Giving Compass' Take:
- Adam Mahoney reports on how the rising prices of electricity and utility bills are hitting Black southerners hardest.
- What can philanthropy do to work towards systems change that keeps utility prices affordable nationwide? How is affordability interconnected with the clean energy transition?
- Search for a nonprofit focused on utility prices.
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Brionté McCorkle opened her latest Georgia Power bill and started doing some math to try to understand where her money was going. As utility prices rise, the total was $233 — steep, but familiar for her and her neighbors living just outside Atlanta. Then she plugged the number into a new calculator built off a national analysis of investor‑owned utilities and watched a smaller figure pop up: $52.
“Roughly $52 of that bill is just profit for the power company,” she said last week, “and that is really high.”
Across the country, residential power prices have jumped more than 30% since 2019, rising faster than inflation, and a growing share of those hikes are going straight into the profits of utility companies.
A new report from the Energy & Policy Institute puts hard numbers behind what McCorkle and Black households across the South have felt for years.
Looking at 110 investor‑owned electric utilities nationwide from 2021 to 2024, researchers found companies kept about 13 cents of every dollar customers paid — roughly $186 billion in profit over four years.
Historically, that number hovered closer to 9 cents, but early 2025 data shows that climbing closer to 15 cents on the dollar. Utilities in the Southeast, where the biggest concentration of Black Americans reside, are averaging nearly 16 cents of profits per dollar paid, some of the highest margins in the country. Georgia Power has an even stronger profit margin. For every dollar a Georgia Power customer pays, the company rakes in 22 cents of profit.
A chunk of what you pay each month isn’t going to new infrastructure, workers, or grid upgrades, but to the people who own the utility — the shareholders.
For McCorkle, who leads Georgia Conservation Voters, that number isn’t abstract. She works with Black families and low‑income residents who are already “spending a huge part of their income just to pay the bills, keep the lights on.”
“Families in Georgia are already dealing with some of the highest energy burdens in the country,” she said, and each new utility rate hike forces people to choose between food, medicine, rent — and the utility bill.
Read the full article about utility bills hitting Black southerners hardest by Adam Mahoney at Capital B News.