How Much Are You Paying For Utility Profits? — Episode 270 of Local Energy Rules

Daniel Tait:
Unfortunately, that’s kind of the way that it goes down. Money and politics is very important and very prominent in all things in our society and utilities are no different.

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John Farrell:
In some parts of the United States, 30 cents of every dollar a utility customer pays to their electric utility goes to profits for those utility shareholders. How widespread is this problem and how did it happen? Joining me in March 2026, Daniel Tait, Research and Communications Director for the Energy and Policy Institute, walked me through the findings in their new report, Paying For Their Profits, and what we can do to bring excessive utility profiteering under control. I’m John Farrell, Director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system.

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John Farrell:
Daniel, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Daniel Tait:
Thanks for having me, John. Looking forward to the conversation.

John Farrell:
I love to start off by just asking my guests a little bit informally to talk about how did you get to doing what you do? How did you get to a career path where you’re doing this research on electric utility profits? Is this what you said you wanted to do when you grew up?

Daniel Tait:
It was very much not. When I was growing up, I thought I wanted to be an astronaut. I’m from Huntsville, Alabama, and everybody that grows up here in the heart of space country wants to be an astronaut or do something cool like that. But I got my kind of start in this industry, if you will, or interest in this, ironically, on my weekend, I was supposed to get married. There were massive tornadoes that kind of came through this area, which many listeners may recall from late 2011 or mid 2011. And so mass tornadoes came through, hit the Tuscaloosa area, also hit pretty heavily up here where I live in the Huntsville, Decatur area of North Alabama and knocked out power for about 10 days here directly.
And so I didn’t get married and instead went on my honeymoon and then came back and got married later because, well, there was not power for food and my wife’s dress was locked in the electronic safe and all that kind of good stuff. And the fast forward version of this is that in response to that, a lot of local leaders were trying to figure out how we could make sure something like this never happened again, especially with how much space and missile defense and military activity was going on in the area. And so I got involved with some local efforts to try to rebuild our local community stronger and more resilient and honestly just kind of fell in love with it. And so took the first opportunity I had to go from volunteer to real big boy work and get paid to do something like this. And the rest is history.
And then I’ve been on it ever since.

John Farrell:
So I want to jump in then to this new work that you’ve done and specifically what it means for people. By now, everyone across the United States knows electric bills have been rising significantly. Some folks have even called it an affordability crisis. So let’s get right to the heart of this. What role are utility profits playing in the high bills that consumers are paying for electricity?

Daniel Tait:
They’re playing a massive role. I mean, there are lots of factors that go into people’s electric bill and how high they are. We often hear about things like fuel cost and infrastructure that needs to be built. And to be clear, those all are real things. They are legitimate drivers and can make your bill more unaffordable. But especially if you have an investor owned utility, a for- profit utility, the investments that it makes are eligible for profit. If it’s trying to build a new power plant, then it doesn’t just cost a billion dollars to build a new power plant. It actually costs a billion dollars plus the financing cost plus the profit. And those things make what would be, say, a billion dollar power plant cost two billion or two and a half billion after the plant has been financed and the banks make their interest and the shareholders make their profit.
And so when we think about the system that we currently have, utilities are monopolies. In most areas of the country, you can’t leave, you can’t choose a competitor. And every single dollar of profit is kind of baked in by regulators. And so it’s not market discipline or a market issue per se. It’s a return that’s extracted from captive customers and it’s added to every single investment. So when you talk about profits, we’ll talk a little bit later. I’m sure about how much of your bill’s really going towards profit, but it makes everything that we’re trying to do more expensive. And so when this balance gets out of whack, it’s not just that profits are high, but that investments that we do need to make become even more expensive than they otherwise would be.

John Farrell:
So you have a terrific report, which I definitely recommend listeners read called Paying For Their Profits. You use the public financial documents of utility companies to document their profit margins. I was hoping you could kind of get right to this here. Can you give me a sense of the scale of this issue? So of every dollar I pay on my electric bill, how much is going to those utility shareholders for profit and how has that been changing in recent years?

