Milwaukee Community Groups Announce “People’s Audit” of We Energies

MILWAUKEE – On Saturday, Nov. 1, community leaders, advocates and Milwaukee-area residents came together for Our Power, Our Future, a community conversation to review We Energies‘ past practices and empower residents to take action for a fair, sustainable energy future. During the event, attendees announced plans to conduct an independent community audit of We Energies — dubbed the “People’s Audit” — calling on the monopoly utility to disclose its rate practices, service reliability and impact on Milwaukee residents.

“Rising utility costs are crushing Milwaukee families by forcing residents to make difficult trade-offs to their health and financial well-being,” said Bryan Rogers, Environmental Justice Director at Walnut Way and director of the statewide Environmental Justice & Infrastructure Initiative. “An energy system that prioritizes shareholders and continues to build harmful fossil-fuel plants, rather than affordable, reliable energy for struggling families, is not only unjust, it’s unsustainable.”

The People’s Audit will look to analyze We Energies’ financial and operational practices, specifically its rate increases, massive profits and the environmental and health impacts of building more fossil-fuel plants. Aspects of the audit will include:

• Understanding the scope, distribution, and equity impacts of shutoffs and arrears in Milwaukee.
• Assessing how rates and bills have changed by class, usage and geography to compare Milwaukee’s rates to three peer cities in the Midwest.
• Evaluating outage frequency and duration, identify worst-performing circuits and measure whether resilience investments align with need.
• Documenting current and future generation mix, capital plans, emissions and financial risks affecting Milwaukee ratepayers.

The call for this audit comes after We Energies has continuously raised energy prices for Milwaukee residents, including seven rate increase requests over the last 12 years. Notably, the utility will realize a 9% increase in rates in 2025 and an 8% increase in 2026. The utility has also been supportive of the construction of large-scale data centers, which are projected to use more electricity than all residential homes in Wisconsin. In a news release issued days before the event, WEC, parent company of We Energies, also reported rising profits.

“Milwaukee residents deserve transparency and accountability from their monopoly utility company,” said Kat Klawes, Climate Action Policy Coordinator at Citizen Action of Wisconsin. “Our community deserves better information about how We Energies is shutting people off for nonpayment, how much household debt they are forcing families to carry, where outages keep happening, and how much money is going into fossil fuel projects like coal and methane gas instead of reliable, affordable clean energy. We Energies is making record profits while families are choosing between keeping the lights on, paying for medication and buying groceries to feed their kids.”

The findings from the audit will be shared with policymakers to help ensure every Wisconsin family and business has reliable, affordable energy.

To learn more about how you can participate and help hold We Energies accountable, please visit www.powerwisconsinforward.com

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.