Commentary
Let us begin with a fact and a moral judgment delivered together: a family in Tulsa, Oklahoma received an electric bill for $1,373 in the summer heat, and the power company cut her off when she could not pay it. That is not a weather story. That is a story about who holds power over ordinary life in this republic, and what they choose to do with it.
Electricity in the summer heat is not a luxury. Fans and air conditioners running nonstop are not signs of extravagance; they are the minimal machinery of survival when temperatures climb. We do not require a public health lecture to understand this. We require only the common sense that has always animated the best American governance: that certain goods, when they become indispensable to life, carry a public obligation that the market alone cannot satisfy. The men who built the rural electrification lines across this country understood that. They understood that leaving essential infrastructure to the unmediated profit motive would leave whole communities in the dark, and they were right. We appear to be learning that lesson again, this time in the sweltering heat of an Oklahoma summer, one disconnection notice at a time.
The soaring price of electricity is hitting people who cannot absorb the blow. In Tulsa, residents are having their power cut when bills go unpaid, and they are not alone in that predicament. This is precisely the situation that utility regulation was designed to prevent. A regulated utility is not a free-market actor; it is a private company operating under a public franchise, granted a monopoly in exchange for obligations that include fair pricing, service continuity, and protection of customers who fall into temporary hardship. When rates climb to the point where working families receive bills north of a thousand dollars for a single month, the regulatory compact has broken down. The question worth asking is not whether families should pay their bills. Of course they should. The question is whether the regulatory bodies charged with overseeing these monopolies have done their jobs, or whether they have quietly allowed the balance of power to tip so far toward the utility and its shareholders that the customer has no real recourse at all.
There is a governance failure embedded in every disconnection notice sent to a family that simply cannot keep up with soaring summer rates. State utility commissions exist for exactly this moment. They have the authority to require moratoriums on disconnections during extreme heat events, to mandate affordable payment plans, to scrutinize rate increases before they land on customers, and to demand that utilities exhaust every alternative before they cut a family’s power in August. If those tools are not being used, the failure belongs to the commission and to the elected officials who appoint its members and set its mandate. Utility regulation is a political choice, and so is the decision to let it atrophy.
The federal dimension matters here as well. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program exists to buffer exactly this kind of crisis, and its adequacy is a direct function of congressional will. When electric bills spike in a heat emergency and families in Tulsa are losing service, the question of whether that program is funded at a level equal to the need is a live political question, not a bureaucratic footnote. The same applies to the broader question of energy infrastructure investment. A grid that cannot deliver affordable power during peak demand is a grid that has been underbuilt and underregulated, and the repair of it is a public responsibility. Private capital will not solve a market failure it is profiting from.
There is something particularly galling about the way this kind of crisis tends to be framed as an unfortunate consequence of circumstances beyond anyone’s control, the heat, the demand, the market. Markets do not set monopoly rates. Regulators and legislators do, or they abdicate that duty and let the utility do it for them. The woman who received a $1,373 bill did not negotiate against a competitor. She paid what she was charged by a company with no rival, overseen by a commission whose diligence deserves scrutiny, in a state whose legislature sets the terms of that oversight. Every one of those is a human decision made by accountable officials, and every one of them can be made differently.
This country has chosen before to assert that the ordinary citizen deserves protection from the full force of unaccountable private power, particularly when that power controls something as fundamental as light and heat. It can choose that again. Oklahoma families baking in the summer heat and opening four-figure electric bills are not asking for charity; they are asking for a regulatory system that remembers whose interests it was built to serve. The answer to that question is not the shareholder. It never was.