In an April 29 presentation to the three commissioners, PUC staffers displayed data showing increased duration and frequency of power outages in 2024 compared to previous years. Staffers also discovered that of around 1 million calls to Xcel’s customer service line by Colorado customers in 2024, 100,000 were disconnected by Xcel before any resolution had been reached.
“It seems like we’ve got a real problem on our hands,” Eric Blank, chairman of the PUC, concluded after the presentation. “I view Colorado as a light-touch regulatory state, which generally assumes that the utility is acting in good faith and in the public interest. As I listen to this, the company's behavior raises troubling trust questions about the fundamental assumption that they're acting in the public interest.”
Erin O’Neill, deputy director of fixed utilities for the PUC, said the number of dropped calls is a safety concern. Even those who didn’t get hung up on by Xcel say they grew increasingly frustrated with the utility over the last year.
“The data suggests really significant, uniformly negative customer service and customer care concerns for the company,” O’Neill said. “Some of these things are outside of the company's control, like the weather, but a lot of this was conscious decisions that the company made in terms of how to operate its business.”
The PUC’s findings are no surprise to the customers who sparked the investigation months ago.
A particular area of concern is on Broadway in Denver. Every business and resident on the west side of Lincoln Street and east side of Broadway from Bayaud to Third avenues has experienced regular, long-lasting power outages that increased in frequency over the last year.
In June, July and August of 2024, there were three outages per month on those four blocks, with residents and business owners reporting no power for at least four hours, if not longer, each time.
They elevated their concerns to the PUC after getting little to no response from Xcel. Though the company has made improvements in the area in recent months, the PUC investigation showed there are many other parts of Xcel’s service area where the situation is just as bad, if not worse.
In fact, PUC staffers identified the fifteen worst electric feeders — extension cords of the power grid, running from substations to specific neighborhoods — in Xcel’s territory...and Broadway isn’t even one of them.
The Xcel Energy office building in downtown Denver.
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Power Outages in Metro Denver Increased in 2024
The PUC discovered persistent outage issues impacting Boulder, Denver and other Front Range areas served by Xcel. According to the PUC's data analysis, customers experienced an increase of five minutes in outages every year from 2015 to 2023, for a total of 45 more minutes of power outages in 2023 compared to in 2015.But in 2024, the numbers skyrocketed — with the average customer experiencing 350 minutes of outages compared to around 166 minutes that would have occurred if the outages stayed on trend with previous years.
In a statement from spokesperson Tyler Bryant, Xcel says the company tries to provide reliable, affordable and sustainable electric service and regularly assesses performance to improve customer service and satisfaction.
“We recognize that we do not always deliver to the level we set for ourselves,” Bryant says. “From a reliability standpoint, our customers received reliable electric service 99.9 percent of the time. However, it’s important to note that 2024 was a challenging year due to several extreme weather events in Colorado.”
In April 2024, Xcel conducted a public safety shutoff because of the high fire danger created by extreme winds. That shutoff, which impacted around 155,000 homes and businesses, was responsible for many of the increased outage minutes — but not all of them. Minutes not related to major weather events were also “significantly above the trend line,” according to Tamar Moss, a fellow with the Colorado Department of Energy who worked on the investigation.
“Even when we take out major events from 2024, this year stands out as an outlier,” Moss said.
According to the PUC presentation, customers experienced both more outages and longer outages, especially within the territory of the fifteen worst electric feeders.
“Any given year since 2015, some feeders would have an increase, some feeders would have a decrease,” said Nick Bongiardina, a PUC analyst. “It's notable that from 2023 to 2024, all of these feeders had an increase between those two years, which just wouldn't be expected if things were in their normal course of operation.”
The Broadway outages are not covered by those fifteen bad feeders, but are associated with a problematic section of a feeder. Customers in the area experienced outage minutes similar to those served by the worst feeders in the entire Xcel system.
According to Moss, Xcel’s outage reporting isn't granular enough to allow determining what caused the outages — so one idea from the PUC commissioners is to increase the specificity of Xcel’s required outage log.
