Essentially Indebted: Utilities, Regulation, and the Politics of Protection and Vulnerability

ABSTRACT

Capital‐intensive energy utilities exist through indebtedness, yet rising household utility debt is routinely framed as distinct from this essential nature of utilities and rather as a problem of consumer irresponsibility or regulatory failure. This paper argues that even sympathetic framings of household utility debt reproduce the moral architecture they seek to contest. Drawing on economic histories and critical economic geographies, we analyze how consumer protection, the codified check on utility capital, has become the terrain through which structural indebtedness is allocated onto households. Through regulatory archives, financial filings, and interviews in Pennsylvania, we trace how the 2004 “Responsible Utility Customer Protection Act” constructed a moralized “delinquent” customer that deflected scrutiny from financialized utility expansion. Confronting utility debt requires interrupting both the discourses that implicate low‐income customers in a perpetually indebted system and the legal and material relations that render utilities central to dispossession.