A city council that owns the utility votes on Tuesday on ending one-for-one net metering for 11,000 homes, a year after rejecting the same idea

On Tuesday 22 September 2026, Colorado Springs City Council is scheduled to take a final vote on ending one-for-one net metering for about 11,000 homes. The council is not a bystander to the utility in this case. Colorado Springs Utilities is municipally owned and the council governs it, so the elected representatives of the affected households are also the rate-setting authority. There is no investor-owned utility and no state commission standing between the two.

That is what makes this worth following from outside Colorado. Municipalisation campaigns across the United States, in Ann Arbor, in St. Petersburg and elsewhere, are premised on the idea that public ownership changes who decides and therefore what gets decided. Colorado Springs already has the arrangement those campaigns want. It is a live test of what it delivers.

The substance is a familiar rollback. Today solar customers bank credits one for one and draw them down later, across the day and across the seasons. Two replacements are on the table. The first adds a one dollar daily connection charge and moves solar customers onto the utility's standard Energy Wise time-of-use rates, so credits arrive as dollar amounts that depend on when the electricity was generated rather than as kilowatt hours that can be spent whenever. The second leaves credits at one for one with monthly rollover but adds a demand charge based on the customer's single highest 15-minute interval in the previous month. The utility's own numbers put the average increase at around 38 dollars a month, which is close to a doubling of a typical net metering bill, and its chief financial officer Tristan Gearhart has put the annual gap attributed to net metering credits at 4.5 million dollars. Separate reporting carries a utility estimate of roughly 500 dollars a year more for solar customers beginning in 2032, which suggests a phase-in that no retrieved source describes. [NEEDS DATA: phase-in schedule; grandfathering terms]

The detail that deserves more attention than it has had is that fewer than 400 of the roughly 11,000 solar homes have a battery. Both proposals are, in effect, instructions to get one. A time-of-use credit structure rewards shifting export into the evening peak, and a demand charge based on a single fifteen-minute interval is a direct penalty on unbuffered demand. Whether households can act on that instruction, and on what timescale, is the question that decides whether this is a rate design that moves control toward the edge or simply a bill increase pointed at people who already spent the capital.

The politics have already run once. In October 2025 the council pulled a materially similar proposal out of a larger rate case after organised opposition from solar customers. The utility came back, and in late August 2026 the council voted 6 to 2 to advance the revised version, again over substantial public objection. Same institution, same electorate, opposite outcome inside a year.

The honest reading is that municipal ownership changes the venue and the vocabulary of the fight without changing its terms. The utility still has a revenue gap it wants closed, the solar customers still constitute a small minority of ratepayers, about 11,000 households on a system serving a whole city, and a majority of a nine-member council is still what decides. What public ownership buys is a shorter route to the decision-makers and a vote that can be reversed at an election. What it evidently does not buy is immunity from the same cost-shift argument that investor-owned utilities make to state commissions.

This piece was written on 20 September 2026 and nothing later than 1 September was available. The vote may move. [UNVERIFIED: that the 22 September vote remains scheduled]