Daniel Tait:
Yeah, it’s actually going up. So let’s step back and say, where is it at right now? Where is it going and how does that compare? So we looked at data from 2021 through 2025. Not all utilities have reported their 2025 data, but all 110 that we looked at, every investor owned operating company in America had 2021 through 2024. And in that data, we basically found that about 13 cents of every dollar, so about 13% of the average bill, was going towards profit. In the 2025 data that we did have, it was about 15%. So it looks like the profit percentages are increasing this past year. We’ll know more when we get the full year of data, but so far it does not look promising for customers.
And a couple of things to keep in mind there. This is just kind of median, middle of the road. So there are, of course, utilities that are not charging as much as 15 cents of every dollar or 15%, but there are of course utilities that are substantially higher than that. So a couple of examples there would be Florida Power and Light, Georgia Power, some investor owned utilities in the Southeast, where we’re looking at 20%, almost 30% of a bill that is going towards profits. And depending on where you are in the country, it can be a massive, massive part of your bill. This data is public, like you mentioned, it’s available already. Utilities report it both to Wall Street in their earnings calls and their earnings reports, as well as through Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC, Form one. So we tried to pull data from either of those where we could get it and compile all that together to figure out, okay, how much of an average bill is going to profit and then break that down by utility. And that’s where this profit tracker was born.

John Farrell:
You kind of previewed this already, but I guess I just want to emphasize this by asking it two of you again. Is there anything I can do as a consumer if I’m feeling frustrated about this? I mean, it sounds like I can’t shop around to get a better deal, unfortunately.

Daniel Tait:
That’s right. I mean, ultimately, the only thing that you have the ability to do depending on where you live is make your voice heard through the political process. Most of the regulators in America are either appointed by a governor or they are elected by the people. And so you’ll need to know in your state which is the case, and you can either vote for people who want to do something different than what’s currently being done, or you can make your voice heard to say the governor who would be responsible for appointing those individuals at a public utility commission or a public service commission. Like I said, most of the United States does not have retail choice where you can just kind of pick your supplier. It’s left up to regulators to make that decision. And so that’s really where your choice comes from is are with those regulators to make your voice heard there.

John Farrell:
That actually gets me to a very in the weeds question, I wanted to follow up with even in the states that have retail choice, usually the distribution utility, the one that actually delivers the electricity on the poles and wires is still a monopoly. Does the analysis that you have look at utilities like that that are sort of wires only utilities, or were you mostly looking at the vertically integrated ones that have the power plants, the wires, and the retail customers?

Daniel Tait:
It’s a great question, John. We actually looked at all operating investor owned utility companies in America, but there’s something really important in the data that listeners need to be aware of. So if you have a vertically integrated utility, say Georgia Power or Florida Power and Light that we use as examples earlier, that means they own generation, transmission, and the distribution grid and sell to customers. So when we look at their profit, that is kind of a total profit all the way up and down that value chain, if you will, from start to finish. Not all of the utilities that we looked at in this study actually operate that way, not just in places that people might think of like Texas, but think of PJM or maybe parts of MISO where your local utility is just a distribution utility and there are other generators and suppliers out there in the market.
Unfortunately, our tool does not capture the profit from those other third parties. Part of it is a data problem that those are often private companies and we simply don’t have access to the detailed financials that many utilities are required to report in order to tell you what your kind of full profit is.
So let me give you a good example. Say you are a ComEd customer, you might look at your profit on our tracker and go, “Wow, this seems a little bit low,” but keep in mind that that is just the profit to the distribution side. There’s actually a lot more profit built into your bill from the generation suppliers and stuff like that that we are unable to capture. So think about it if you’re in one of those areas where it’s restructured or quote unquote deregulated, that what you’re seeing in our tool may really just be a floor of profit and that the likelihood of your profit being higher is almost certain.

John Farrell:
That’s rather disturbing actually to think about. So even when you talk about the median number, it may still be sort of understating what the actual sort of profit take of the whole suite of companies is that are involved in delivering your electricity. If you are, say, a Northern Illinois customer of ComEd, your retail choice provider, should you have exercised that choice, their profits are hidden from the data that’s being shared here.

Daniel Tait:
Yeah. We’re only able to pull data from those that are publicly accessible. So if they don’t file something with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission, unfortunately, there’s not a way for us to be able to look at that data or understand their revenue and their profits and stuff like that. So we do the best that we can and wanted to make the data available with what’s public and make sure that people understand that it’s already disturbing with the data that we have now of how much profit is in the system and it’s likely much worse than we’re able to currently show.

