Utility Data Transparency

Table Of Contents
  1. Why This Matters
  2. Policy Solution
  3. Model Policy Features
  4. Potential Policy Drawbacks & Pitfalls
  5. Complementary Policies
  6. Examples
COMMUNITY BENEFITAffordability, Empowerment, Transparency
KEYWORDSGovernance, Utility Rates
REGIONState, Regional, Local
AFFORDABILITY STRATEGYUtility Reform: Accountability
OVERSIGHTUtility Commissions, Energy Agencies
POLICY MECHANISMRegulation, Legislation

Why This Matters

Utility customers and the broader public often have limited access to critical information about utility investments, programs, and operations that can significantly impact living standards and community well-being. We see this today with rising household energy costs and growing infrastructure risks and costs in the communities most affected by climate change.1 This holds true for both regulated investor-owned utilities, which serve the majority of U.S. residents, as well as for publicly owned municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives. Often, relevant data and other information that could shed light on the negative or positive impacts of utility spending, operations, and programs are not collected, not reported, or are opaque and difficult to access. As a result, utility customers, policymakers, regulators, and the broader public are limited in their ability to track utilities’ performance, hold utilities accountable to serving the public interest, and set the direction for utility investments and operations.   

Policy Solution

Through utility commission orders or legislative mandates, states can establish comprehensive data collection and disclosure requirements to better inform ratepayers and the public about utility performance in critical areas for ensuring energy affordability, energy resilience, and, more broadly, equitable development of the energy system. In states that are developing performance-based regulation (PBR), data transparency requirements can be tailored to specific metrics in designated performance areas and expanded beyond the sometimes narrow scope of PBR frameworks. 

Importantly, the following policy features should be generally applicable to all forms of utilities, but there may be variation in the scope of useful data and avenues for requiring data disclosure depending on the type and size of utility. In many cases, data transparency for municipal authorities and rural electric cooperatives will require state or local legislation or other policy action, while utility commissions can institute requirements for investor-owned utilities. 

Model Policy Features


General Features

  • Policy pathways: In general, data transparency requirements can be established by an Order or other administrative action of utility commissions, or by legislation, with enactment/enforcement delegated to commissions. Ideally, regulators/policymakers establish comprehensive data transparency requirements rather than piecemeal ones. Requirements primarily apply to investor-owned utilities, large publicly-owned utilities, and electric cooperatives. Smaller municipal utilities and rural cooperatives should also embrace customer-centric data transparency requirements, potentially with support from states and/or working with trade organizations such as the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and the American Public Power Association. 
  • General accessibility requirements: Data is presented in accessible and useful ways, including elements such as clear explanation of technical terms; downloadable data tables (rather than only providing static forms such as pdfs) to enable easy independent analysis; and regular updates to ensure relevancy. Data may also be shared in maps, interactive dashboards, or other publicly accessible formats. Reports or other documents directly pertaining to community interests should be made available in relevant languages.   
  • Key parameters of data transparency: There are essentially three basic steps for improving utility data transparency: 1) Identifying data gaps and collecting relevant data to fill them; 2) Making collected data available as public information (with appropriate privacy measures in place); and 3) Sharing and presenting data that are collected and publicly available in accessible ways for ratepayers and the general public, following the general accessibility requirements described above. In some cases, utility data is already reported to other federal, state, or local agencies, in a prescribed manner; for example, greenhouse gas emissions and toxic chemical releases of utility-owned power plants are reported to the EPA.2 
  • Community engagement:  Community engagement processes can help identify customer concerns and questions related to energy needs, costs, services, and policies, with a priority on input from communities with high energy burdens, high pollution burdens, unreliable grid performance, or who otherwise face disparate impacts from the existing energy system. Such input could be facilitated through a representative advisory panel or working group of community-based leaders.3 
  • Utility customer impacts dashboard:  State energy agencies (or other applicable public agencies) develop and operate a central platform/portal for accessing critical public information about utility performance, which could be described as “customer impacts information dashboards.”  A customer impacts dashboard (or set of dashboards) is an accessible portal for residential customers to access digestible information in clear, understandable categories, with multilingual formats. The dashboard(s) can encompass dozens of data categories across multiple critical areas of customer impact, such as energy affordability, energy efficiency savings, environmental pollutant emissions, grid reliability, rooftop solar adoption, etc. In many cases, data may be aggregated and reported at relevant spatial scales (e.g., census tracts) to enable demographic analyses of the utility data. It should be noted that some new or highly technical data collected by utilities may not be feasible for disclosure in a user-friendly customer impacts dashboard.

Specific Data Requirements
The following outline enumerates key data relating to affordability and other aspects of utility performance that affect utility customers and communities. How data needs should be addressed will vary by utility depending on their current data collection and reporting practices.

For both electric and gas utilities, key categories for data reporting and transparency include:

  • Utility arrearage and shutoff data: Currently, only 25 states require tracking and public reporting of utility shutoff data, and often such data are incomplete, irregularly reported, and hard to access.4 Comprehensive reporting would include aggregate data on utility shutoffs, average length of shutoffs, and customer arrearages, including interest and fees (for reconnection). Monthly and annual reporting enables tracking of seasonal and long-term trends. These data can be mapped by census tract, enabling parallel demographic analysis of impacted households and development of policies to mitigate these impacts.  
  • Low-income program savings: Data on utility program and policy impacts on low-income households and neighborhoods may include, for example:
    • Estimated energy bill savings for low-income households from utility customer programs (e.g. bill assistance, community solar credits), including breakdowns by housing type (single-family, multifamily/rental buildings, etc.). 
    • Adoption or enrollment rates in low-income programs, reported by census tract, fraction of eligible households served, total number of households served, etc. 
    • Percent of assisted households that subsequently experience utility shutoff(s).
  • Customer-sited programs: Relevant data on customer-sited energy programs include, for example:
    • Energy efficiency programs:
      • Home energy rebates: For utility rebates or other incentives for purchase of energy efficient appliances and other home energy improvements, report total spending,  spending broken down by census tract, and spending specifically targeted for or otherwise reaching low-income households.
      • Weatherization funding: For utility programs/financing that support home weatherization upgrades, report total spending and spending by census tract; enrollment data on the number of approvals, deferrals, and disapprovals, broken down by census tract; spending specifically targeted for or otherwise reaching low-income households.
    • Demand-response programs: Total enrollment by type of benefit, typically either tariff-based or incentive-based; enrollment by census tract; total customer savings.  
    • Distributed energy resources (DERs): Tracking DERs (small-scale, decentralized energy generation and storage systems, typically customer-owned and located near the point of use), including incentive spending for and installed capacity of rooftop solar, battery storage, and “smart” (controllable) heat pumps; total net metering credits (if applicable); bill savings attributable to DERs; total incentives targeted for low-income households and related credits for multifamily residents (where applicable). All of the above broken down by census tract. 
    • Overall utility impacts from customer-sited programs (e.g., reduced peak demand, reduced overall usage, etc). 
  • Utility financing and spending: Data on utility spending can provide opportunities for accountability and reform. Examples include:
    • Revenue and profits. 
    • Financing: debt and equity totals, and disclosure of financing sources.
    • Return on equity: rate, amount, and as share of average utility bill.
    • Capital costs: 
      • Electricity: grid maintenance and grid expansion, transmission and distribution networks; new/expanded generation.
      • Gas: delivery system maintenance, expansion, replacement. 
    • Political spending such as lobbying and trade group dues.
  • Grid interconnection for large loads: As a potential cost-driver with rate impacts, grid operators and utilities (in regulated states) should publicly disclose interconnection applications (e.g. for data centers), specifying by applicant the load requested, estimated interconnection costs, and expected share of costs borne by applicant.   
  • Environmental and public health indicators: Key environmental and public health indicators include:
    • Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of electricity supplies, including electricity imports/power purchases of electricity distribution companies, and emissions of utility-owned power plants/generation (including upstream, “well-to-gate” emissions of gas or coal supplies for generation).   
    • Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of gas supplies for heating and appliances; estimated distribution system gas leakage.
    • Electricity co-pollutants: Air emissions from electricity supply, including imported electricity, should be tracked using power plant data, with mapping to indicate spatial distribution and demographics of emissions sources. 
    • Gas system co-pollutants: Gas composition data (e.g., inclusive of hazardous air pollutants such as benzene), along with estimated emissions based on leakage and safety incident data.     
  • Workforce characteristics and job quality: Relevant utility-employed workforce data includes compensation by job category, demographics, union/non-union status, apprenticeship programs, etc. Similar data for utility contractors’ workers is also tracked and reported, and provided in parallel with state reporting on related government contractor workforces (e.g., for residential energy efficiency upgrades funded by the federal Weatherization Assistance Program).  

For electric utilities specifically:

  • Equitable grid reliability: Utility reliability is typically measured based on system-wide averages of outage frequency and duration, but this approach can mask geographic and demographic inequities.5 It’s important for utilities to develop high-resolution spatial data to track potential racial and economic disparities in utility service reliability, which could be used in a performance incentive mechanism tied to adjustments of return on equity or other financial penalties or rewards.
  • Equitable grid resilience: In contrast to reliability, which refers to routine grid performance under normal, controllable circumstances, resilience refers to qualities of the electricity grid that prevent, absorb, or enable quick recovery from major power disruptions, most commonly due to severe weather. As with reliability, higher spatial resolution outage data are needed to capture racial and economic disparities in grid resilience following major outage events, as measured by outage locations and ranges and outage recovery rates by location and for different affected populations. Relatedly, to promote resilience investment as part of utility resource planning and requirements, utilities can work with regulators and outside experts to develop metrics, data, and valuation methods to quantify resilience needs and potential benefits for customers, especially those in climate-vulnerable communities/grid areas.6  
  • Interconnection equity: Develop and regularly report/display high-resolution data on hosting capacity (the grid’s technical capacity to safely interconnect distributed energy resources) and other critical grid characteristics at neighborhood scale, such as hosting capacity maps. In addition, utilities can track interconnection timelines and costs (primarily for distributed solar and storage) and potentially tie this tracking to goals established through a performance incentive mechanism on interconnection.    

For gas utilities, specifically: 

  • Gas distribution system leakage rates: Regular reporting of “lost and unaccounted for gas” (that is, the difference between what the utility purchased and what it sold to customers) can help inform reporting on system-wide methane leakage rates and identify potential meter errors, both of which can be used to reduce methane leakage and improve accuracy in metering and billing.
  • Gas System Safety: Leaks of natural gas (or other hazardous gases) that involve a death or injury resulting in hospitalization or property loss or damage exceeding $122,000 (excluding the value of the leaked gas) must be reported to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration7 and can be included in state-level reporting requirements. 
  • Mapping of system transition: Mapping pipelines by age, material, maintenance timelines, etc., can then be used for identifying neighborhood “hot spots” for system “pruning,” where replacing gas use will protect ratepayers from bearing long-term capital costs by redirecting gas pipeline maintenance investments towards electrification, in addition to making way for the climate and local environmental benefits of electrifying heat.      

Potential Policy Drawbacks & Pitfalls

  • Data can be hidden behind questionable business confidentiality claims,8 although certain privacy concerns, especially with regard to individual consumer data, can be legitimate.9 
  • It can be hard to synthesize large amounts of data into something meaningful or even accurate, and too much or poorly organized data can also be a barrier to access.  
  • Incomplete data reporting can skew messaging—for example, utility spending is often not tracked with the benefits of that spending: efficiency programs show up only as a “cost” unless “savings” (from reduced energy use) are shown as well.
  • Smaller utilities (including small municipal utilities and rural cooperatives) may not have the capacity (money or staffing) to conduct comprehensive data reporting comparable to what could be feasible for large investor-owned utilities; any relevant reporting requirements will have to weigh trade-offs between transparency goals and reporting burdens for small utilities.
  • Utility commissions provide a clear centralized venue for aggregating, standardizing, and sharing data from investor-owned utilities. But in many states, there is no clear centralized body or agency to serve as a hub for data reporting and sharing from publicly-owned utilities and rural cooperatives.

Complementary Policies

Utility data requirements can be linked to related utility reform policies or efforts, including:

Examples

1. California Heat Pump Deployment, Water Heaters, and HVAC:  TECH Clean California Database; Senate Bill 1477 (2018)

Details:

  • Authorizing legislation: In 2018, Senate Bill 1477 authorized the TECH Clean California (TCC) program, including $116 million in funding over four years, with $72 million reserved for contractor incentives to make heat pump installations more affordable. The California Public Utility Commission contributed an additional $50 million for FY22-23. In addition, TCC administers federally-funded Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates (HEEHRA) on behalf of households, which further reduces the price of installing heat pumps.10 Importantly, stakeholders were interviewed to provide input on what kind of data should be collected and reported.    
  • Basic program data features: The central data feature is a robust, interactive dashboard with multi-layered aggregated information and filters as well as downloadable anonymized data on individual projects and contractor information; importantly, data are updated monthly and much is downloadable in spreadsheets. In addition, regular reports evaluating implementation and impacts are compiled and made available along with the data.

Specific features:

  • County map: Click each county for summary cumulative data including number of installations; number of unique contractors; median cost per residence by project type; median incentive per residence by project type. For example, in Sacramento County (as of 4/30/26): Heat Pump Water Heaters: 3982; Heat Pump HVAC: 7140; Unique Contractors: 220; WH median cost: $6288 and median incentive: $4800; HVAC median cost: $19819 and median incentive: $1000.
  • Installations over time: Broken down by project type, with primary and secondary incentives by funding totals and sources; total contractor incentives; building type, equipment type, and replaced equipment type. Between July 9, 2021 and March 13, 2026, cumulative contractor incentives totaled $231,205,534, for a total of 76,598 units installed, including 9,686 in multifamily buildings.  
  • Cost summaries: Cost per installation, at 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile; broken down by project type and size; electrical upgrades (if included with water heaters); duct or ductless for HVAC.  
  • Cost details by project type: Siting (including whether in a Disadvantaged Community), and home details (building type, home age, square footage/# bedrooms); equipment technical details; equipment replaced; installation features (panel upgrades, ducts).
  • Contractor data: List of contractors with number of installations by type, including “low-income” installations; survey data on contractor workforce characteristics. 
  • Equity budget and spending report: TCC adheres to statewide goal of targeting 40 percent of clean energy funding for disadvantaged communities; report tracks budgeted and paid DAC resident incentives by source of public funding (cap-and-trade, state budget, Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund).

LIMITATIONS:

  • TCC’s public reporting includes Heat Pump Data Visuals, featuring an interactive mapping tool, which collects and updates basic information on installations at the county level. But the map does not include demographic or socioeconomic information about installations, which could be incorporated by further breaking down the county-level map and underlying data to the census tract level. Limited census tract information is included in downloadable and regularly updated datasets of the program, but data spreadsheets are not a helpful resource for most utility customers or the general public and access to the datasets requires completion of a short professional survey.        
  • The program adheres to the state’s codified goal of targeting at least 40 percent of climate and clean energy investments from the state’s cap-and-trade revenues for disadvantaged communities or populations, which TCC terms “equity communities.” TCC produces an Equity Budget and Spending Report, which shows that 45 percent of TCC incentive funding to date went to residents defined as part of “equity communities,” a reasonably impressive share. However, TCC does not collect or otherwise try to determine and track racial-ethnic identity information about program customers. This is needed for assessing potentially stark racial equity gaps in program participation, as is evident in the distribution of other clean energy technologies, such as rooftop solar installations.11

2. California Low-income Oversight Board, Reports. LIOB: Documents;  Senate Bill No. 2 (2001.)

Details:

  • California’s Low-Income Oversight Board was established by Senate Bill No. 2 in 2001. The Board primarily advises on the implementation of low-income energy assistance programs by the state’s investor-owned utilities—Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, Southern California Gas, and San Diego Gas & Electric. The programs covered are Energy Savings Assistance (ESA), which is publicly funded and supports energy efficiency upgrades; California Alternate Rates for Energy (CARE), which provides ratepayer-funded utility bill discounts; and Family Electric Rate Assistance (FERA), which is ratepayer-funded but just for electricity and targeted for households with incomes moderately higher than CARE’S income limits.12  
  • LIOB posts utility reports on ESA, CARE, and FERA activities, submitted monthly and annually with accompanying spreadsheets. 
  • “Low-income Needs Assessments,” including evaluation and recommendations for improving the utility programs, are produced triennially by a consultant and submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and participating utilities. These reports are sometimes tailored for specifically identified needs; for example, the 2022 Low-income Needs Assessment focused on how the ESA program could better serve the needs of renters.13

LIMITATIONS:

  • Utility program data for ESA, CARE, and FERA activities is reported on a monthly and annual basis (starting in 2018). But the reporting is in the form of static document files—pdf files and related spreadsheets—on the LIOB homepage. This is an example where utilities are collecting a huge amount of useful data but without a public interface for people to be able to understand even basic information like how much money is being spent on programmatic benefits. LIOB can consider developing a dashboard for the ESA to track implementation at least selectively in the manner of the TECH Clean California dashboard. In addition, CARE and FERA funding could be made more “visible” in a web-based graphical format that shows monthly and annual funding totals and tracking year-over-year changes, including graphing tools for analysts to use. 
  • A consultant produces triennial Low-income Needs Assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of the three utility low-income assistance programs, with reports submitted to the CPUC and the utilities, but with limited access to data underlying some of their assumptions and conclusions.

3. Michigan Public Service Commission, Case No. U-21297: Order (2023)

Details:

  • This is a somewhat different example of data transparency, in which changes to the methodology of a required grid reliability analysis can yield new information and insights about the DTE grid that aren’t otherwise brought to light by conventional metrics and methods of analysis.  
  • In 2023, the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) considered Rate Case No. U-21297, in which DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility serving 2.3 million electricity customers across Southeast Michigan and the City of Detroit, sought a rate increase to fund reliability upgrades for its distribution system.14 DTE’s service area includes 550,000 residents living in 485 census tracts that qualify as environmental justice communities as scored by MiEJScreen, the state’s Environmental Justice Screening Tool.15
  • As part of the MPSC’s final Order, DTE is required to undertake development of a research effort on grid reliability, using regression analysis to identify where grid performance may harbor inequities that disproportionately affect certain populations. The research order stemmed from stakeholder concerns and recommendations, expressed in formal comments submitted in the Case. 
  • Specifically, the Case Order stated: “DTE Electric Company shall also work with the Commission Staff and stakeholders to develop a detailed regression analysis of customer demographics and reliability for vulnerable communities to be used in the company’s distribution plan case. DTE Electric Company shall also provide the data supporting the regression analysis to enable interested parties to perform their own analyses.” (pp. 375-376)
  • Although the Order itself does not specify requirements for the analysis, it requires DTE to work with Commission staff and stakeholders in developing the analysis.
  • Importantly, the Order requires DTE to publicly share data utilized to develop the analyses with stakeholders.
  • The Case record shows that stakeholder advocacy was very important for the Commission’s imposition of this requirement of grid equity analysis, led by the “Clean Energy Organizations” (CEO) comprising Environmental Law & Policy Center, Ecology Center, Vote Solar, and Union of Concerned Scientists.16 

LIMITATIONS:

  • As ordered, the required analysis appears to be a one-time effort to be included in the utility’s next distribution plan case. Thus, the requirement is currently not designed for further analytical refinement or for tracking changes that could follow from investments informed by the initial analysis.   
  • The requirement, as ordered, is not in any way specified to have directive influence on resource allocation or other decision-making by the utility that could impact grid reliability and resilience for environmental justice communities. As ordered, the requirement, therefore, could be “toothless” in effecting meaningful change to reduce grid inequities.    
  • The Order did not include a recommendation from one of the CEO witnesses regarding DTE’s efforts to assess reliability specific to environmental justice (EJ) communities. According to these recommendations (pp. 14-16), DTE should adopt a multi-tier rather than single tier threshold for comparing grid reliability in EJ communities as compared to the system average; this is important to ensure that reliability disparities that might be experienced in higher (and the highest) vulnerability communities is not overlooked in the analysis; in addition, socio-demographic analysis should be integrated particularly to assess whether racial disparities exist holding other factors constant.  

Written: July 2026

  1.  The most notable such trend today is rising electricity prices driven largely by infrastructure costs: US Energy Information Administration. (2025). U.S. electricity prices continue steady increase; On climate-related energy infrastructure risks and costs and specific data needs, see Harnett, E., Sardag, S., Crouch-Hess, K., Flandrick, S., Kornbluh, E. and Salazar, A. (2026). Power Outages Cost More Than We Account For. Better Data Could Help. RMI. ↩︎
  2. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program requires annual reporting of GHG emissions of large facilities (> 25,000 metric tons per year) in nine sectors, including power plants. In the Fall of 2025, however, the Trump Administration initiated repeal of the Program. See Jenks, C., & Dewey, S. (2025). EPA Proposes to End Greenhouse Gas Reporting. Environmental & Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School. ↩︎
  3. One model for implementing community-based development of data tools and analysis (in this case for official designation of “disadvantaged communities”) is New York’s Climate Justice Working Group, which was authorized under the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019. ↩︎
  4. Castillo, M., Rosenbach, C., Ebinger, K, & Daniel, J. (2025). Disconnections Handbook: Landscape of Regulatory Disconnection Reform Options. RMI. We use the term “shutoffs” for what utilities generally term “disconnections,” which is the action of turning off power to customers for non-payment of utility bills. In 2026, the Energy Information Administration released a landmark, federally-funded report on utility disconnections for non-payment, based on comprehensive reporting of natural gas and electricity delivery companies serving residential customers: US Energy Information Administration. (2026). 2024 Residential Utility Disconnections Report. ↩︎
  5. For a recent case study of grid reliability disparities, see Chelminski, K., Wei, G., & Bellocca, G. P. (2026). Light out on vulnerable communities: Zip-code level spatial examination of inequitable grid reliability in Portland and Seattle. Energy Policy 212. In Portland, Oregon, the worst-performing zip codes experience outage frequency and duration values five times higher than citywide averages. ↩︎
  6. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. (Revised 2022). Valuing Resilience in Electricity Systems. ↩︎
  7. 49 CFR 191.3. ↩︎
  8. St. John, J. (2025, April 23). Is Georgia Power quietly planning a massive buildout of fossil gas? Canary Media. ↩︎
  9. US Department of Energy. (2016). Energy Data Accelerator: Guide to Data Access and Utility Customer Confidentiality. ↩︎
  10. Tech Clean California. About. ↩︎
  11. Sunter, D. A., Castellanos, S., & Kammen, D. M. (2019).  Disparities in rooftop photovoltaics deployment in the United States by race and ethnicity. Nature Sustainability, 2(1), 71-76. ↩︎
  12. California Public Utilities Commission. (2025, December 18). Empowering Communities The DACAG and LIOB Role in Equity. ↩︎
  13. Evergreen Economics. (2022, December 9). 2022 Low-Income Needs Assessment. ↩︎
  14. State of Michigan, Before the Michigan Public Service Commission. (2023, December 1). Case No. U-21297: Order. In the case, DTE requested a $622 million dollar rate increase and was awarded a $368 million increase. ↩︎
  15. DTE Electric Company. (2023). 2023 Distribution Grid Plan. ↩︎
  16. Kenworthy, W., & Tan, B. (2024). Advancing Energy Justice: A New Paradigm in Grid Equity and Reliability Analysis. Utility Dive. ↩︎