The Savings Plan
Your electric bill is up about 50% since 2020.
We can save Louisiana over $1.6 billion a year that is hiding in the utility companies' own filings. This page shows exactly where, line by line.
Chris Justin is a licensed professional engineer who worked for the Public Service Commission before running for it. He added up what a commissioner who actually fights could win back for the people paying the bills, and every number on this page traces to a public document. That fight is what a vote for Chris hires.
Every dollar claim on this page links to a docket, an SEC filing, or arithmetic you can re-run. Check the math → And a commissioner is one vote out of five; the end of this page deals with that plainly.
Why your bill keeps going up
The 50% is not a campaign talking point. It is the Public Service Commission's own published rate comparison, a rise from about 9 cents to about 14 cents per kilowatt-hour, and Entergy's own executives have confirmed the trajectory on the record. The state's biggest industrial power users (companies like Exxon and Shell) told the Commission in a 2025 filing that rates are on track to rise another 40% by 2030. Neither party has fixed this. Both have had decades.
Here is the engine underneath it. The more a utility builds, and the more expensively it builds, the more its shareholders make, no matter who ends up paying. That is not a scandal somebody uncovered. It is the deal in writing: a monopoly utility earns a guaranteed profit on everything it builds. The only thing standing between that incentive and your bill is five elected commissioners. The utilities fund the campaigns of the commissioners who regulate them. Chris has pledged to take zero utility money. A commissioner who owes them nothing can fight every line on this page.
This is not about your meter reader or the linemen who climb poles after a storm. It is about boardrooms, and a system that pays them to overbuild. The utilities do not hide any of this. They bury it. They put out 800-page filings written so densely that nobody reads them, backed by armies of lawyers and consultants who bore you to death so they get what they want. Chris can actually understand the 800-page filings. That is the whole job. This page is what he found inside them, and it builds on years of work by consumer advocates and Commission staff who have fought many of these line items already. This page adds them up and puts a vote behind them.
Where the money hides
Start with one example: Louisiana ratepayers pay about $12.8 million a year for energy nobody used. That charge can come off the bill. That is the first kind of money.
Two different kinds of money are on the table, and this page never blends them. The first kind cuts bills people pay today: charges that can come off, profit rates that can come down, costs that never belonged on your bill. The second kind prevents increases that are already on the way: the gas plants, surcharges, and data-center deals queued up to hit your bill between now and 2030. Every number on this page is tagged as one or the other.
What each move is worth per month at a typical home (1,200 kWh a month at Entergy Louisiana; summer bills run higher)
Navy bars come off the bill you pay today. Orange bars are increases that never land.
The bars compare the moves to each other (the longest bar is the biggest move), and every bar is a line a commissioner votes on. Tap any bar to see the move behind it. A few dollars a month per line doesn't sound like much; together they run hundreds of dollars a year per household, and they compound. Gas and water customers have their own lines: those are counted in the calculator below, not here.
Nine moves a commissioner votes on
Each move below is a specific thing a commissioner votes on, not a slogan. Each card shows what it is worth per year, whether it cuts today's bill or prevents a coming increase, and where the number comes from. Open any card for the line items, then follow the link to the filing itself.
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1. Make data centers pay
$? / yr in prevented increases, and growing with every deal
This is the rule that decides who pays for every deal that follows. Meta pledged at the White House to pay for its own power. Good. But a pledge is voluntary, and Louisiana's rule only makes a data center cover half its long-run costs: half the cost, for 15 years, on plants that run 30. One deal is already binding, and about half a billion dollars of transmission built for Meta's project is committed to your bill while the newer, bigger deal doesn't pay it back. Map that same half-cost floor onto the data centers lined up behind Meta and the threat to ratepayers runs to $1 to $2.2 billion a year. Then comes Hyundai's steel mill. Then whoever's after that. Where does it end? Write 100% cost coverage, the plants, the lines, the water, all of it, into every binding order, and the per-year question mark finally gets an answer: zero.
