By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026
A utility is the rare company whose customers cannot leave and whose permission can still be withdrawn. Your franchise is legal, your territory is exclusive, and your prices are set in public by people who can end careers in your building. Every bill is a press release your customers did not ask for. This guide reads the published record on rates, rate cases and wildfire era failures, and turns it into hiring criteria for an agency. The short version: a utility does not need to be loved, but it must be believed by the five people in the hearing room, and belief is a publishing discipline.
16.48 cents: the average US residential electricity price per kilowatt hour in 2024 (EIA 2025).
50: electric utilities with rate cases pending across 29 states and Puerto Rico as of October 2025 (DSIRE Insight 2025).
30 billion dollars: the scale of wildfire liabilities that drove PG and E into bankruptcy in 2019.
I Discrimen
Captive customers are not the same as consenting ones
The meter keeps running. Consent is what determines what you are allowed to charge for it.
Most companies fear losing customers. A utility's customers stay, and complain to a regulator instead, which is worse. Your real franchise is not the service territory on the map. It is the standing belief, held by your commission, your legislature and your host cities, that your company spends money prudently and tells the truth about it. That belief is re-underwritten at every rate case, every storm restoration and every incident, and it is priced into your allowed return.
An agency that approaches a utility account as brand building has misunderstood the business at the foundation. Utility communication is regulatory evidence with a public audience. Every release, filing summary and bill insert is a document some intervenor will quote back in testimony. The right agency writes for that reader first: the commissioner, the consumer advocate, the city manager, the local reporter who covers the docket in February, not the launch in May.
Ask candidates to describe your last rate case as an intervenor would. If they cannot adopt the hostile reading fluently, they will not survive contact with the real one.
Your customers cannot switch. Your judges can switch on you, and they publish their reasoning.
II Machina
The rate case is a public trial, and the bill is the verdict people read
Two machines decide a utility's standing, and both run on documents.
The first is the rate case itself: a litigated proceeding with discovery, testimony and cross examination, in which your capital plan is read aloud by people paid to doubt it. As of October 2025, at least 50 electric utilities in 29 states and Puerto Rico had rate cases pending (DSIRE Insight 2025). The average residential price reached 16.48 cents per kilowatt hour in 2024, up from 13.15 cents in 2020 (EIA 2025), and every one of those increases arrived in a customer's kitchen as a number without an explanation attached, unless the utility attached one first.
The second machine is the outage. Storm restoration is the one moment the whole territory watches you work, and it remembers the estimated restoration times you published longer than it remembers the storm. Utilities are judged, with eerie consistency, on the accuracy of their bad news.
The industry PR resources for this programme show the same shape across regulated sectors: the credible actor publishes evidence in the format the proceeding consumes. Hire an agency that can draft a filing summary a commissioner would thank them for, and an outage update a furious mayor could read aloud without editing.
A utility's brand is the sum of its bills and its outage maps. Everything else is commentary.
III Exemplum
PG and E lost the state's trust before it lost the court cases
The defining utility failure of the century was a communications culture with a balance sheet attached.
Pacific Gas and Electric's equipment ignited California wildfires, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise. The company entered bankruptcy in January 2019 under wildfire liabilities estimated around 30 billion dollars, and in 2020 pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. Investigations described years of deferred maintenance and a public record that lagged the physical one. By the time the legal process finished, the state's political system had long since delivered its verdict, and California spent years restructuring oversight of a company it no longer believed.
Set beside it San Diego Gas and Electric. After its lines were linked to the 2007 Witch Creek fire, SDG and E spent a decade building the industry's reference wildfire programme: a dense utility weather network, camera systems, refined shutoff protocols and relentless local publication of its mitigation work. Same state, same fire weather, different communications culture: one company treated disclosure as exposure, the other as the product.
Ask candidate agencies which of the two they instinctively resemble, and make them prove it with documents rather than adjectives. The proof is a record of bad news published early, in numbers, on schedule.
Courts fine companies. Publics retire them. The second sentence is the longer one.
IV Damnum
Distrust is collected through the rate base
In most industries reputation loss is a sales problem. In utilities it is a financing term.
A commission that doubts your prudence disallows costs, and disallowed costs are paid by shareholders, not customers. A commission that doubts your candour shortens your leash: more reporting conditions, more audits, more proceedings, each with outside counsel attached. A legislature that doubts your safety rewrites your liability exposure, as California did in creating its wildfire fund, with utilities and their customers splitting the bill. Every one of those outcomes is a communications outcome wearing a regulatory costume.
Now do the arithmetic. A single disallowance in a mid sized rate case runs to tens of millions. A shift in how your allowed return is argued, across a multi billion dollar rate base, is worth more per year than most communications budgets in total. The agency that carries your capital plan's evidence into the public record, accurately and early, is a rounding error standing in front of your largest controllable regulatory variable.
The cheap agency is the one whose work an intervenor quotes, sarcastically, against your testimony.
