Xcel Energy customers face more outages and longer phone wait times. “We have a real problem,” regulators say.

Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest electricity provider, is having increasing difficulty answering customer calls, sending out bills and keeping the lights on, according to two reports by state utility regulators.

Blackouts more than doubled in 2024 and customer complaints have jumped 100% in three years, according to a Colorado Public Utilities Commission briefing Wednesday on outages.

Outages have become more prevalent across Xcel Energy’s service territory which includes zones from the northeast, near Sterling, to Greeley, the Denver metro area, the San Luis Valley, the central mountains and Grand Junction. 

In 2024 the average Xcel customer experienced 350 outage minutes, compared to an average of 166 minutes between 2014 and 2023, and more customers were hit with multiple and longer blackouts, according to a PUC staff analysis.

At the same time, customer complaints rose to 1,728 in 2024 from 873 in 2022. The number of customers not receiving bills was up 58% and the time to resolve billing problems stretched to three months. The utility serves 1.5 million people in the state.

A big part of the problem, the commission’s chief economist Erin O’Neill said, was due to a 10% reduction in staff and a 5% cut in the customer service budget between 2022 and 2024. O’Neill noted that electric rates increased 30% over the same period.

“We’re seeing a company before us requesting tens of billions of dollars to buy new things, to do new things when they appear to be falling short of their basic core commitments to the customers that they exist to serve,” Commissioner Megan Gilman said.

Xcel Energy operates in eight states with Colorado and Minnesota its biggest markets. In the first quarter of 2024 it reported $483 million in profit, with Colorado accounting for 53% of earnings – the largest single share.

“This is a regulated monopoly operating in a legally defined service territory where competition is prohibited, and in return for that privilege of operating as a monopoly, they shouldn’t be driving profit at the expense of customers,” PUC Chairman Eric Blank said.

“Aren’t they obligated to act in the public interest and answer the phone and bill customers, and avoid and respond to outages?” Blank asked.

In a statement, Xcel Energy said: “We recognize that we do not always deliver to the level we set for ourselves.”

“We hold ourselves to a high standard and that is why we continually assess our performance and take necessary steps to improve customer service and satisfaction,”’ the company said. “From a reliability standpoint, our customers received reliable electric service 99.9% of the time.”

The Daily Sun-Up podcast | More episodes

A few bad feeder lines account for 18% of outages

The analysis found that since 2014 outage numbers have been increasing. In 2024, they were above historical average in every Xcel Energy service area. 

Fifteen bad transmission feeder lines, or 2% of all feeders, which carry electricity from a substation for distribution to homes and business, account for 18% of the outages.

Seven of those feeders are in Boulder County, three in the Denver metro area, two in the San Luis Valley and three in the Front Range service area, which includes Jefferson County.

“Over the past several months, we have been strengthening our infrastructure by testing feeder performance, replacing cables, assessing our substations and more to address these issues,” Xcel Energy said. 

Any customer who experienced frequent outages will automatically receive a bill credit in July 2025, as part of the company’s quality-of-service plan.

 The outages, however, have been widespread. One stretch of South Broadway in Denver, with 178 businesses and not on one of the bad feeders, suffered 13 outages in 2024, including one that lasted a day and a half, according to a filing.

At the Waterworks Car Wash, cars were soaped up and moving through the tunnel when the power went out. “We had to manually guide cars out, hand wash them down and give complimentary wash for the inconvenience,” said Marty Krekow, Waterworks’ general manager.

Krekow said there have already been four outages in 2025.

Last July 13, the Colorado Brewers Rendezvous was in full swing in Salida when the power went out at the craft beer festival,

“Vendors were unable to process credit card payments on the busiest day of the festival, resulting in untold losses of revenue,” Salida Mayor Dan Shore said in a letter to the PUC.

“The City of Salida is solely dependent on sales tax revenue and the multitude of outages experienced during the summer directly affected revenue,” Shore said. He listed 14 blackouts over a four-month period, the longest lasting nearly 10 hours.

A major contributor to the increased outage time in 2024 was the heavy wind storm in April when Xcel Energy shut down lines to reduce the risk of wildfires and other “major events.” Still, when adjusted for these events, outages remained historically high.

Other causes of outages included equipment failures, trees hitting power lines and damage by the public. In a large number of cases the cause was listed as unknown.

“In 2024, the highest number of customers in the last 10 years experienced six or more outages” — 90,000 customers, the report said.

Didn’t get a bill? That could take months to clear.

As for the PUC staff’s customer care investigation, it found that Xcel Energy’s goal of a response to a customer call in 45 seconds was met 75% of the time in 2023, but a year later it had fallen to 45%. The average wait time was 452 seconds, or about 7.5 minutes.

The number of abandoned calls quadrupled with Xcel Energy customers hanging up in 200,000 cases. “They couldn’t wait to get a response from the company,” O’Neill said. There were 100,000 times when customers were auto-disconnected.

Xcel Energy gets about a million calls a year, O’Neill said.

Between 2023 and 2024 there was a 58% increase in customers not receiving monthly bills and a 240% increase compared to 2020. It can take months to get this non-billing resolved and customers on average end up with a bill of $3,000.

O’Neill said that the company attributed some of the billing delays to the widespread replacement of old electric meters with new smart meters. If the meters aren’t properly set, they can create bad bills.

In one case a smart meter generated a $8 million monthly bill for a customer. Such bills are flagged and that delays an accurate bill getting to a customer.

O’Neill said that Xcel Energy Is “taking this seriously and has taken steps.”

Xcel Energy said it has increased the number of customer support agents and provided specialized training to address billing issues, while implementing organizational improvements to prevent future billing problems.

Still, O’Neill said, “the data suggest really significant, uniformly negative customer service and customer care concerns for the company and shortchanging customer facing service while spending elsewhere.”

Joseph Pereira, deputy director of the Colorado Office of Utility Consumer Advocate, said “although surprising, this is consistent with what we’ve seen around the company’s operations and implementation generally.”

The UCA represents residential and small commercial customers in PUC proceedings, including Xcel Energy rate cases, the company’s $1.9 billion wildfire mitigation plan and its $12 billion Clean Energy Plan.

“They’ve taken advantage of the public trust under an umbrella of leading to meet other state goals,” Pereira said. “In doing that, they have forgotten some of their core function which is providing a consumer service.”

PUC director Rebecca White, said in a statement, that “while the rules we have in place today ensure some recourse for customers, the question before the commission now is whether that is sufficient to protect customers.”

“That’s where the commission will be turning its attention next,” White said.

The staff recommendations called for better data and reporting on outages and considering setting quality of service rules. There was also a discussion of increasing fines. In 2024 the company paid $6.5 million for outages and customer service failures.

“Not being able to answer the phone within a minute doesn’t inspire confidence in the $20 billion they want to spend,” Blank said. “It sounds like we’ve got a real problem on our hands.”