They bore you to death on purpose

Here's something I learned working inside the Louisiana Public Service Commission: utility companies don't win by being sneaky. They win by being boring.

They put out 800-page documents that no one reads. They have armies of lawyers and engineers that bore you to death so they get what they want.

This isn't an accident. It's the strategy.

Every rate increase, every new charge, every cost that gets pushed onto your bill — it all lives inside filings so dense and technical that no normal person would ever find it. The commissioners who are supposed to catch it? Most don't have the background to read it. And the ones who could? They're taking campaign donations from the utilities they're supposed to regulate.

I found ~$12.8 million per year buried in a filing

I'm Chris Justin. I'm a licensed Professional Engineer, and I used to consult for the LPSC. On the energy efficiency docket, I argued to eliminate a charge called the Lost Contribution to Fixed Costs.

In plain English: monopoly utilities are billing ratepayers for energy they didn't sell. The logic was that if you use less electricity thanks to efficiency programs, the utility loses revenue — so you should pay them anyway.

But here's the thing: they're not actually losing revenue right now. The charge is completely unnecessary. In 2024, it was ~$12.8 million (2025 numbers aren't out yet).

For literally nothing.

That's the structural challenge. The people in charge of protecting us are up against an army of folks who are very smart and very well equipped to bore us to death.

The real problem isn't data centers

Everyone's talking about data centers right now. But here's what gets lost in that conversation: electricity prices are up about 45% since 2018 — and not a single data center has pulled power off the Louisiana grid yet.

Data centers are throwing gasoline on a fire that's already burning. But they're not the fire.

The fire is the monopoly business model itself. Utilities get a guaranteed rate of return on everything they build. Their incentive is to build as much as possible, as expensively as possible, and push costs as high as they can wherever they can. Death by a thousand cuts — and they win because nobody has the tools to stop them.

What competition looks like

The Louisiana Energy Users Group — a coalition representing over 35,000 employees, including Exxon and Shell — proposed adding 3.5 gigawatts of generation to the grid on their own dime. They didn't ask for subsidies. They asked the Commission to study the impact on other ratepayers.

The Commission took the utility companies at their word and refused to even study it.

Private industry was willing to fund new generation and introduce real competition. The Commission said no. I would reopen that docket, because if someone wants to build power on their own nickel and it might lower your bill, the least we can do is look at the numbers.

We should be doing hard things

At the LPSC, I once tried to merge two overlapping energy efficiency programs so customers would have one number to call instead of two. Less confusion, less waste. Dead simple improvement.

The answer I got: "That's hard."

Yeah. It should be hard. If it means people at the Commission work a little harder so millions of Louisianans have a simpler way to drive down their costs, that's the job.

I'm running as an Independent. No party. Zero utility money. I'm the only PE in the race — which means I'm the only candidate who can personally read those 800-page filings and tell you where your money is going.