Public Power’s Affordability Edge Faces Its Hardest Test in Years
Key takeaways
- That concern, he noted, was once confined to certain areas.
- Affordability is where public power's case is strongest in the data, and where Corwin spent much of the conversation.
- If affordability is the headline, reliability is the quieter strength, and Corwin returned to it repeatedly as the thing utilities exist to deliver.
Public Power’s Affordability Edge Faces Its Hardest Test in Years Source: Envato Elements · POWER Magazine Aaron Larson Mon, June 29, 2026 at 8:28 PM GMT+7 10 min read For decades, the pitch for community-owned electric utilities has been simple enough to fit on a bill insert: lower rates, reliable service, and decisions made close to home. The numbers still back that up. What has changed, according to Scott Corwin, president and CEO of the American Public Power Association (APPA), is the difficulty of holding that ground."The thing that's really changed over the last couple years," Corwin said, speaking as a guest on The POWER Podcast, "is this increased focus nationally on resource adequacy, potential impacts to reliability, combined with affordability." He pointed to demand growth in some regions, generation coming offline in others, and the siting, permitting, and construction of new generation and transmission failing to keep pace with the demand curve. That concern, he noted, was once confined to certain areas. Now it stretches across nearly all of APPA's membership footprint.That membership is large and remarkably varied. APPA represents roughly 2,000 community-owned systems operating in every state except Hawaii, along with the five U.S. territories, ranging from big-city utilities to small rural districts. The 2026 Public Power Statistical Report, APPA's annual data supplement, counts 1,998 public power utilities serving more than 55 million Americans. Read alongside Corwin's interview, the report functions less as a victory lap than as a baseline—a measure of where the sector stands as the pressures he describes begin to take hold.
Affordability is where public power's case is strongest in the data, and where Corwin spent much of the conversation. He framed cost control as partly a matter of conventional discipline—planning, watching expenses, automation, and modernization—and partly a function of financing tools unique to not-for-profit utilities.Chief among them is tax-exempt financing, which Corwin called "critical" and a perennial advocacy priority for APPA. He also pointed to Elective Pay Tax Credits, which extended certain tax incentives to not-for-profit utilities that previously could not use them. That provision became law a couple of years ago but was "scaled back a little bit recently," he said, and APPA continues to press for Treasury rules that would make both tools more useful on longer deals. Beyond financing, Corwin argued, local control itself disciplines spending: when customers can show up at a council meeting, the pressure to balance reliability against rates is immediate and personal.The report puts figures behind the claim. In 2024, residential customers of public power utilities paid an average monthly bill of $123.78, compared with $139.42 for customers of investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and $149.18 for customers of cooperatives—bills roughly 13% and 21% lower, respectively. Setting aside customer charges and other fees, the report calculates that public power residential customers paid $16 less per month than IOU customers and $25 less than cooperative customers, which it tallies at $188 to $305 less over a year. In 35 of the 45 states with comparable rate data, public power utilities posted the lowest average residential rate.The affordability gap has also been widening in public power's favor. According to the APPA report, residential rates rose 25.7% nationally between 2020 and 2024, but the increase was driven largely by IOUs, whose residential rates climbed 27.2% over that span, against 11.7% for public power. One caveat is worth stating plainly, and APPA states it: because the Energy Information Administration (EIA) excludes utilities with less than 200,000 MWh in annual sales from detailed customer-class reporting, nearly three-quarters of public power utilities file a short form. APPA contends that fuller reporting "would only further favor public power," based on historical patterns—an assertion from the association rather than an established fact, though the reporting gap it describes is real.
If affordability is the headline, reliability is the quieter strength, and Corwin returned to it repeatedly as the thing utilities exist to deliver. The data supports the emphasis. Excluding major events such as hurricanes, public power customers experienced an average of 1.2 hours of outage duration in 2024, against 2.3 hours for IOU customers and 4.0 hours for cooperative customers, per the report's reading of EIA's System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) figures. Over the 2013–2024 period, public power customers averaged 72 minutes less outage time per year than IOU customers and 114 minutes less than cooperative customers, again outside major events.That track record is a useful asset precisely because the period ahead may test it. Corwin's concern about resource adequacy is, at bottom, a concern about reliability—about whether enough dispatchable capacity