Michelle Scala’s 2024 Consumer Champion Speech

At our 14th annual policy conference, CUB had the pleasure of awarding Michelle Scala the Consumer Champion Award. Michelle Scala is the Manager of Regulatory Strategy at the Oregon Public Utility Commission, where she collaborates with industry peers on advancing equitable systems, socially informed policy, energy justice, and ratemaking for the public interest.

Michelle gave a thrilling speech when she accepted her award. We’re pleased to share her remarks with CUB members and the public. Prepare to be inspired!

Michelle’s Consumer Champion Speech

Disconnection is also one of the clearest indicators of inequity within our energy system, that said it is a symptom and not a cause. Energy justice and energy equity go beyond keeping the lights on. They’re about creating an energy system that provides affordable, reliable, and safe access for every household. It’s about challenging the structures that have left too many people behind and building a foundation that supports stability and dignity for everyone.

We start by recognizing that energy is not a luxury good. It’s a basic human need that underpins every aspect of life, health, education, economic opportunity, and overall well-being. I think that fact has been said at this conference every year since I started with the commission. And yet the reality remains that safe, reliable, and affordable energy is out of reach for many households.

No one should have to choose between paying their energy bill and other essential needs. Yet, for many families, energy insecurity is a constant reality. Whether through disconnections, mounting arrearages, or unsafe reliance on alternative energy sources, these struggles aren’t the result of poor choices or lesser human beings. These are all symptoms of a system that hasn’t been built to serve everyone equitably.

It’s got to be understood that for many households’ late penalties, customer fees, and threats of disconnection, are meant to serve the system in spite of the customer experience. I’ve heard Disconnection, often justified as a “last resort,” to secure customer payment as if all reasonable interventions and accommodations have been exhausted.

So many will tell you “It’s the only thing that will get some people to pay.” But these practices often push energy-burdened households further into crisis, financially, emotionally, and physically. Disconnection may resolve a utility problem but at what cost? Knowing that it is punitive and the culmination of a system that prioritizes financial recovery over human well-being. Does the end justify the means? I believe our work needs to move further upstream so we can adopt proactive solutions that prevent energy insecurity before it even begins.

These issues are so much bigger than just paying bills. When we talk about energy affordability, we’re talking about keeping families safe during extreme weather, stabilizing households so children can have a conducive learning environment, and creating economic opportunities by ensuring that people can focus on their lives instead of worrying about losing essential services. How many here truly know what that feels like? To live in crisis and in fear.

Unfortunately, too often, when low-income, Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities struggle to pay energy bills, facing greater health disparities, homelessness, and more, it’s often tolerated at higher rates than it is for white or wealthier communities and minimized as a social issue and an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of poverty. But when those same risks and harms of rising energy costs begin impacting those wealthier households, it becomes an immediate crisis worthy of swift and unprecedented intervention.

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed just how deeply these disparities run. Long-standing issues like utility arrearages and energy insecurity only became urgent when they began affecting broader populations. And while I’m grateful for all that we were able to accomplish with the pandemic-era protections and programs and how that has contributed to the forward momentum we have today, I also feel distraught that for some reason our society finds poverty and crisis more palatable when it’s just a black brown and poor issue.

We rely on deficit framing to justify our willingness to accept the casualties that come with the status quo. Deficit framing views marginalized communities as fundamentally lacking, lacking resources, lacking knowledge, or lacking capability, and interprets their struggles as personal failings rather than the result of systemic barriers. Not only does this type of framing further stigmatize already underrepresented and overburdened groups of people, but it reinforces the illusion that assistance programs, qualified protections, and differential treatment are acts of benevolence, and unilateral transactions that are our goodwill manifest.

And it is that downstream mischaracterization of equity work as synonymous with charity work that absolves these efforts of any real accountability toward achieving meaningful change. when we treat energy equity as a charity, we lower the bar for what success looks like. And obscure significant gaps in the efficacy of the work behind sanctimonious messaging

How does this keep happening?

Since the dawn of the regulated monopoly model, we have planned for a system largely in a vacuum where people are represented by little more than their headcount and average use in decision-making venues. We get stuck in the theoretical and allow decision-making in energy policy to be largely dominated by strategically narrowed perspectives of economists, engineers, and financial professionals over aggregate data and faceless scenarios.

While these voices are important, they aren’t enough, and the application of their perspectives intentionally neutralizes customer heterogeneity and disparate needs. To break free from the limitations of the theoretical, lived experiences, community voices, lessons from the humanities, and disaggregated data should hold and share space qualitatively and quantitatively alongside technical and financial expertise. We need to center human beings to rebalance what has become an overly extractive system wrought with regressive payment models and punitive rate designs. We need to look at our system practically and speak plainly and transparently about how decision-making works for or against equitable outcomes.

Here in Oregon, I’m proud to say we are working on it. Our state has taken significant steps to better support those who have been left out and left behind. From collaborating with community advocates to pursue more procedurally equitable spaces, expanding low-income assistance programs, and increasing protections against disconnection, to setting ambitious goals for clean energy that center the needs of our most impacted communities and collecting and analyzing disaggregated data, we are making moves to shift the balance.
But for every new policy and initiative we pass, we need to ask ourselves: Are we doing enough to change the systems and structures that perpetuate energy inequity? Are we moving fast enough to counteract the entrenched forces that keep the status quo in place?

If we want to see continued progress toward transformative change, we need to keep pushing forward and valuing these community voices and impacts as integral to decision-making, not as afterthoughts, inefficiencies, or decrements to otherwise optimized solutions. Don’t be someone who weaponizes your education, expertise, and authority in this space to justify injustice. Instead, challenge yourself to evolve your strengths and prowess for nascent and disruptive solutions that advance equity at the core.

Moving forward, we need to accelerate our efforts to create a truly equitable energy system. One step is prioritizing affordability and access at every stage, from rate design and regulatory frameworks to legislative action and community engagement. It means recognizing that energy equity isn’t just about removing barriers, it’s about transforming the structures that created those barriers in the first place. Look at the revised statutes, look at the administrative rules, look at the process, the models, and the inputs. Do they serve the public interest equitably? Can we operate within their framework and still minimize harm? Are they conducive to your organization’s objectives? What are your organization’s objectives and does the emphasis change depending on who is in the room listening?

I’ve posed a lot of questions, all of which I ask myself throughout my work at the commission. I encourage everyone to reflect on these questions and where there is discomfort or qualified responses. Explore them.

Energy justice must be a guiding principle that shapes every decision we make in this space. Ensuring that energy is affordable and accessible for all isn’t a niche pursuit nor an act of kindness where something is better than nothing — it’s our duty, it’s measurable, and it is a formidable challenge that we have to work together to achieve. I’m grateful and encouraged to be able to say that there are a lot of active programs and work streams happening here in Oregon. Dare I say, we’re on the right track.

But until we can say with confidence that every household in our state has access to clean, safe, and affordable energy, let’s keep at it.

This speech has been edited for clarity.

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