John Farrell:
So one of the things that sort of boggles my mind about this is the nature of the utility business and these utilities having a monopoly is that the public is supposed to have some control over how much money utilities make because they’re state supervised monopolies. That’s the trade off, if you will, that was made over a hundred years ago and structuring our electricity system. So why is it that utility companies have such high profit margins and why aren’t the state regulatory agencies that are supposed to keep profits in check really doing their jobs?

Daniel Tait:
I have a lot of thoughts on that, as you might suspect. But before I get into some of those, one thing that you said that I wanted to make sure that I hit on that I failed to in your last question was, how does this compare to other industries? You mentioned these are usually regulated monopolies and many other sectors of the economy think of, especially those that are necessities like groceries, they’re operating on single digit profit margins, whereas what we’re looking at here are double digit and that’s being conservative. So not only is it not a competitive sector of the economy where you have no choice, but it’s a necessity, right? So it’s kind of a double whammy there.
Now to your specific question of like, well, why is it that utility regulators are frankly not doing their jobs when it comes to keeping this in check? I think there’s a few things for people to know, and I’m sure it won’t be a shock to many of your listeners that utilities are among the most politically active industries in any given state. When you think about who has the most lobbyist, who spends the most money on the political process and almost every state in America, you will find that your investor owned utility is either number one or really close. These are usually some of the most politically active entities at the state level. They’re spending very heavily on lobbying, on the rate cases to set where all these things are being determined. If there are appointments, then the utilities are often very active in lobbying the governor for that or making sure that there are campaign contributions and knowing where the bread is buttered.
A second thing that I like to call out is that, unfortunately, the rate case process in terms of what the rates are, what the allowable profit is going to be is a long and technical resource intensive process. Maybe it’s arcane by design, I don’t know, but it is very hard for regular people to intervene or to be a part of that process compared to the utilities who have effectively unlimited resources and just an army of consultants and lawyers. Rate payer advocates don’t have that often and regular people don’t have that. Regular intervenors don’t have that. And so there’s a really big mismatch of resources between what the utility can bring to bear in a rate case versus what the regular people or consumer advocate can. And so that kind of structural issue really aligns with the utility getting what it wants at the end of the day. So unfortunately, that’s kind of the way that it goes down. Money and politics is very important and very prominent in all things in our society and utilities are no different.

John Farrell:
I think it’s worth to point out what you said about rate cases, and you were saying how it’s hard to participate as an ordinary person. I just have a funny anecdote. ILSR normally does not do rate cases in part because we don’t have an attorney on staff or the budget to hire an attorney to represent us. But I remember I once filed an interest in participating, mostly just so I could kind of follow along more closely with the detailed filings that the different parties were submitting. And I was denied even as… We’re an expert group that often does participate in regulatory proceedings. We were denied because our perspective wasn’t unique enough from the others that were already participating in the rate case, that there was already a consumer advocate or the office of the attorney general. There were already some other groups participating and they just basically said like, “No, you’re not allowed.” Apparently we’ve got enough opinions already in here, but the profit margins for my utilities still seem pretty high.

Daniel Tait:
And one thing that really makes my blood boil a little bit is that the utilities are going to spend millions and millions of dollars in cost to go before the commission and ask for more of your money. And guess where they get all the money to ask for more money? They also get to charge you for all that. I mean, in most places in America, regular customers are paying the costs for the lawyers and all of the apparatus to ask for more money from regulators, but that doesn’t happen on the other side. So it’s just an entire structural imbalance that is made to give the utilities basically everything that they want.

John Farrell:
It’s also crazy too. It’s not just groups like mine that would have to come up with the money to contest in the rate case, but even public utilities commissions have limited budgets, limited staff, et cetera. It really is only the utility who is pulling money from the sort of unlimited pool of its thousands, if not millions of customers that has all the money it wants in order to ask for as much profit as it wants. It’s pretty insane.

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John Farrell:
We are going to take a short break. When we come back, I ask Daniel to explain the complex relationship between profit margins and utility return on equity, the big financial consequences of failing to act now, and the many ways states can address this pressing problem. You’re listening to a Local Energy Rules podcast with Daniel Tait, research and communications director for the Energy and Policy Institute.
Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. We’re so glad you’re here. If you like what you’ve heard, please help other folks find us by giving the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, five stars if you think we’ve earned it. As a bonus, I’ll gladly read your review aloud on the show if it includes an energy related joke or pun. Now back to the program.

