Has anything really changed besides the price since the outage in April 2025?

“Duquesne Light did a great job.” I’ll never forget sitting in a room with Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) a month after helping people without electricity for almost a week, and hearing those words strung together in that order frustrated me to my core. My mother (Council President), the Council vice president, and I drove around helping people get water and food that was delivered from the Red Cross. Great would not be the word I used to describe Duquesne Light’s response time. We were helping each other and trying to help ourselves that week. Our State Rep even made the largest pot of chili I had ever seen just so she could feed the community.

People at PEMA went a bit further and suggested that municipalities pitch in and purchase generators to help their residents. Municipalities aren’t supposed to be in the business of electricity; the electric company is. It felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone when, in a room full of elected officials, we were told that our response to being without power for almost a week should’ve been to document things before doing them so the state could know how dire things were. “Before buying a generator for the senior citizen’s housing, you should have documented it first,” he told the State Rep. It became even more of a mess when it was stated that the state didn’t know we needed help because someone at the county didn’t alert them. Just us, going to the local restaurant that somehow had the power to charge our phones, rest in well-deserved AC, and regroup. The state has a process, and even in an emergency, the process is the process, and the paperwork always needs to be done. Fascinating!

After days of watching power trucks ride through, and everyone pitching in to help one another in town, the power was restored, we threw out our food, and life went on. Kind of…

A year and two months after the storm, Duquesne Light raised the electricity rates for its customers. Duquesne Light, however, has not shown us that they put that money into infrastructure improvements that were very much needed, as when utility companies from other states came to help fix things, they were apparently met by antiquated infrastructure that they didn’t even know where to start. For someone who doesn’t even make electricity, it’s getting very expensive just to be the middleman. Every time the wind blows nowadays, the lights go out, and we wonder if this will be the one that leaves us without power for a week, like the time last year? Having no other opportunities when it comes to distribution, we’re all stuck with Duquesne Light, and it feels like a hostage situation. We keep giving them more money; they promise to keep the lights on, and they don’t keep that promise. It’s almost like a bad relationship. If any other product (I hate that electric is a product) did what Duquesne Light does to us on a regular basis, we wouldn’t trust them, we wouldn’t spend money with them, and we’d demand a refund.

Which got me thinking. What if they were required to give us a bill credit every time we were without power for an extended period of time? It turns out some states have considered and/or implemented this as they were tired of failing infrastructure, also. “The Public Utility Commission wouldn’t approve such a thing. They almost always side with the utility company.” Seems to be the response to the idea here in PA. But those people should represent us. The PUC is put there to protect us and not allow us to be exploited like we are. They are appointed by the governor’s office, and if their power went out as much as ours, they would understand that something needs to be done. Duquesne Light, being a private equity company and all, should be able to afford the bill credits when they drop the ball, as every time the wind blows and the lights go out, we all question, “Will this be the one?”

And to expect that these blackouts will become a regular thing shouldn’t be acceptable. These companies should have to be transparent if we’re giving them all this money. We should be able to make demands like do better, and offer us bill credits if you can’t keep the lights on for three hours or more.