Oklahoma Regulators Just Denied OG&E’s Rate Hike

Amazing news in the Sooner State... the Oklahoma Corporation Commission actually pushed back against corporate welfare for once. OG&E recently asked to raise customer rates during construction of new infrastructure, but the board gave them a prompt and ultra-rare "no."

The Story

OG&E wanted to use a cost-recovery tool called Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) to have ratepayers shoulder the cost of building two new natural gas turbines at its Horseshoe Lake plant. Thanks to a recent law (Senate Bill 998), utilities can recover those costs before construction is done, but not always.

After several tense meetings, the Corporation Commission voted 2-1 to deny OG&E’s request to apply CWIP for this build.

Their reasoning? Whatever savings customers might eventually see would come decades from now, 25 years or more, in the words of Commissioner Todd Hiett. And by then? Who knows if those same customers will even be on the grid.

Consumer groups like AARP and the Oklahoma Industrial Energy Consumers backed the denial, saying OG&E hadn’t proven that this approach was fair or reasonable. They argued that charging people now for something they won’t immediately benefit from shifts too much risk onto the average Oklahoman.

Still, the OCC didn’t completely shut the door. They gave OG&E pre-approval to build the turbines, they just can’t charge people during construction under the CWIP method. There are also consumer protections coming: OG&E has to file a “large-load tariff” so big users (like data centers) pay their fair share instead of dumping costs on regular customers.

That's A Positive Note For All Oklahomans

What’s wild is how rare this kind of regulator pushback is. For a utility this big to get denied, especially for a multi-hundred-million-dollar build, that’s a big deal. If you’ve felt like rate hikes always come easy around here, they usually do... but this might be a moment to lean back and let the OCC pat itself on the back for once.