Nobody disallows a cost because of a press release. They disallow it because the press release and the filing told different stories.
V Genus
The controlling variable is the bill trajectory, explained or unexplained
Customers forgive physics. They do not forgive discovering physics through their bill.
Electricity demand is growing again after two flat decades, driven by data centres, electrification and new industry, and the EIA expects US generation to reach record levels in 2026 and 2027 (EIA 2026). Growth means construction, construction means rate base, and rate base means bills rising on a schedule customers experience as monthly evidence. The utilities that hold public patience will be the ones that narrated the trajectory in advance: what is being built, why, what it does to the bill in which year, and what the customer gets for it, in reliability numbers rather than adjectives.
An agency's core utility skill is trajectory honesty. Test it directly: hand candidates your five year capital plan and ask them to write the bill impact page for customers. The strong drafts name the percentage path, separate fuel from infrastructure, and concede what is not yet known. The weak drafts say investments are being made in a reliable future, a sentence that has never survived a hearing.
This is also where storm and outage data belong in the same document. Bill tolerance is purchased with restoration credibility. Customers who watched honest outage maps in October read January's bill insert with different eyes.
A rising bill with a published reason is a policy. A rising bill without one is a scandal on an instalment plan.
VI Regio
An investor owned utility, a co-op and a water system answer to different sovereigns
The word utility spans three ownership forms and at least one entirely different industry in water.
| Segment | Audience that decides | Evidence that persuades | Failure that ends you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Investor owned electric and gas | State commission, intervenors, investors | Prudence record, filing grade disclosure | A rate case lost on credibility |
| Public power and municipal utilities | City councils, local boards, voters | Local cost comparisons, board transparency | A bond or rate vote that becomes a referendum on management |
| Electric cooperatives | Member owners at the annual meeting | Patronage and reliability record, local faces | A board election turned insurgent |
| Water and wastewater utilities | Councils, state health regulators, ratepayers | Water quality data published before it is requested | A contamination notice that arrives late |
The audiences differ in kind, not just size. A co-op's members are owners; its annual meeting is a shareholder meeting with folding chairs, and its communications are governance documents. A municipal utility answers to elected officials who face voters holding your bill. Public power serves more than 50 million people in the United States, and cooperatives about 42 million (APPA and NRECA figures), which makes these supposedly small segments two of the largest audiences in American energy.
Water deserves its own warning: its catastrophes are contamination events, where the notice timeline is legally specified and morally absolute. The agency for a water system is a public health communications firm whether it knows it or not. Match the agency to the sovereign. The public relations services model for this sector starts from ownership form for exactly that reason.
Same wires, same pipes, different constitutions. Hire for the constitution you live under.
VII Occasio
The opening is the return of growth, and growth has to be sold again
For thirty years utilities communicated decline management: flat load, efficiency, restraint. The script is obsolete.
Load growth from data centres and electrification has put utilities back in the construction business at a pace not seen in a generation, with the EIA projecting record national generation within two years (EIA 2026). Construction at that scale is a public argument: about land, interconnection queues for loads rather than generators, who pays for capacity built for a single large customer, and whether ordinary households are subsidising hyperscalers. Those arguments are already running in statehouses, and they are the defining utility communications arena of the decade.
The companies that win them will publish allocation arithmetic early: what the new load pays, what existing customers gain in spread fixed costs, what reliability investment was needed anyway. Silence does not keep a utility out of that argument. It merely assigns the utility the villain's lines, written by others. The nuclear energy agency guide in this series describes the same buyer led revival from the generation side.
Growth used to sell itself. At current prices, growth is a rate case with better scenery.
VIII Structura
Local ownership of the story beats national scale in a service territory
The equaliser in utility communications is that every decisive audience lives inside your map.
A commission has a handful of members and a public docket. A city council can be visited. Local newsrooms, thinned as they are, still cover the utility beat with a memory for your last three storms. Against audiences that concentrated, a national agency's scale is nearly worthless, and a disciplined local evidence operation is nearly everything: commissioners who have your data before the intervenors call, mayors briefed before the outage map goes public, reporters who know your restoration estimates are conservative because they checked them twice before.
The structure that delivers this is a standing regulatory editorial operation: filing summaries written for lay readers, bill trajectory pages updated quarterly, outage communication rehearsed like a safety drill, and community presence in the months when nothing is being asked for. It is organised by docket and by storm season rather than by campaign, which is how this firm's team describes its own structure.
Ask every candidate where their account lead lives. In this sector, geography is a credential.
A utility's reputation is a local newspaper archive and a docket. Both are written in your territory or not at all.
IX Consilium
Score for docket fluency, bill honesty and storm behaviour
The hiring order the record supports, stated plainly.
Docket fluency first: the agency must read a rate filing the way intervenors do and summarise it without flinching. Bill honesty second: the demonstrated willingness to publish your price trajectory with the causes separated, before a regulator forces the disclosure. Storm behaviour third: an outage communications record you can verify with the mayors and editors who lived through it.
| Your situation | Agency to hire | Agency to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| IOU entering a major rate case | Regulatory communications specialist | Brand agency with event experience |
| Public power or co-op | Governance literate local firm | Agency that treats members as consumers |
| Utility with wildfire or storm exposure | Crisis drilled firm with utility operations fluency | Firm whose crisis plan is a template |
| Water utility | Public health communications specialist | Generalist energy shop |
Trial finalists on the artefacts that decide your year: the bill impact page from your real capital plan, and a simulated storm day with a hostile restoration estimate to publish. You will learn their drafting honesty and their nerve in one afternoon. Anything else you need to know, reference calls to regulators' staff and local editors will tell you, and in this small world those calls get answered.
Hire the agency you want quoted in the transcript. In utility work, eventually, everything is quoted in the transcript.
X Quaesita
Questions utility buyers actually ask
Does PR really influence rate case outcomes?
Commissions decide on evidence and law, but the evidence arrives in a public record that intervenors, press and legislators also read. Communications shapes what your customers and elected officials tell the commission they believe, and it determines whether your filing's story survives contact with your own past statements. It does not replace the case. It decides whether the case is believed.
How should we communicate a rate increase?
Before it lands, with the arithmetic: the percentage, the monthly figure for a typical customer, the causes separated into fuel, infrastructure and policy, and what the money buys in reliability terms. A bill that surprises is read as a bill that was hidden. Every month of advance honesty is worth basis points of public patience.
What is the right way to handle outage estimates?
Publish conservative estimates, update them before they expire, and explain the cause in plain units: poles, feeders, substations, crews. Customers forgive damage. They remember being told Tuesday and restored Friday with silence between. The estimate is a promise, and utilities are in the promise business whether they like it or not.
Should a co-op or municipal utility communicate like an investor owned utility?
No. Your customers are owners or citizens, and your communications are governance. Lead with cost comparisons, board decisions in the open, and local accountability. Borrow the IOU's disclosure discipline, not its investor vocabulary. The audience that can vote your board out deserves a different document than the audience that can only sell your stock.
How do we prepare for wildfire or storm season communications?
Rehearse, in the off season, with the actual artefacts: shutoff notices, shelter information, restoration maps and the executive who will front the briefing. Pre publish your mitigation record and your shutoff criteria so the event is judged against documents that already exist. Season preparation announced during the season is read as improvisation, because it is.
What should we say about data centre load growth?
Publish the allocation: what the new load pays for, what it does to fixed cost recovery for existing customers, and which investments would have been needed regardless. The subsidy question is legitimate and will be asked by intervenors with spreadsheets. The utility with its own spreadsheet already public wins that exchange.
Which metrics actually matter?
Disallowances avoided is hard to attribute, so track the proxies: accuracy of outage estimates, correction rates in coverage of your filings, intervenor use of your own documents against you, and customer comprehension measured in surveys after bill changes. Sentiment scores that rise while the docket burns are decoration.
XI Methodus
How this guide was built, and where it is thin
The price figures come from the EIA's Electric Power Annual, the pending rate case count from DSIRE Insight's October 2025 affordability analysis, and the demand outlook from the EIA's Short Term Energy Outlook, each cited where used and listed below. The PG and E and SDG and E accounts reflect the public record, including PG and E's 2020 guilty plea and California's published proceedings.
The limits are worth naming. Pending case counts are a snapshot and mix routine filings with contested ones. Average national prices conceal the state variation that actually decides utility politics. The SDG and E comparison flattens a decade of operational work into a communications lesson, which this guide does knowingly. No public dataset ranks agencies by regulatory outcomes, so the criteria here are inference from the record, presented as inference.
XII Incipe
Where Frontier Industries fits in this
Frontier Industries runs utility communications as regulatory evidence work: filing summaries the public can read, bill trajectories published before they are demanded, and storm communication rehearsed like the operational drill it is. That is the practice this guide recommends, in the order it recommends it.
If you are choosing an agency for a utility, start with your next filing and your last storm: request an industry campaign consultation or call 401-219-4207.
Sources
1. US Energy Information Administration, electricity prices and factors affecting prices, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/prices-and-factors-affecting-prices.php 2. DSIRE Insight, Energy Affordability Price Trends and Factors 2025, https://www.dsireinsight.com/blog/2025/10/29/energy-affordability-price-trends-and-factors 3. US Energy Information Administration, Short Term Energy Outlook generation projections reported 2026, https://tedmag.com/eia-electricity-generation-to-reach-record-levels-in-2026-and-2027/ 4. Edison Electric Institute, industry association, https://www.eei.org/ 5. American Public Power Association, https://www.publicpower.org/ 6. National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, https://www.electric.coop/ 7. National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, https://www.naruc.org/ 8. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, https://www.ferc.gov/ 9. San Diego Gas and Electric, wildfire safety programme, https://www.sdge.com/wildfire-safety 10. US Energy Information Administration, electricity explained, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/