The line items
Why this card shows a question mark. Every other figure on this page traces to a filing with the arithmetic published. The per-year saving from making data centers pay can't be pinned to one defensible number, because it grows with every deal the Commission signs and it overlaps the other moves on this page. The honest answer is an open question, and that should worry you more than any single figure.
~$500M committed (binding). The Sarepta-to-Mount-Olive 500 kV line and substation upgrades built for the first Meta deal, recovered from all ratepayers once the line enters service (U-37425; the estimate was $439.9M as-filed, $363.5M once a firm Class 3 estimate was completed). Committed to your bill, not yet on it.
Up to $1 to $2.2 billion a year, the threat if nobody fights. Louisiana's Lightning Amendment lets a large load cover as little as half its fixed costs for 15 years, on gas plants that run at least 30. Half the cost for half the life works out to about 25% from the data center and up to 75% left on ratepayers. Mapped onto the 7 to 12 gigawatts of data centers lined up behind Meta, at Entergy's own filed cost, that is a $1.0 to $2.2 billion a year exposure. The only thing in the way is a voluntary pledge the Commission won't make binding until December 2026, after the election.
What's proven, and what comes next. The Stack and Amazon deals showed companies pay their own way when the Commission requires it. Now Hyundai's $5.8 billion steel mill in Ascension Parish already has Entergy building transmission to serve it. Entergy's own CEO told legislators the model doesn't scale: "If we do this fifteen times, we can't digest forty-five power plants." Making 100% cost coverage binding is a vote.
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2. Stop building plants ratepayers don't need
~$350M / yr in prevented increases
Entergy has filed for roughly $12.9 billion in new gas plants for a single data-center customer, on top of a capital plan that grew $13 billion in one quarter. Utilities profit on what they build, so they want to build the maximum, whether or not the grid needs it. Louisiana's plants already run at roughly 46% of capacity, like a restaurant that only serves dinner. A commissioner's job is honest need analysis and competitive bidding before the next billion gets approved: fill the lunch seats we already built before paying for a second kitchen.
The line items
Stop building plants ratepayers don't need: ~$350M/yr prevented. Competitive procurement, binding cost allocation on large loads, and honest need analysis before certifying new gas plants. The Lightning Initiative waived the competitive bidding that would have found cheaper options; restore it.
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3. Cut the guaranteed profit rate
~$356M / yr in cuts to today's bills
Louisiana guarantees its electric monopolies a 9.70% return on the equity share of everything they build. British regulators set that number at 5.7%. German regulators set it at about 5%. We're not getting twice the service. We're paying twice the profit. Lowering that guaranteed return is the single deepest cut available: about $319 million a year across Entergy, Cleco, and SWEPCO when fully phased in, plus roughly $38 million more from the gas companies and over-earnings sharing, all computed from each company's own filed rate base and capital structure (the line items below show the math).
The line items
Lower the electric guaranteed return: ~$319M/yr at full reform. Independent analyses put the true market cost of utility equity closer to 7.5%; the reform lowers the return toward that and shifts the capital structure toward cheaper debt. Per-utility arithmetic from filed figures: Entergy Louisiana ($16.7B rate base, 50.91% equity) ~$240M; Cleco ($3.5B, 52% fixed by order) ~$52M; SWEPCO-Louisiana ($1.9B) ~$27M. The math deliberately excludes the tax gross-up on equity returns; counting it would push the figure roughly a third higher.
Lower the gas companies' guaranteed return: ~$26M/yr. Atmos is guaranteed 9.80% on a 58%-equity structure; in 2024 it actually earned 7.30%, so rates were trued up to fill the gap. The ask is lowering the guaranteed target the true-up aims at.
Share over-earnings with customers: ~$12M/yr. In 2025 Cleco earned 10.26% against its 9.70% target and owed customers nothing, because the dead-band makes the first slice of over-earning free. Tighten it.
