Although I knew it could happen any day, it still surprised me when Tucson Electric Power (TEP) shut off the electricity to my home. It was late January 2025. I could not afford my electric bill, but I had qualified for assistance through the federally funded Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). I believed that the Community and Workforce Development department, responsible for administering LIHEAP, was primed to pay the bill. I had applied for (and was granted) assistance the previous summer and the process was only supposed to take up to a month.
However, it was now six months later, and something was keeping the bill from getting paid. Caseworkers kept telling me that my application was pending.
A company representative I spoke with for this story told me that my company file shows the utility company and the agency called each other several times, but no progress was made on paying my bill.
And so, on Jan. 30, 2025, the lights went out. One moment I was writing an email to a supervising editor for my job as a low-wage journalist, and the next moment, my power was gone.
TEP sent me—and thousands of other low-income Tucson residents—a shutoff notice with a termination date of five days before Christmas.
I was caught between delayed energy assistance and corporate profits. While my delay seems to have been an isolated bureaucratic snafu, with that many shutoffs issued, it was clear that assistance was already not reaching everyone who needed it. (Disbursal information, released through a public data request, shows that the county LIHEAP agency averaged payouts within 23 days in 2024, totaling nearly $20 million in assistance since October 2022.) If federal funding for LIHEAP is cut—as the Trump administration attempted last year—or continues to face delays and uncertainties, more people will likely end up in the position my neighbors and I were in.
Seeing your breath inside your house is unsettling. It doesn’t feel natural; the idea of a home includes being warm. On top of that, I felt ashamed. I only let my closest friends know I was without power. It helped that they, too, were low-income; generally, all poor people know how close they are to crises like this.
When my lights went out, I did not know there was already a local conflict brewing about who should own our electric power utility—the residents of Tucson or TEP.
Public vs. Private Power
In April 2026, TEP, which is a local subsidiary of a North American conglomerate that operates in Canada, the U.S., and the Caribbean, will reach the end of a 25-year franchise agreement with the city of Tucson that allows the company to build and maintain infrastructure and service within city limits. While TEP’s parent company raked in a reported $1.6 billion in profits in 2024, power bills for residents like me have been rising over the years. Now, residents are questioning whether the agreement should be renewed.
The Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), a state regulatory agency led by elected officials, has faced criticism for being “too cozy” with investor-driven companies like TEP, as well as accusations of repeatedly rubber-stamping the company’s proposed rate hikes on residents’ electricity bills. The commission approved a 6 percent rate increase for TEP in January 2021 and a 10 percent increase in August 2023, according to analysis by the Arizona Daily Star.
That analysis also found that TEP’s residential rates had increased as much from 2020 to 2023 as they had over the 22 years from 1998 to 2020. (In 2022, the commission’s Republican majority became more concentrated, shifting from 3–2 to 4–1.) TEP claimed that inflation and rising infrastructure costs were to blame, noting that the increases in its residential rates since 1998 amount to less than the average annual inflation rate. Nicole Garcia, spokesperson for the ACC, replied to a request to comment by citing a Feb. 17, 2025, press release quoting ACC chairman Nick Myers: “Utilities rarely, if ever, receive all of what they request in their rate case applications.”
The commission is currently considering TEP’s request for a nearly 14 percent rate hike. State Attorney General Kris Mayes, whose office intervened to oppose the measure, estimates that if TEP’s rate hike is approved, Tucson residents will likely pay an extra $19.43 per month for their electricity. “TEP’s proposal is blatant corporate greed plain and simple,” Mayes said at a hearing of the commission in February 2026. Mayes, who served on the commission from 2003 to 2011, enlisted Mark E. Ellis, a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, who testified to the ACC that TEP should be limited to a 4 percent rate hike.
Daniel Dempsey, executive director of Underground Arizona, points to the city of Mesa, Tucson’s neighbor to the north, as an example of how much Tucson stands to gain by transitioning to a publicly owned utility. Dempsey says Mesa relies on extra revenue generated by its public utilities to help fund the city’s general public services.
While my power was out, I went from working at home to working at a library or an internet cafe. Thinking about my dark house, I wondered, Do rising bills lead to more shutoffs? The place to look, it turns out, is the annual reports TEP is required to submit to the ACC. (These reports include data on how many residential shutoffs TEP conducts.)
