Electric and gas utilities routinely charge ratepayers for costs related to political advocacy, ads to burnish their brand, and even luxury perks for executives and employees, according to a recent report by the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute (EPI). Such expenses add up to millions of dollars paid by customers toward utilities’ efforts to raise prices and stall climate progress. While charging customers for lobbying is banned in federal and state laws, consumer advocates say that existing policies are nowhere near rigorous enough to hold utilities accountable.

In some states, that’s starting to change. In 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed the first comprehensive laws to prevent utilities from charging customers for lobbying, advertising, and other political influence activities. Customers in those states have already saved hundreds of thousands of dollars after regulators began enforcing the laws last year.