A PLAN TO LOWER BILLS AND FIX OUR GRID

As a consultant to the LPSC, Chris worked to advance policies that would lower costs for Louisiana families and businesses. During that time, he uncovered approximately $12.8 million per year in unnecessary charges being passed on to ratepayers for energy that was never actually delivered. He urged the Commission to change its rules and eliminate this waste. The Commission declined to act.

After seeing firsthand how rising utility bills continued to burden families while monopoly utilities earned guaranteed profits, Chris decided he could no longer stand on the sidelines. Louisiana needs a regulator with the technical expertise, real-world experience, and independence to stand up to powerful interests and deliver results.

When elected, Chris will advance three key reforms to level the playing field and bring families reliable electricity at a fair cost: require utilities to fix the grid before raising rates, ensure data centers pay 100% of the infrastructure they require, and end the pay-to-play practice of utilities funding the commissioners who regulate them.

Every month, your electric bill includes money for grid maintenance. The problem: the Public Service Commission doesn't actually require utilities to spend it. Whatever they don't spend becomes profit. There's no audit, no refund, and no proof the work got done.

Then a storm hits, the grid fails, and ratepayers pay again to fix what we already paid for the first time.

After Ida, Zeta, Isaac, Gustav, and Katrina, Entergy got $2 billion to strengthen the grid they should have been taking care of all along. We take all the risk. They earn all the profit.

And it isn't just electricity. The same broken pattern is happening with water systems across St. Tammany and the Florida Parishes. Companies like Magnolia Water buy failing systems, raise rates, and leave customers stuck with the bill the investors should have paid.

This stops with me on the Commission.

What I'll do:

• Make our utilities fix our electric, gas, and water systems before allowing any rate increases.
• Require utilities to prove they actually spent maintenance money before approving rate hikes.
• Audit storm-recovery requests against pre-storm maintenance spending.
• For water utility acquisitions like Magnolia: require investors to underwrite system upgrades, not pass them onto captive customers.

Louisiana wants to bring in data centers, computing plants that can each use as much power as a small city, and the current deal would stick you with up to 75% of the cost of serving them. That's the most urgent fight in front of the Commission right now. But it's not the whole problem: your electric bill is already up about 50% since 2020, before a single data center has pulled a watt off the grid.

Utilities earn a guaranteed profit on everything they build, so they build as much as they can, as expensively as they can, and send you the bill. It's not your meter reader or the linemen fixing things after a storm, it's the boardrooms and Wall Street executives who designed it that way, and they bury the details in 800-page filings nobody reads. I'm an engineer who consulted for the Public Service Commission, and I can actually understand those filings and tell you where the money goes.

Four ways we drive those costs down:

1. Make data centers pay their fair share.

When a data center comes to Louisiana, it should pay 100% of its own costs: the power, the transmission lines, the water, all of it. Right now the Lightning Initiative shifts about 75% of that onto your electric bill instead of onto the out-of-state, trillion-dollar companies ordering up these expensive gas plants. Other deals have already proven these companies will pay their own way when the Commission requires it. This one doesn't. I'll fight to change that.

2. Lower the guaranteed profit rate.

There's a number on your electric bill you've never heard of. It's the guaranteed profit rate the Commission votes to give Entergy. Right now it's 9.7%. British regulators just set theirs at 5.7%. German regulators set theirs at 5%. We're not getting twice the service. We're paying twice the profit.

3. Bring competition back.

The Louisiana Energy Users Group, which represents Exxon, Shell, and 35,000 industrial workers, offered to add 3.5 gigawatts of power to the grid on their own dime, with a built-in study to make sure nobody else's bill got hit. In 2025 the Commission closed that docket without ever running the study. I'll reopen it. If private industry will fund cheaper power, we take it.

4. Kill the junk charges.

There's a charge on the energy efficiency docket called the Lost Contribution to Fixed Costs. It bills ratepayers for energy utilities didn't sell, roughly $12.8 million a year. Money for nothing. Going through filings line by line and killing charges like that is exactly the work an engineer does.

Utility companies fund the campaigns of the commissioners who regulate them. Spending $200,000 to elect a friendly commissioner is a fantastic deal for a utility making $4 billion a year. That's the structural conflict of interest at the center of why your bill keeps going up.

Your electric bill shouldn't be somebody's campaign donation.

The pledge

I am the only viable candidate in this race who has pledged to take zero utility money. Period.

The bigger fix

The rule itself has to change. Nobody running for the Public Service Commission should be allowed to take money from the utilities they regulate. That's the structural reform.

What I'll do:

• Take zero utility money in this campaign.
• Push for rules prohibiting utility campaign contributions to commissioners.
• Ban Utility Donations to commissioners, by rule, statewide.
• Publish every donation publicly so voters can see who's funding whom.

These problems are not going away, and they may get worse. A 2025 analysis projected that base electricity rates for customers could rise by as much as 90% between 2018 and 2030 if current policies and spending trends continue. That’s not sustainable for Louisiana families or small businesses. We need real accountability and a Commissioner who is willing to challenge the status quo. It’s time to elect an Independent who puts ratepayers first. Chris Justin will do exactly that.