States with most reliable grids often have cheapest, cleanest power – study

States where residential customers spend less on electricity and have more reliable power also tend to be less reliant on fossil-fueled generation, according to a new study by the Illinois-based Citizens Utility Board. By contrast, some states that rely more on fossil fuels also have longer outages and households paying more for energy, the study found.

The Citizens Utility Board, or CUB, ranked all 50 states and the District of Columbia on energy affordability, power outages and the environmental impact of their electricity service, using 2019 and 2020 data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and several other federal agencies. The Illinois legislature formed the CUB in the 1980s as an advocate for residential utility customers.

Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Illinois, Nebraska, North Dakota, Arizona, Minnesota and Utah ranked at the top for overall utility performance, according to the study. Six of those states were also among the 10 with the lowest power costs; Utah had the lowest average annual residential power bills at $908.

Those 10 well-performing states also were among the more reliable for electricity service. Nebraska, for example, had fewer power outages per customer in 2019 than any other state, based on EIA data, though the District of Columbia topped the list. Nebraska customers also saw their power restored more quickly than any other state when they did have an outage.

Seven of the 10 states with the overall best utility rankings also scored in the top 20 on environmental metrics. Utah, Nebraska and North Dakota were the outliers.

The CUB based its environmental rankings on carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from energy, without including imported power. This metric included the percentage of power the state generates from renewable resources as well, but it leaves out residential solar panels for which no data is available. That is likely skewing the ranking for a state such as Hawaii known to have significant solar resources, the group said.

Although the data and metrics in the new study may be improved and tweaked over time, the results raise some important questions, said David Kolata, CUB's executive director.

"I think we can make the conclusion that when people say we need fossil fuels for affordability and reliability, the data doesn't really bear that out," Kolata said in an interview. "It's interesting to us that some of the bottom performers are bad across the board, but we're not saying they can't improve. In fact, we think there's room for quite a bit of improvement in all states."

Outages, rising costs in West Virginia

West Virginia had the lowest score for overall utility performance, followed by Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi, Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Connecticut and Maine in the bottom 10. Unaffordable power costs dragged down the ranking for some states, which was the case with Connecticut, Hawaii and Alaska.

Residential customers in some fossil fuel-heavy states pay more for electricity while suffering more outages, the study showed.

West Virginia ranked 36th for annual residential power costs, and power customers there experienced the most more outages. The state trailed only Wyoming for the highest emissions of carbon dioxide per gigawatt hour of power produced, giving West Virginia a low environmental score in the study.

Robert Williams, director of the West Virginia Public Service Commission's Consumer Advocate Division, said in an interview that power costs have been rising steadily for households and businesses in recent years, mainly due to surcharges associated with keeping the state's coal plants operating. West Virginia still gets 90% of its power from coal-fired generation.

As for outages, regulators have been pushing the state's utilities to improve vegetation management and speed up repairs after frequent ice storms tear down power lines in difficult terrain and knock out power.

"In some instances, we haven't seen the improvement we hoped for," Williams said. "The commission is doing a focused [utility] audit to see what can be done to improve the situation."

Regarding the state's power costs, "it's hard for people," Williams said. "We're not a state with a lot of income." West Virginians spend a higher share of their household income on electricity bills than people in 44 states, the CUB's research shows.

Kolata emphasized that more analysis is needed to sort out why bills are higher or lower in some states and why some states have longer outages than others. "We also recognize there may be other methodologies for tracking this," Kolata said. "We're hoping this will start a conversation."

The CUB's data compilation started as an internal project to see how Illinois compared with its neighbors, and it grew into a nationwide comparison of states, Kolata said. The group plans to update the report annually going forward.