Apparently utility companies in Louisiana have taken a hard look at the concept of energy efficiency and discovered a horrifying problem: if people use less electricity, the utility companies might make less money. Yeah, no shit.
Louisiana has been trying to run programs that help homeowners become more energy efficient, things like better insulation, more efficient appliances, and other improvements that cut how much electricity a home needs. Pretty normal stuff. The whole point is to get people using less power and paying lower electric bills, and the utilities, it turns out, have protection against the horrible financial catastrophe of their customers actually pulling that off.
Ever since Louisiana’s energy efficiency programs started in 2013, the state’s big utilities have been allowed to collect something called a “Lost Contribution to Fixed Costs.” In 2024 the state tried to replace those programs with a statewide one run by an independent administrator, which would have ended that charge. The utilities argued against it, and in 2025 the Public Service Commission killed the plan and went back to the old utility-run programs. The rules the commission adopted in January 2026 still say utilities “shall be permitted to recover” it.
Boil their argument down to normal English and it goes something like this: if these programs cause customers to use less electricity, the utilities lose revenue, so they get a mechanism that recovers some of that lost money through customer rates. Put more simply, you used less electricity, so now we’d like to charge you because you used less electricity.
What the fuck kind of business model is that?
Imagine Walmart saying, “Jason, we noticed you only bought $80 worth of groceries this week instead of your usual $120, so here’s a $40 lost-revenue adjustment.” Or Exxon sending you a bill because you bought a more fuel-efficient car and aren’t buying as much gasoline anymore. Or you take your car in for an oil change and they slap another twenty bucks on the bill because your car didn’t need as much oil as they were hoping to sell you. You’d laugh in their face, since that isn’t how selling shit works. If your customers use less of your product, you make less money, and anybody calling that some unfair flaw in capitalism has it backwards, because that’s exactly how capitalism is supposed to work. You aren’t entitled to the money I might have spent with you in some alternate universe where I was more wasteful.
And yet somehow, once you wrap the same ridiculous idea in utility regulations and rate cases and commission proceedings, plus enough bureaucratic language to tranquilize a horse, everybody’s supposed to nod along as if it made one bit more sense than the Walmart version, which it doesn’t.
What pisses me off most, I think, is the attitude underneath it. These companies apparently believe they’re owed their expected revenue, like at some point that number quit being money they hoped to earn and became money they’re entitled to receive. If I make my house more efficient and conserve electricity, and it costs less to serve me as a result, that should count as a win. Instead the response seems to be, “Congratulations on saving money. Now give us the money anyway.” But they don’t get to charge me for electricity I didn’t use, any more than Exxon gets to invoice me for gasoline I didn’t buy.