Between 2021 and 2024, the number of households to which TEP disconnected power (after sending out notices) increased by 32 percent, from 9,767 to 12,914, according to the company’s annual reports. (Yet the number of residential customers only increased by just over 3 percent during this period.) In an email, a TEP spokesperson, Joseph Barrios, wrote that while TEP customers had faced unique economic challenges from the pandemic during this period, they had also “set new energy usage records”—specifically in 2021—that weren’t surpassed until 2025. Barrios did not respond to queries about current rate hikes or the potential for Tucson to switch to public power.
In September 2018, a 72-year-old Arizona woman died of heat exposure after Arizona Public Service, a for-profit energy company, cut her power after her payment toward a past-due bill fell just $51 short. The following year, the ACC banned most power companies, including TEP, from disconnecting people’s electricity during “extreme weather conditions.” Companies can pick one of two ways to comply: either choose to not carry out any shutoffs from June 1 through October 15 or not carry out any shutoffs when temperatures are forecast above 95 F or below 32 F. (Despite these limitations, TEP has shut off power to some residents every year since the 2019 ban, according to the company’s annual reports.) And since Arizona experiences “extreme weather conditions” year-round, some residents have died while their power was disconnected or out of service during months not covered by the moratorium on power shutoffs.
When TEP’s franchise agreement expires, Tucson voters and city council will decide—either through a popular vote or city council vote—whether to renew it for another 25 years. If the city doesn’t renew the agreement, it could instead buy infrastructure back from TEP and operate it as its own public utility.
In the fall of 2024, the all-Democrat city council hired consulting firm GDS Associates to study public versus private ownership of power utilities and to inform the public about costs, benefits, and potential pitfalls.
“With a publicly owned utility, you have better check[s] and balance[s] to protect the affordability for all people,” Councilmember Paul Cunningham says. “I think it’s a model that ends up being more equitable to everyone involved.”
Dozens of towns and cities in California, Florida, Massachusetts, and other states already have publicly controlled power. More than 55 million Americans living in 2,000 communities receive their electricity from public power utilities. In these areas, those who answer to concerns about price hikes and infrastructure maintenance are overseen by city councils or other public bodies instead of private power companies and the commissions that regulate them. Arizona has 30 public utilities (including several Indigenous tribal districts), with the oldest dating back to 1909, according to data provided by the American Public Power Association (APPA).
Since 1940, APPA has been advocating for municipalities to switch to publicly owned utilities. Ursula Schryver, APPA’s senior vice president of education, training, and events, explains the case for public power: “All the money is invested back into the community. [Public utilities] have higher reliability because the crews live and work in the community. They know the system—they’re keeping the power on for their family, too.” According to an APPA analysis of public data from the Energy Information Administration, public utilities consistently outperformed private utilities, delivering significantly fewer service interruption events and total minutes of service interruption.
Saving money has been the driving force behind municipalities switching to public power. In Kansas City, which has had a city-owned utility since 1901, city council unanimously voted down a September 2024 measure that would have sold the city-owned utility to a for-profit company, citing rate increases for residents. A public power feasibility study conducted for San Diego found that if the city bought the energy infrastructure assets of San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) for approximately $2 billion, residents would save up to 14 percent on their bills. (The city did not vote to purchase these assets, but it is still studying the idea.) Meanwhile, a coalition of officials, activists, and community groups has been campaigning for New York state to wrest control of the power utility that serves New York’s Hudson Valley, currently operated by Central Hudson Gas & Electric.
Back in Tucson, GDS Associates released its draft report on the feasibility of creating a public power utility in Tucson on April 22, 2025. The report suggested that there would be challenges, including likely pushback from TEP, but that the obstacles were “not insurmountable.” The projected upfront price tag for the project—$1.9 billion to $3.7 billion—far exceeded the previous estimate of at least $1 billion.
However, the study also projected that residents could expect significant savings on their electricity bills in the first 20 years following a public purchase: up to $241 per year in the first 5 years and as much as $1,077 per year by years 16–20.
A 2025 study by the American Economic Liberties Project found that “over the last three years, IOU [investor-owned utility] residential electricity rates have increased 49% more than inflation. In contrast, their publicly owned counterparts have increased 44% less than inflation.” The study also noted that some private utilities brought substantially higher costs. SDG&E, for example, raised residential rates by 78 percent between 2020 and 2023, while the cumulative inflation rate for those years was 17.7 percent.