Check the math: U-36959, U-36923, U-37502-A, the per-utility table →
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4. Stop paying twice for maintenance and storms
~$90M / yr in cuts + ~$337M / yr in prevented increases
After Ida, Entergy collected roughly $2 billion to strengthen a grid ratepayers had already been paying to maintain for decades. Now comes the sequel: a $9.6 billion "resilience" program. When the Commission's own engineering consultant reviewed the $8.85 billion of it filed so far, only about $732 million of the proposed projects passed the test of work that wouldn't already belong in a normal capital plan. The rest blended in routine replacement of aging poles and towers that deferred maintenance left behind. Pay for genuine hardening. Don't pay twice for the maintenance that was already on the bill.
The line items
Audit storm-hardening plans before they hit your bill: ~$337M/yr prevented. The Commission's own consultant found 91.7% of Entergy's project list blends routine replacement that belongs in normal, fully reviewed ratemaking, not an accelerated rider. This number takes that finding at its word: validated cost-benefit analysis, firm (not conceptual) estimates, competitive bidding, and disallowance of deferred maintenance ratepayers already funded, across all three programs: Entergy's $9.6 billion, Cleco's ~$510 million plan, and SWEPCO's $401.8 million plan. The one judgment input (how much of the routine-capital return real scrutiny avoids: 50%) is bracketed by evidence and published with the arithmetic.
Enforce the maintenance you already pay for: ~$30M/yr. Maintenance standards with teeth, audited against what ratepayers already fund in base rates.
Don't bill customers for half-built plants: ~$40M/yr. Discipline on construction-work-in-progress charges: customers shouldn't pay a return on general-system construction before it serves anyone.
Refinance uneconomic plants at bond rates: ~$20M/yr. Securitization works: refinancing storm costs with low-cost bonds instead of utility capital saved Louisiana customers $1.9 billion, by Entergy's own on-the-record account. Apply the same tool to aging, uneconomic plants.
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5. Strip the costs that don't belong on your bill
~$160M / yr in cuts to today's bills
This is the boring, line-by-line work that is the whole reason to put an engineer in the chair. The signature example: Louisiana ratepayers pay about $12.8 million a year for energy nobody used: a charge that reimburses utilities for electricity they didn't sell. Chris fought that charge as a consultant on the Commission's own docket. It is one line among many: executive bonus structures, what the parent company charges itself, excess collected taxes, and consultants billed to ratepayers at law-firm rates.
The line items
Kill the charge for energy nobody used: ~$13M/yr. The LCFC, on the record in docket R-31106. Filed number, not an estimate.
Stop billing ratepayers for bonuses and politics: ~$22M/yr. Entergy Louisiana is already barred from recovering financial-metric incentive pay; enforce that ban and extend it to Cleco, SWEPCO, and the gas companies.
Audit what the parent company charges itself: ~$30M/yr. The parent must bill the utility at cost, no profit. But "cost" is whatever the holding company says it is, and almost nobody audits it. The Commission's own investigation of those charges settled into a $184 million package, and on the water side Magnolia's parent loads overhead at nearly double the industry norm.
Return the excess tax money: ~$40M/yr. Depreciation lives and deferred-tax balances that quietly over-collect.
End the single-issue rider games: ~$50M/yr. Riders recover one cost at a time outside a full rate case, so nothing ever nets against anything. Force the offsets.
Hire staff instead of renting consultants by the hour: ~$5M/yr. The Commission rents its lawyers at up to $395/hour (the standard rate runs to $800) and its technical experts by the docket, then the cost lands in rates. Salaried in-house staff for the recurring work is cheaper.
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6. End the blank check on fuel
~$43M / yr in cuts + ~$50M / yr in prevented increases
Ask anyone who opened a gas bill this past February. The benchmark price of natural gas in January 2026 ran nearly double the January before, and because the pass-through works on a one-month delay, the spike landed on February bills after market prices had already collapsed. Nobody at the utility lost a dollar: about $2.2 billion a year of fuel and purchased power flows straight through Entergy Louisiana's fuel clause alone, 100% passed through, no markup, no vote, and almost no incentive to buy smart.