Both businesses and residents in the Lincoln/Broadway area want a more concrete response, including compensation to help businesses recoup power-outage-driven losses.
In a letter, resident Blake Davis, who lives in the impacted area, requested “the PUC to require penalties that not only impact Xcel but also benefit those damaged by the service failures.”
Xcel says customers who experienced frequent outages will automatically receive a bill credit in July. The company has also tested feeder performance and replaced cables when needed to strengthen electric infrastructure.
Xcel's "Alarming" Customer Service Trends in 2024
Perhaps more concerning to the commissioners were the findings on customer care, which arose because the PUC Consumer Affairs Department noticed increased customer complaints. According to O’Neill, complaints to the PUC related to Xcel have increased 45 percent in the last few years, and the number of complaints per customer has risen by 200 percent — both "alarming" trends.According to Xcel’s internal customer satisfaction survey, which the company provided to the PUC, satisfaction numbers declined in every category, representing an average reduction of satisfaction of 17 percent across the board.
Like the outage issues, 2024 stood out for being significantly worse than previous years. In 2022 and 2023, Xcel answered calls within the standard of 45 seconds 70 percent of the time. In 2024, just 45 percent of people had their phone calls answered in that time, with the average time for an answer sitting at 452 seconds.
Because waits were so long, over 200,000 calls were terminated by the customer before they got a response. Combined with the 100,000 calls Xcel dropped when people said their concern was not an active emergency, around 30 percent of the calls to Xcel from customers were dropped in 2024.
PUC staff found that Xcel staffing levels had decreased 20 percent from 2022 to 2024, with the customer contact center budget declining by 5 percent from 2020 to 2024.
“Over that same period of time, [Xcel’s] electricity rates have increased by over 30 percent,” O’Neill noted.
The number of complaints about bills increased by about 40 percent over the last two years, while the time it took Xcel to address billing complaints increased significantly in 2024 compared to the previous three years. According to O’Neill, Xcel believes those issues are related to widespread meter replacement as the company switches to time-of-use rates; the company also outsourced around 60 percent of billing staff. O’Neill said Xcel is aware of the challenges caused by the outsourcing and is working to grow staffing levels and train staff more effectively.
“We have increased the total number of customer support agents and provided specialized training to address billing issues,” Bryant confirms. “We are committed to improving and serving our customers with excellence.”
PUC staff suggested the commission consider instituting rules regarding disconnection of company phone calls, especially when customers aren't able to leave a message or callback number. Staff also suggested that the PUC consider creating policies on quality of service expectations around call response and responsiveness to customer concerns.
But the commissioners indicated they may be interested in going even further, with Blank suggesting the $6.5 million in penalties Xcel paid for lapses in service quality in 2024 were not high enough.
Colorado Utility Commissioners Ready to Take Action on Xcel
“It sounds like the simple story is there's financial and profit incentives for this company to reduce O and M and staffing levels, and that's what they did, and it's greatly or significantly harmed billing, customer service and maybe outages,” Blank said. “This is a regulated monopoly operating in a legally defined service territory where competition is prohibited. In return for that privilege of operating as a monopoly, they shouldn't be driving profit increase at the expense of customers.” He said the staffing cuts in the customer care and billing departments likely saved Xcel far more than the $6.5 million the company paid in penalties. Commissioner Megan Gilman added that she questions Xcel asking for billions of dollars to “buy new things” when it appears that customers are not being served by the current system.
“I'm not sure if those customers need all the new things if we cannot provide the basic, core services in a competent way as we move forward,” Gilman said.
Gilman also wondered if other electric utilities were experiencing a similar uptick in complaints. Though the PUC only regulates one other electric utility, O’Neill noted that other utilities like telephone and water utilities did not have a marked increased in complaints. Gilman and Blank both suggested that the commission examine ways to incentivize Xcel based on customer satisfaction.
Commissioner Tom Plant offered the specific idea of tying parts of Xcel’s cost recovery from customers to customer satisfaction metrics, saying he knows that idea has been tested in the United Kingdom before.
“On the customer side, I think this has been a giant fail for the company,” Plant said.
Blank said he wants to schedule an emergency rulemaking to address the findings.
