Lauren Waldrip is resigned to rising electric bills as power-hungry data centers proliferate and demand soars.
But the Arkansas Advanced Energy Association chief is alarmed by a trend that’s squeezing ratepayers facing higher costs everywhere.
State regulators approved a 23% rate increase for Southwestern Electric Power Co.’s 126,000 Arkansas customers last month, drawing fierce pushback.
“Frequent, dramatic rate increases should be a warning sign,” Waldrip told Arkansas Business. “Arkansas has to rethink how we plan for future energy needs if we want to remain competitive and protect reliability and affordability.”
Waldrip noted that utilities serving Arkansans, including Shreveport-based SWEPCO and Entergy Arkansas, are pursuing additional rate cases. “If we don’t change how we plan and invest, continuing at this pace simply isn’t feasible for the people and businesses we’re trying to serve.”
The hike approved by the Arkansas Public Service Commission was down from an original 27% request, but still represents an average $24 monthly increase. Part of that will support continued operations at the Flint Creek coal-fired power plant in Benton County, which draws criticism from citizens and environmental groups.
The plant is on track to be retired in 2038. But the PSC ruling will require studying northwest Arkansas’ grid reliability under other timelines, including potentially retiring the plant in 2030 or 2035.
“Ratepayers have already paid hundreds of millions to build and maintain Flint Creek and to purchase out-of-state coal to feed it,” Cameron Rackley, an area resident and an organizing intern for the Sierra Club, told Arkansas Business. “The PSC’s decision will force SWEPCO’s customers to throw millions more into a money pit that is nearing the end of its life and polluting the air and water of northwest Arkansas every single day.”
Rackley and the Sierra Club favor closing the plant as early as possible and investing in renewable generation. Those “are fast to bring online, don’t pollute our communities, and would have decades of use ahead of them,” Rackley said.
Nate Bell, a former Arkansas lawmaker and renewable power advocate, doesn’t really blame regulators, he said in an interview. “Their hands have largely been tied by bad laws enacted by the Legislature” that reinforced utility monopolies on electricity generation in 2023 and 2025.
The 2023 law was associated with limits on net metering, the process that gives private solar arrays a credit for the excess power they put onto the grid. But Bell said net metering was actually a minor part.
“[The law] essentially made net meter aggregation impossible, or at least economically unfeasible. And there were punitive measures that set limits,” Bell said. “On a residential application, you have a cap. On commercial projects, you have a cap. It was all designed to make sure that the utilities protected their monopoly. And frankly, it’s working.”
The 2025 Generating Arkansas Jobs Act incentivized utilities to build big new projects, partly by allowing them to start billing ratepayers as infrastructure is built, rather than when it starts supplying electricity.
Citing former PSC Chair Ted Thomas, Bell argued that “free capacity” built by private citizens lowers costs for everyone. But the 2023 bill effectively shut down consumer-owned generation growth, from residential solar to small arrays serving businesses.
Utilities now have “carte blanche” to build whatever generation they want “and essentially charge whatever they want for it,” Bell said. “And consumers don’t have much recourse under the new laws.”
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