The line items
The Delta winter. The same winter, Delta Utilities took over hundreds of thousands of Louisiana gas accounts; of roughly 38,000 households on bill-smoothing levelized plans, only about 6,300 made it through the transition, because the Commission approved the sale without requiring it. And a Commission-approved rate increase took effect December 30, mid-spike. None of that was weather. All of it was votable.
Give the utility skin in the game on fuel: ~$18M/yr. A sharing mechanism on controllable fuel and purchased-power costs, so efficient procurement is rewarded and sloppy procurement costs shareholders, not just customers.
Audit the gas purchasing: ~$25M/yr. Recurring purchased-gas-adjustment audits at Atmos and Delta with real consequences. After last winter, the Commission moved its gas audits from a two-year to a one-year cycle; that is the right direction, enforced.
Diversify before the LNG export squeeze: ~$45M/yr prevented. Louisiana is about to host roughly half of America's new LNG export build, and the federal government's own export study says every billion cubic feet per day of new exports pushes the price of the gas your power plants burn higher. Your grid is ~76% gas-fired, and fuel is a 100% pass-through to your bill. Every megawatt served by self-supplied industrial power, solar paired with batteries, or demand flexibility instead of new gas carries zero fuel-price exposure. And because the gas your power plants burn comes from the same market as the gas in your stove and furnace, easing the grid's gas dependence eases the squeeze on home gas bills too. Sized on the federal government's own numbers, no advocacy math.
Manage the gas-price risk: ~$5M/yr prevented. Procurement discipline on the fuel exposure the gas build-out creates. A commissioner cannot set the price of natural gas; this is the slice that discipline can actually reach.
Make protections a condition of the deal, not an afterthought. Not a separate dollar line. When a company buys a utility, levelized-billing carryover, billing-system readiness, and winter protections belong in the approval order. Delta's owner is already shopping for its next Louisiana utility; the next commissioner votes on those conditions.
What this page does not claim: that a commissioner can set the price of natural gas. The Henry Hub price is set by national and global markets. The honest lever is procurement discipline plus deal conditions, which is why this number is tens of millions, not hundreds.
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7. Bring competition back
~$180M / yr in prevented increases
This is the one move that reaches every electric customer in Louisiana, co-op members and New Orleans included. Louisiana's biggest industrial employers offered to add 3.5 gigawatts to the grid on their own dime, with a built-in study to make sure no other customer was harmed. The Commission closed that docket in 2025 without ever running the study, over a lone dissent. Reopen it. Then open new power lines to competitive bidding instead of automatic utility self-builds. Louisiana sits on the congested side of the regional grid, like rush hour on a two-lane bridge: every customer pays extra for the bottleneck until somebody fights for the lanes.
The line items
Transmission competition + congestion relief: ~$120M/yr prevented. Competitive bidding on new transmission, and a Louisiana seat at the regional market actually fighting for import capacity. Day-ahead congestion in the regional market runs over a billion dollars; Louisiana's share of relief is counted conservatively here.
Use the grid we already have: ~$60M/yr prevented. Flexible interconnection: national grid studies show the regional market could serve roughly 15 GW of new load with existing capacity if big customers accept curtailment about 0.5% of the time. That is the engineer's answer to "ten plants for one data center."
Reopen the Customer Centered Options docket. Not a separate dollar line; it is the gateway: industry-funded supply, more competition, downward pressure on everything else.
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8. Waste less, build less, pay less
~$17M / yr in cuts + ~$40M / yr in prevented increases
The cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one nobody has to generate. Louisiana has the highest per-person electricity use in the country and some of the least developed efficiency programs, which means headroom. This is fiscal discipline, not ideology: scale the programs that pass a hard cost test, fire the ones that don't, and pay for measured results instead of paperwork.