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John Farrell:
So I want to talk a little about one of the things that you released with your report was a very cool interactive feature where a user can go put in the name of their utility and find out how much of their bill goes to utility profits. So you gave some examples of like Florida Power and Light, Georgia Power. I just want to emphasize for listeners, and we’ll have a link in the show notes, if you want to go check this out, you can go to the EPI website, you can put in your own utility, you can get the answer really quick and then kind of see the places that they pulled that information from.
So I went and did that. I plugged in my utility Xcel Energy here in Minnesota, and I saw that about 15 cents of every dollar I pay goes to profit. So it sounds like kind of in the middle, even though as you mentioned, a lot of utilities take as much as double that. I thought it was interesting, and this actually was sort of a helpful contrast then to sort of explain where these numbers are coming from. So ILSR also just released a similar calculator. So in that one you put in your state and about how much you pay out for an electric bill. And for me, what it showed was about five of those 15 cents that I’m paying for utility profits are excessive, which means that on an annual basis, my bills live much as $150 higher than it ought to be per year.
So could you explain the difference between the EPI research that looks at profit margins, as you did in your report, and then the ILSR tool is based on return on equity, which is sort of the underlying metric that we used and is what utility commissions are setting. Could you talk a little bit about that difference because I think it also might help people understand the role that the regulator is playing in reaching to these numbers.

Daniel Tait:
I’ll try my best, John, and you should definitely correct me if I inadvertently misinterpret or misstate something.

John Farrell:
We’ll stumble through it together. Hopefully one of us can get it right.

Daniel Tait:
I’ll just say at a high level, I think that both of what we’re trying to do at EPI and what y’all are doing at ILSR is a little bit different flavor, but at the end of the day are about a similar issue and kind of pointing to the same problem in a little bit different way that essentially the profits are too high. These are independent methodologies or kind of different ways to get there, but they’re kind of corroborating each other is the way I look at it, not a contradiction in the sense that they’re showing that there’s a lot of profit in the system. And then what your calculator is doing is, okay, well, what would it be like if some of that excess fat, if you will, were cut out of the system? What does that really translate to in terms of dollars back in people’s pockets?
And so our calculator looks at net income for the entire utility and revenue for the entire utility. So in your case for Xcel, I made a certain number of billion dollars that year and it kept certain number of billion dollars in profit and then it’s a very simple division, right? Net income divided by revenue, there was a certain percentage, in your case about 15, and that’s how much at the end of that year they kept as profit. Whereas what you’re looking at with the calculator that y’all put together, and frankly, most public service commissions are looking at something called return on equity, which is a key marker of how utilities determine how much profit they get to keep. But as that is calculated, that has to be translated to a dollar figure on the bill or as part of someone’s rate. And that’s what we’re trying to capture with our calculator is how do those ROE decisions and the investment decisions that a utility makes add up over time?
Because a really key thing that I think a lot of people miss is that return on equity is extraordinarily important, of course, but it’s not a one-time thing. So if I go back to my example of a billion dollar power plant, the utility gets to charge the return on equity, say it’s 10%, on the billion dollars in year one, and then in year two, that plant depreciates a little bit in value and they charge a return on equity to the remaining plant balance again. So it’s how you end up at the end of a 30 year period, similar to how you would in a home mortgage, paying financing and investors for practically and usually more than the entire power plant costs, right? So you can make an ROE decision in a docket of a regulator can, but when those decisions are applied to real world investments year after year after year, they add up and they balloon into this system where a massive chunk of your bill is actually going to profit. And that’s what our calculator is trying to calculate.

John Farrell:
I love your example of the mortgage. I also just want to note that in the report, I can’t remember on what page it is. And so there was a good paragraph or two helping to explain sort of the difference between our two, not intentionally displaying the difference between ILSR and EPI’s research, but kind of explaining how the return on equity ends up factoring into the profits. So in addition to what you said about the mortgage, which by the way, I think is a great example here because we are talking about a return on equity that’s close to 10% for most utilities. So just imagine if you’re out buying a home. Your mortgage interest rate right now might be like 6%. And that’s more in the ballpark of what would happen if it was a publicly owned utility or if the profits for utilities were appropriate. We’re talking about buying a house with a 10% interest rate and you can understand how that changes your monthly payment and therefore how big of an impact it’s making on your monthly electric bill.

