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Report for America is a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities.

New Report: Major Windfall For ComEd At Expense Of Customers

ComEd
ComEd Logo

According to  new report out this week shows ComEd is enjoying record profits while its customers pay higher electricity delivery rates than they should be.

The report by the Illinois Public Interest Research Group (PIRG),  show that the 2011 Energy Infrastructure Modernization Act (EIMA) is at the center of ComEd’s "profit machine." 

"The law mandated a set of investments to improve reliability and upgrade, update technology," Abe Scarr said. "And then in return and this is how kind of ComEd presented it was as a give and take. There was a major overhaul in terms of how utilities were regulated in the state."

Scarr is with Illinois PIRG. He said that the implementation of EIMA in 2011 has translated into automatic rate hikes every year since it went into law. The report shows that ComEd customers paid $700 million more total for delivery in 2019 than they did in 2011. 

Scarr said that on top of surging delivery rates, it’s unclear how effectively ComEd held up their end of the bargain. As part of the passing fo EIMA, ComEd agreed to modernize their grid and improvements to reliable service.

“We've found that those gains in liability have not been properly scrutinized. And so we don't know if we've gotten value from the amount of money we spend on it.” Scarr said.

ComEd said that consumers have seen benefits from the Exelon subsidiaries’s modernization efforts.

  • Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco is a 2020 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project which is a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms.