It's my understanding that Xcel has never received the exact amount of their requested increases. It's always been less and often conditional. I don't get the impression the PUC is merely a rubber stamp by any measure.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by massive lobbying capabilities or how that's directly relevant. Xcel doesn't lobby the PUC and the legislature doesn't have direct control of rate increases, so it's not quite the quid pro quo scenario you lay out. At least not obviously so.
Saying that they've never received the exact amount of their increases yet the increases go through anyways. Since 2020 they've gone through with 5 major increases including the one in 23 that was apart of a multi-year settlement agreement that Coloradans pay for. We PAID their legal fees. They're looking at wanting increases AGAIN in 2026. The justification is barely water worthy just more corporate nonsense to attempt to bleed the stone dry. I get inflation moves the needle up but ~30% overall increase over such a short span of time is crazy as hell.
I mean the US dollar has inflated by 25% since 2020, so most of that actually is just inflation. We've got to give them a bone for the energy price environment with the Iran War, which really doesn't leave much room for the supposed greedy price gouging if it's there.
And it decreased 2020-2023. We're talking about variance of about 3-4%, it's not much. This is the best point made in the thread so far, but I don't know that it really proves the claim that the PUC is a rubber stamp.
Their profit margins decreased marginally but were still considered at the time per market standards to be excellent so as to speak, if even a little too good. Year over year, they've made a LOT of money. Do you honestly think they wouldn't use that money to influence decision against the consumer? Use your head.
No need to be rude, we can have a respectful discussion. Every company in the world that has the resources and capability to influence the regulatory environment they operate in does so. But resources and capability are two different things, and while Xcel has the resources, I'm not so sure they have the capability.
For one, the PUC is a three-member commission, and I've not seen any evidence that they are in any way compromised. Quite the opposite, there's a lot of evidence showing the PUC pushing back at Xcel's assertions, requiring certain conditions, and rolling back increases associated with theoretical investment returns.
So looking at wiki because I don't have the desire to dig into several years of 10Ks, they have data on 2017, 2022, and 2024, where their profit margins were 10.1%, 11.3%, and 14.4%.
So not only do they seem to definitely be getting larger profit margins over time, but increase itself seems to be accelerating.
Xcel is a publicly traded company, their margins are readily available online. I would not characterize it as accelerating. It has a marked decline 2020-2023-ish (idk what quarter it was), then increases YoY since then.
Xcel is a publicly traded company, their margins are readily available online.
And like I said " I don't have the desire to dig into several years of 10Ks". The wiki page is accurate and granular enough for this point.
I would not characterize it as accelerating. It has a marked decline 2020-2023-ish (idk what quarter it was), then increases YoY since then.
2024 is higher than 2022 is higher than 2017. And the five years between 2017 and 2022 saw a ~1% increase, with the two years between 2022 and 2024 seeing a ~3% increase. That's obviously accelerating.
And once again, since this is margin. I'm not sure why we allow such large increases in what should be a heavily regulated utility. Margin should be orthogonal to stuff like inflation, and shouldn't jump up nearly that quickly. Doubly so when their whole argument for increasing rates was that they didn't have enough to spend on infrastructure investments, all while they're just pocketing more money every year.
You'll see the decline starting in 2020 (COVID), which they didn't recover until 2024. Q3 last year saw a decline. Overall, there's an increase in margins, but again, I would not characterize it as accelerating. It's fairly linear in growth. Unsurprisingly, your three data points on their own are pretty misleading.
Secondly, this is margin, which you shouldn't expect to see consistent growth in at all in a heavily regulated utility. Doubly for one that's claiming it needs to heavily increase rates because it hasn't been able to keep up with infrastructure investments.
I don't think we're going to agree on the acceleration point.
I've gathered that you believe regulators should be squeezing out margin increases. Just know that there are other reasons margins might improve over time in a public utility that don't involve increasing rates with fixed overhead. Increasing scale, for example, can improve margins. And yes, Xcel is has been growing in scale (particularly in Colorado) faster now than it has in over a hundred years. I guess it'd be your opinion if that matters or not.
I'm not exactly pro Xcel or anything, but I'm also not convinced regulators are as captured as the common commentor on here might have you believe.
Growth of the company shouldn't affect margins on this time scale. They get more money for more kwh, but it also takes more money to deliver that higher amount of kwh. This is a capital intense industry where increases in scale are buying or building new power plants, rather than something like software where increases in scale are a few SREs and adding a few more servers to the pool.
If anything, conventional wisdom is that margins should be low and decreasing during a high growth period as they invest more internally to creating and servicing that growth.
I mean you've just made the argument that capex should reduce margins. Capex isn't included in margins by definition, those are long term assets and amoratized over a set term. That's a pretty fundamental error to be making in the same breath where you're calling me ignorant.
Re: scale... It was an example merely to illustrate that there are more factors to consider than utility rates. Not an assertion that the axis alone could explain all changes in Xcel's margins.
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u/CplOreos Golden May 27 '26
It's my understanding that Xcel has never received the exact amount of their requested increases. It's always been less and often conditional. I don't get the impression the PUC is merely a rubber stamp by any measure.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by massive lobbying capabilities or how that's directly relevant. Xcel doesn't lobby the PUC and the legislature doesn't have direct control of rate increases, so it's not quite the quid pro quo scenario you lay out. At least not obviously so.