Daniel Tait:
Exactly. And if you look at some larger utilities, right, I’ve done some math for utilities like Alabama Power and Georgia Power. Just a 1% change in the return on equity can equal hundreds of millions of dollars in profit every year. And so it’s important to recognize not just how important ROE is, but how even pretty minor changes, I mean, people might think that taking your home mortgage from 6% to 5%, yes, I’m going to save some money, but when we’re talking about a utility with hundreds of billions of dollars of asset, that 1% point change can be massive in terms of how much profit the utility is either allowed to collect or that customers could save if it were done a more fair way.

John Farrell:
Which also highlights another issue, I think, and this was covered in the report and I thought was a really helpful explanation of how a profit margin percentage, say for Florida Power and Light can be over 20% when their ROE, their return on equity is set by regulators at 10%. It’s partly how much investment have they put in, how much of that remaining value is on the power plants that they built. So if utilities are building a lot of stuff and earning that much on all of it, it’s compounding. It’s not just compounding over 20, 30, 40 years, but it’s also compounding based on how much investment they’re making. And that gets to some of the other issues here, which we’re not going to get into in much more detail. But if utilities decide, hey, instead of meeting our goal for power generation or the power needs of customers by investing in energy efficiency on which we don’t make money, and instead we want to build a power plant, we can juice that profit margin by basically finding more and more ways to earn that return on equity on things by making bigger and bigger investments.

Daniel Tait:
That’s right. And there’s actually been some really interesting testimony that I’ve read over the last few years from consumer advocates arguing that utilities are indeed making billions of dollars worth of investments into the transmission system and the distribution system for very little improvement in the actual reliability of the system. And a specific example with Georgia and Georgia Power comes to mind there with that testimony. But I think it’s important to note that because of the way that utilities are incentivized in this model, they’re always, usually I should say, but almost always looking for investments that earn a rate of return. And if there are things that simply don’t earn a rate of return, and those things could be like vegetation management or maybe that your energy efficiency programs in your jurisdiction are not eligible for profit, those things are not going to be viewed by the utility as a profit making venture. And so they’re usually deprioritized.

John Farrell:
Clearly, we could all be charged a lot less for electricity. It seems like we could also be making investments with those excess profits, big profit margin, into things that actually improve the electric grid to help with rising demand, to build resiliency in the face of extreme weather. What else could we be doing with that money?

Daniel Tait:
A lot. I mean, not just within the energy sector, of course, but if you think about how much you hear about and is true in a world of an affordability challenge, what regular customers would be doing with that money when you have people that are having to choose between food and medicine or keeping the lights on, I mean, that starts to have a massive ripple effect through the broader economy. But just keeping the argument around what could we be doing, I think it’s important for folks to understand that the utilities will often put forward this argument that we need these high levels of returns in order to attract capital for grid investment. And it’s really kind of a false trade off in the sense that utilities are recovering their CapEx, their capital expenditures, through rates, and they earn a return on that. And having lower profits doesn’t magically mean that people are not going to invest in utilities.
Again, look at other sectors of the economy where profits are a lot lower than they are already in the utility industry. And I would argue with much more risk than the utility industry where you have captive customers, you still see tons of investment in those industries. So shareholders might, yes, earn a little bit less money, but that doesn’t mean that there will be no investment in the future history of the utility industry. And I hate to give a pretty bad example here, but there have been disasters, really bad disasters happen in the utility industry in the past. And even things like that that can drive someone like say PG&E to bankruptcy has not stopped their ability to raise capital from private markets in order to fund what they are trying to do with their grid. So it takes a lot to try to convince me of this idea that capital will just dry up when we can look at actual bankruptcies and financial troubles and that has not slowed them down at all.
And so I think it’s important to note that, but also that, yeah, we do need to build stuff. We are going to need power plants. We’re going to need transmission lines. And so the real question is not whether or not we should stop building. I don’t think anyone’s making a serious argument for that, but what is a fair and reasonable cost to customers for doing that? And I think A, when there’s a huge affordability challenge right now, and B, when we have frankly, a massive amount of construction that’s going to be necessary, that tells us that now is the time that we have to address this because as we’re making those investments, if we don’t get things like return on equity and profit done well, done right, then we are simply condemning people to decades of excess profits in the system and it’s going to make it that much worse moving forward.
So I think it’s extremely important to solve this problem to help people, but also to get it right, especially at the early stages of making these multi-decade investments that will be with us and our children for a long time.

