulder, and the three PUC commissioners will decide its fate this summer.
A year from now, Carlos said, he expects to still be thinking about the bills, and about what he will have to cut. The baby is due in February.
“What else am I gonna make the cut on,” he said, “so I don’t get cut off?”