The line items
Scale efficiency to what pays for itself: ~$40M/yr prevented. Independent analysis says cost-effective programs could meet about 5% of statewide needs; every avoided kilowatt-hour is generation nobody finances at 9.70%.
One accountable administrator, measured results: ~$9M/yr. Consolidate program administration statewide and pay on verified savings, not estimates.
Stop funding projects that fail the cost test: ~$7.5M/yr. Public-entity projects have been approved with paybacks measured in centuries. Centuries.
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9. Make water-system investors pay their own way
~$15M / yr in cuts
Private companies have been buying failing water systems across St. Tammany and the Florida Parishes, then raising rates on captive customers to pay for the repairs the purchase price should have covered. In Slidell's Belair subdivision, sworn testimony at the Commission's own hearing traced one household's bill from about $26 in 2020 to about $136 today. In June 2026 the Commission had a clean chance to stop the automatic increases and force a full rate case, the one proceeding where the company has to open its books and re-justify every cost on the record. It approved three more years of automatic increases instead. The next opening is the full rate review the Commission ordered for the company's 2027 books. It lands on the next commissioner's watch, and it only pays off if someone shows up ready to fight it.
The tier math
Under the rates approved in August 2025, a metered household owes $116.42 before using a single gallon, and an ordinary family using 8,000 gallons a month pays over $140. Until the ordered review of the 2027 books happens, the approved extension keeps the annual increases running with no books-open test. That full rate review puts it all back on the table: the minimum charges that front-load those bills, the Tier 2 classification that 85% of Magnolia's customers sit on (the same household on Tier 1 rates pays about $67 a month less across water and sewer, per the Commission's approved rate tables), and the upgrade costs investors should have underwritten when they chose to buy.
Commission staff has already disallowed $2.4 million just from desk audits. The card's dollar figure is the conservative statewide total; for a Tier 2 household the approved rate tables put the stakes at about $67 a month, and the calculator below counts it (assuming a Tier 2 customer).
What does this mean at your house?
Different moves reach different customers. The numbers below start from Entergy Louisiana, the state's largest electric utility, at the average Louisiana home's 1,200 kWh a month. Pick your own provider and usage and the page recounts only what genuinely reaches you: a co-op member has no shareholder profit rate to cut, and New Orleans bills are regulated by the City Council, not the PSC. That honesty costs us a prettier number for some households. It is the point.
It's on your bill, usually labeled "kWh used." The Louisiana average home uses about 1,200 kWh a month.
A rough conversion at the average Louisiana rate; it fills in the kWh box for you.
Tier 2 is 85% of Magnolia's customers; your bill says which tier you're on. The water savings shown assume a Tier 2 customer.
… off the bills you pay today … in coming increases that never reach you
the second number is money that never shows up on your bill (by roughly 2035), not a refundOver the next 20 years, that adds up to … staying in your pocket (cuts and prevented increases combined; electric grows on the chart's assumptions, gas and water count at today's rates). The gap grows every year.
These are estimates, not promises. They split each reform's value to residential customers using federal utility data (EIA Form 861, 2024) and your share of residential usage. Your exact share depends on rate design the Commission sets case by case. Full method, every constant, every source →
Your electric bill: two futures
Illustrative scenario, not a bill forecast. The "without an engineer" line follows the rate trajectory Louisiana's industrial users filed at the Commission (+40% by 2030), then eases toward ordinary inflation by 2040 as the filed $57 billion buildout completes and those costs finish working into rates. The "with an engineer" line subtracts the reforms above as they phase in; because they are structural rules, not one-time credits, the gap between the lines widens every year. If the Magnolia Water box is checked, both lines also carry the water bill on its own path (today's approved Tier 2 rates growing a few percent a year; the reform subtracts the Tier 2 reset, assuming a Tier 2 customer). Out-years are inherently uncertain; that's why they fade. Assumptions & sources
- The shaded gap is what stays in your pocket (cuts + prevented increases, combined)
When someone fights, Louisiana wins. Here are the receipts.