John Farrell:
So it’s clear that the bottom line is return on equity is driving utility profits and higher rate payer bills. All of these things seem to be higher than they need to be. So what can we do about excessive utility profits? What does your report, what does your research suggest?

Daniel Tait:
Yeah, we put forward a few ideas or things that we have seen other states and other regulators around the country start to talk about, start to address. We’ll say upfront the EPI, and we do not say or give specific examples of this is the right way or the only way to do it because that’s simply not true. Every area of the country, every state, every locality may have a different flavor or a way that they want to try to attack this problem. But I think that most of the solutions kind of fit into a few buckets. And one of course is lowering the amount of profit in the system. And that can be through things like lowering the return on equity or better scrutinizing what is actually eligible to earn a return on equity in the first place. So kind of right sizing those investments and right sizing return on equity. Of course, there are other things that address this power imbalance that we talked about earlier in the podcast around how much money the utilities have in order to be able to fund their advocacy at the Public Service Commission for a rate case or for their ROE versus good funding and healthy funding levels for rate payer advocates, attorney generals, other interveners, things like that.
And then this report and what we try to do is increase the transparency of what’s happening around the country. I feel like a lot of this is kind of arcane and wonky. And even amongst public utility commissioners, kind of a level removed from the real impact that these decisions have on regular people. And so I feel like that was a huge driver for why we wanted to do this report to be able to kind of break down, okay, yeah, we’re all talking about return on equity and these financial metrics, but what does that really mean when we talk about somebody’s bill and how can we judge our decisions as a public utility commission against those types of metrics of our impact to regular customers? So that was another big motivator and another thing that can be done at the state and local level is in helping to increase that transparency as well.

John Farrell:
Do you have any particular place that you have seen? And I realize this wasn’t the scope of your report necessarily, but are there any state or regulatory commission that has taken an action like what you’re recommending where you think, oh, this is a good example that I might give people to say, if you want to do something, look at what South Dakota did or something like that.

Daniel Tait:
It’s a good question. We’ve seen a few states introduce bills that will lower return on equity or start to address some of these problems. The American Economic Liberties Project has a model bill that they’ve put out and we link that in our report. Again, that kind of gives some framework that jurisdictions or states around the country can edit from. Seen some ROE bills in New York, I believe it was. There’s been some movement for work in Florida that I think ultimately has died for this session. So I’ve noticed that where things are being tried is not what you might think in terms of political lens or partisan lean. This is kind of a widespread problem that people are reckoning with all over the country, both in red states and in blue states. And I will say that something that we also talk a little bit about in report, but again, as devils in the details are things like performance based rate making, how much do you and what do you incentivize as the public utility commission to get from your utility versus what do you penalize?
And so I think people are probably well aware of Hawaii’s been pretty out there moving forward with those types of mechanisms. And so other states have looked at some, but there’s a variety of things that people can do. I think the encouraging part to me to hopefully lead with some hope is that we do see a lot of states trying to tackle or starting to tackle some of these problems. And that can be ROE bills, it can be public finance bills, performance-based rate making. There’s just so many different ways to solve the problem. But the good news is we are seeing states all across the country left and right red, blue that are starting to look heavily at these solutions.

John Farrell:
Well, Daniel, thank you so much to you and your colleagues for doing this research and helping us better understand where utility profits are and where they’re coming from and for giving us some sense of the solution space where we can start to address it. It’s terrific. And I really appreciate you coming on the podcast to talk about it.

Daniel Tait:
Thanks for having me, John.

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John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Daniel Tait, Research and Communications Director for the Energy and Policy Institute. On the show page, look for links to Paying For Their Profits and to the interactive feature on the EPI website where you can see how much of your bill goes to utility profits. We’ll also have links to the calculator from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which explains how much extra you pay to pad shareholder profits because your state’s utility regulators have failed to hold the line. For more on utility accountability, check out other research projects from EPI and reports like Upcharge on the ILSR website. Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. Tune back into local energy rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local and thanks for listening.