How the Citizens Utility Board is Helping Keep Energy Costs Under Control

Challenging utility rate increases is core work for the Citizens Utility Board

Tom Content leads the Citizens Utility Board.

Tom Content has been guiding CUB through an unusually busy period.

As public concern over rising energy prices and hyperscale data centers has intensified, Wisconsin’s utility watchdog has found itself at the center of the debate.

“I dare say there hasn’t been a year like this for CUB in its whole history,” says Tom Content, the executive director of the Citizens Utility Board since 2017. The organization speaks for residential and small-business customers when investor-owned utilities ask regulators for permission to raise rates.

CUB was established by the state Legislature in 1979 as the country’s first state consumer advocacy group for utility customers. In 1986, after a U.S. Supreme Court decision tied to California’s CUB, it became a nonprofit organization.

The 2026 Nonprofit Issue logo.

The Legislature reduced the board’s budget in 2015, but funding was restored in 2021. CUB’s annual budget now totals about $1.1 million. Each year, it asks the state Public Service Commission for permission to spend up to $900,000. Once approved, the money is collected through fees paid by most customers of investor-owned utilities. Content says the charge is “about a penny and a half for CUB” per customer. The final fifth of CUB’s support comes from 501(c)(3) donations and participation in Community Shares of Wisconsin.

The organization has six staff positions, including an in-house attorney. In the months ahead, it hopes to fill the role left open by the retirement of longtime development and outreach director Richard Storck.

In 2025, CUB estimates its work helped customers of Alliant Energy, Madison Gas & Electric, and Xcel Energy save a combined $178 million. Since 2017, the group says it has saved customers more than $1.4 billion.

Rate cases remain CUB’s “bread and butter,” but the group has also taken part in cases involving special tariffs for large data centers. Content says the work requires constant adaptation because “there are so many next things coming at us simultaneously.”

After about a year of review, state regulators approved We Energies’ request for a special tariff to serve data centers. In that decision, the Public Service Commission rejected an alternative under which data center companies would have paid only 75% of the costs. Instead, the PSC required them to cover the full amount, one of several positions CUB supported. Content estimates the ruling will save everyday consumers another $1 billion over time.

More utilities are now seeking their own data center tariffs, and CUB is reviewing each application closely. The PSC approved Alliant Energy rates for a Meta data center campus in Beaver Dam, while also directing the utility to create a tariff for future large customers. Xcel Energy later filed a similar tariff request, and Madison Gas & Electric did the same.

Content is often willing to speak about energy affordability, whether to retired teachers in Kenosha, at a church breakfast in Menomonee Falls, at a town hall in Beaver Dam, or on drivetime radio in Janesville. That has meant attending and speaking at dozens of events this year alone. “We are at the center of what people are concerned about in this state right now, in terms of angst about data centers. Are they going to pay their way?”

Content previously had a long career as an award-winning journalist covering the utility and energy industry for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and earlier for the Green Bay Press Gazette. Former colleagues sometimes ask whether he misses being a journalist while covering the biggest energy story in decades.

“No!” he says. He prefers being involved directly: “It’s just a critical time for there to be a nonpartisan consumer advocate that thinks changes are needed.”