Skeptical that a regulator can actually claw money back? It has already happened, every time someone competent showed up and fought. These are documented past wins from public orders and on-the-record testimony. They are not included in the savings totals above, and each one is labeled one-time or recurring so nobody can quietly add them up.
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$125 million
One-time disallowance · 2024
Returned to Cleco and SWEPCO customers after the utilities billed ratepayers for an overpriced coal plant they ran imprudently. The Commission's own staff and hearing examiner forced it. (Docket U-35753, Dolet Hills.)
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$1.9 billion
Cumulative savings · 2020-21 storms
Kept off Louisiana bills by financing Laura, Delta, Zeta, and Ida storm costs with low-cost bonds instead of normal utility financing, which would have charged ratepayers the utility's full profit rate on the same money. The $1.9 billion figure is Entergy's own, conceded on the record at the Commission in September 2025. The cheaper path happened because the Commission required it.
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$95 million
One-time settlement · Louisiana's share
Won for Entergy Louisiana ratepayers from the Grand Gulf nuclear settlement after Louisiana spent years fighting at the federal regulator. The same fight cut the affiliate's guaranteed profit rate from 10.94% to 9.65%.
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$120 million
First year, recurring since
Saved in year one when Louisiana joined the regional power market, and it has kept saving tens of millions every year since. Structural reform compounds.
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$31.9 million
One-time credit · 2025
Refunded to Entergy Louisiana customers when the company earned above its allowed return in 2024: proof the over-earning mechanisms pay out when somebody checks the math. (Order U-37594.)
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$2.44 million
Disallowed over 3 years
Costs Commission staff struck from Magnolia Water's rate plan, before any commissioner made the water fight a priority. Imagine the audit with someone fighting for it.
The lesson is not that the system works. It is that the money is there, and the only thing between ratepayers and hundreds of millions a year is whether someone competent shows up to fight for it. Most 800-page filings sail through unchallenged. The plan on this page makes the fight the default, not the exception.
What this seat can't do, and the next fights
A plan you can trust has to tell you what it can't do. Three things, plainly. A commissioner cannot set the price of natural gas. Markets do that. What he can control is how much gas Louisiana is exposed to and how it gets bought. The storm charges already on your bill from past hurricanes are locked by bond covenants and cannot be rescinded; what a commissioner controls is whether the next $9.6 billion gets real scrutiny before it's locked in too. And rates lawfully collected in the past mostly can't be refunded; they can be reset going forward, which is exactly what a rate case is for.
One more thing said plainly: a commissioner is one vote out of five. One commissioner alone cannot order any of this. What one commissioner can do is read every filing, put what is buried in them on the public record, and turn quiet approvals into public questions the other four have to answer. The receipts above show what happens when even one competent fighter shows up. Three votes change the rules. One vote changes what gets noticed, and what gets noticed changes what the other four can wave through.
On a co-op or in New Orleans? Louisiana's electric co-ops are member-owned and set their own rates, so a PSC commissioner doesn't vote on your co-op bill, and there's no shareholder profit rate to cut. New Orleans bills are set by the City Council. What does reach you: every Louisiana electric customer pays the transmission and market costs the PSC shapes, so the competition fight is yours too, and widening what reaches you is one of the next fights: more import capacity, competitive transmission, and a market that doesn't trap Louisiana on the expensive side of the fence.
One more fight worth naming: Louisiana is one of the states with no independent ratepayer advocate: no public office whose only job is fighting utility filings. Indiana's saved its ratepayers roughly $27 for every dollar it cost. Standing one up here is how this plan outlives any one commissioner. Until then, the advocate is the engineer you elect. This seat is on the ballot across District 1 on November 3, 2026.