Washington, D.C. — After the news that NextEra will attempt to acquire Dominion Energy, Congressman Eugene Vindman (Va.-07) — a founding member of the Congressional Lowering Utility Bills Caucus — introduced two pieces of legislation that would lower costs for families and hold utility companies accountable.
“Electricity bills are out of control in Virginia, and I am fighting to bring your monthly bills down,” said Vindman. “The Home Energy Affordability Act and the Utility Hikes Transparency Act are common sense laws that would limit rate changes to once per calendar year and ensure these companies cannot hide price increases from consumers. Working Virginians deserve these kinds of protections, and I’ll continue to fight to lower costs for them every day in Congress.”
The Home Energy Affordability Act would help protect consumers from repeated utility rate hikes by limiting electric utilities to one rate increase request every 365 days. This bill is based on a proposal that has received overwhelming support from constituents across Virginia’s Seventh District and would amend the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 to require states to consider policies restricting how often regulated electric utilities can seek rate increases.
The Utility Hikes Transparency Act would create the first comprehensive, machine-readable federal database of retail utility rate changes in the United States. The tracker would be updated quarterly which would include approved and effective electric and natural gas utility rate changes for investor-owned utilities, cooperatives, and municipally owned utilities nationwide.
BACKGROUND
Since January 2025, more than 111.5 million electric utility customers and nearly 55.5 million natural gas utility customers across the United States have faced approved or proposed utility cost increases totaling nearly $93 billion through state Public Utility Commission proceedings.
The database created by the Utility Hikes Transparency Act would include information such as the utility name and state, type of service, dollar and percentage change to the average residential monthly bill, total revenue impact, number of customers affected, effective date of the change, Public Utility Commission approval date, primary stated reason for the change, and links to underlying regulatory dockets. Consumers would also be able to search utility information by zip code, address, city, or state.
###