‘Hostile Takeover’
In other areas, it has taken years for any proposals to convert to public utilities to be settled. TEP certainly does not want to give up supplying Tucson’s power. In 2024, when the city commissioned the study, a utility expert predicted that TEP would “not [be] going gently into that good night,” as reported by Tucson Agenda. And they were right.
TEP did not respond well to the report, declaring in a press release that it amounted to “false promises” and relied on “faulty assumptions that produce inaccurate results and conclusions, misleading city leaders about the prospects for a city takeover of TEP’s local energy grid.”
In the same press release, TEP President and CEO Susan Gray called the proposal for municipal-owned power a “hostile takeover.” “The study seems intent on driving a wedge between the City of Tucson and TEP at a time when we should be working together to address our city’s long-term needs,” she said.
Without power, I was essentially camping inside my home. At least rain wasn’t a problem, but staying warm was a challenge. Temperatures dropped to the high 30s, so I bundled up in socks and thermal wear, wrapped myself in blankets, and slept in a beanie. Not far from my house, an internet bar and café allowed me to charge critical devices: the laptop I relied on for work; the phone I needed to communicate with sources, friends, and family; the electric lantern I used to light my house at night.
I wanted to believe that the lower costs of a city-owned utility would make shutoffs like the one I experienced less common. Unfortunately, the data shows the opposite. A University of Colorado study found that investor-owned utilities have much lower disconnection rates than municipal utilities. The researchers surmised that “the public-facing nature of municipalization makes unpopular redistribution more visible (and hence provided at lower levels).” In fact, “some of the utilities with the highest disconnection rates … are many of the municipal utilities within the United States,” said Sanya Carley of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, in a 2025 interview on Resources Radio.
On the other hand, investor-owned utilities, with their larger profits, have the capacity to do more than they are. “Powerless in the United States,” a report commissioned by the Center for Biological Diversity, examined six investor-owned utilities and found that they had issued nearly 21 percent more shutoffs from January to September 2024 than in the same period in 2023. Redirecting a mere 1.4 percent of the more than $6.8 billion the companies distributed to shareholders in that time “could have covered the cost to prevent these shutoffs,” the report found.
Legal battles are likely ahead as the proposal for public power moves forward in Tucson.
The legal implications are part of the reason Cunningham, the city councilmember, believes that Tucson owning its own public utility isn’t a practical option right now, even though he supports it. He points out that the cost of buying back assets from TEP is still unclear. (Estimates have increased in the last year, and Cunningham tells me he now projects the price tag to be somewhere between $3 billion and $12 billion.) It would cost the city millions in court fees to settle the matter. TEP also has outstanding debt, Cunningham notes. “So, if we buy them out, we take on the debt.”
Instead, Cunningham is advocating for a third option: building a municipal utility from scratch to compete with TEP. In the coming weeks and months, Cunningham plans to present a possible pilot program to the council that involves neighborhood-scale battery-powered microgrids.
Meanwhile, the need for utility assistance is rising. According to the U.S. Census, nearly one-quarter of U.S. households could not afford to pay their energy bill in full in recent years. Andy Flagg, deputy director of Pima County’s Community and Workforce Development department, says that even though the Trump administration has proposed to put LIHEAP on the chopping block, he expects funding to level out. “I don’t think there’s a lot of appetite in Congress to zero out those funding sources,” he says.
I spent a week without electricity. After I called my city councilor’s district office for help, the county LIHEAP service provider and TEP finally connected, and my power was restored.
“Do you still not have power?” a friend asked a couple of nights later. I had forgotten to tell him the good news.
I responded, with a gleam in my eye: “They finally paid my bills—those deadbeats!” The room erupted in laughter. It was cathartic. For a moment, my shame disappeared.
Despite the potential difficulties with publicly owned utilities, I’d take my chances with them because my bills would likely be lower to start with. If nothing else, publicly owned utilities would eliminate the middle ground between residents like me and the entities that can disconnect power, as well as those who oversee them.
A drop in the bucket of investor profits is what keeps the lights on—or off. More can, and should, be done to keep people warm and comfortably housed.
About the Author
Comments