frequent outages
My neighborhood has experiences frequent outages since 2024, which are separate from the severe weather outages. Xcel appears to have misrepresented this when responding to reports on the number of events, stating my neighborhood only had two last year--that's incorrect, I kept track of each one and including multiple outages on the same day, the count was 13 (7 if you group the same-day ones together). It's already begun this summer, with an outage on the eve of the hottest day so far this year.
Xcel keeps getting approved for rate increases, but doesn't appear to be making any changes to solve the outage issues. It's one thing where there are severe weather events and customers are given advance notice (though note, this rarely happens elsewhere), but these are surprise outages. Xcel claims to have fixed the issue--saying it was something to do with the automatic shutoff trigger being set to January's settings, so increased AC use in summer was triggering it--however, my neighborhood is still having unexplained outages.
It's unacceptable, and rather than continuously giving Xcel approved rate increases, they should be required to show solid proof that they are investing in, upgrading, and fixing infrastructure BEFORE they are allowed to request rate increases. As is, Xcel is clearly unable to responsibly run a public, necessary service, and should not be allowed to run a monopoly when better service could be available. Right now, customers are just feeding their profits for no returns.
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