Colorado utility regulators voted Wednesday to begin monitoring the reliability and customer service performance of the state’s largest electricity provider, Xcel Energy.
The decision by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission came after two commission staff reports outlined the company’s repeated problems in answering customer calls, sending out bills and avoiding outages.
Blackouts more than doubled in 2024 and customer complaints have jumped 100% in three years, according to the commission reports.
In a letter to the PUC, Xcel Energy did not dispute the data in the reports but said it has moved to address many of the problems they outlined.
“The company recognizes that performance in 2024 on electric reliability and on customer service faced challenges and we apologize to all affected customers and reaffirm our commitment to do better,” the letter said.
Customer service had suffered as a result of a 10% reduction in staff and a 5% cut in the customer service budget between 2022 and 2024, according to Erin O’Neill, the commission’s chief economist.
Xcel Energy said that it has hired an additional 170 agents and plans to add another 90. Higher than average attrition levels had made it difficult to maintain staffing levels, the company said.
Outages on the Xcel Energy grid have been increasing since 2014, but spiked in 2024, with the average customer outage rising to 352 minutes in 2024 from about 100 minutes in 2023. The utility services 1.5 million people across the state.
Xcel Energy said that the transmission lines with the most outages have been included in a performance improvement plan and that outages for the first four months of 2025 are down 93%.
“I appreciated the company taking responsibility for its customer service and other problems and offering an apology,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank said.
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Still, the commission voted to monitor the utility’s performance on a set of metrics in 2025 and 2026. The company will collect data monthly and report to the PUC on a quarterly basis.
The data will be used to determine if additional PUC action is necessary. Blank raised the possibility of enacting emergency regulations. “I just want to know what our options are,” he said.
Staffing levels for customer care and maintenance service will be tracked, as will the speed in responding to calls.
The time to resolve billing problems — another of the problems cited in the report — will also have to be reported.
Between 2023 and 2024 there was a 58% increase in customers not receiving monthly bills and a 240% increase compared to 2020. It can take months to get this non-billing resolved and customers on average end up with a bill of $3,000.
“We’ve had people saying this is like a part-time job getting my billing fixed,” Commissioner Megan Gilman said.
The commission is also asking for detailed information on outages, including a flag for when outages are part of wildfire operations, and more detail on the outages logged with an unknown cause.
While the commission is just collecting data, Blank said “it sets forth a series of expectations about performance and it sets forth as best we can a timeline.”