Rachel Knott said the last bill she got from Kentucky Power was $1,700 for two months — and a disconnect notice to go with it.
Her high utility bills create a cycle of debt that’s hard to break out of, Knott said, especially when they come in as high as a mortgage.
“You're choosing between having your lights on or a roof above your head, and it shouldn't get to that point, but that's where we're at,” Knott said, as she took a smoke break outside the Perry County Court House.
It’s a common complaint across much of eastern Kentucky, where the average power bill isn’t just higher than the rest of the state, but most of the country.
Kentucky Power Company, whose service area includes a swath of far-eastern Appalachian Kentucky, had the state’s second highest residential electricity rate, according to the 2024 Kentucky Energy Profile.
Their customers also saw the highest average monthly utility bills in the previous year’s profile at more than $180.
There are several reasons why Kentucky Power’s 162,000 ratepayers, located in the most impoverished region in the state, see some of the highest electricity bills. One of them is poor energy efficiency in people's homes. Without adequate insulation, when it’s cold, the only thing to do is to crank the heat. Population loss across years also means fewer ratepayers on the hook to maintain the fixed costs of a far-flung, mountainous electricity delivery system.
Coal continues to dominate conversations, as some locals attribute higher bills to coal’s decline in the region. Meanwhile, some consumer advocates promote the transition away from coal, saying aging infrastructure means other options are more economical and less environmentally damaging.
Kentucky Power has asked state regulators at the Kentucky Public Service Commission to increase the base electricity rate three times in the last six years. That, combined with other costs means customers’ bills are rising faster than inflation — and incomes. Most recently, state regulators approved another 6% rate increase in February, less than what the company asked for.
But that increase came with a caveat. For the first time in decades, Kentucky Power — owned by electricity giant American Electric Power — will have to undergo a comprehensive management audit. The scope of that audit is yet undetermined, and its results will likely have no direct impact on rates. Still, some advocates and customers have high hopes that it may uncover information that will turn the ship around.
Creek Don’t Rise Coalition calls for transparency
Zach Tackett is the founder of a coalition seeking to curb rising utility costs in eastern Kentucky. He’s pushing local governments to pursue radical transparency in the audit process and reforms to ensure low-income Kentuckians don’t bear the costs of poor management decisions.
“I hate to tell you, but you made $3 billion last year, while people where I live are going without medicine, going without food, going without basic necessities that they need,” Tackett said, referring to AEP's $3.58 billion 2025 year-end profits.
Tackett, a nurse in Pike County, has spent the last several months crossing counties off his list, traveling from fiscal court to fiscal court. He’s pushing for a resolution that urges a full and transparent look into Kentucky Power. He’s also requesting state regulators reconsider a recently approved rate increase until that audit is complete.
The resolution, which has gained an online following as the Creek Don’t Rise Coalition, has passed in 10 eastern Kentucky counties and garnered more than 700 individual signatures.
Because electric utilities are essentially granted monopoly power in their service areas, they are under heightened state oversight. He said the audit, especially if public input and concerns are addressed, could provide a real look into the company’s choices — from how it procures its resources, to its relationship with its parent company AEP and executive compensation.
“If I told you a pen’s $80 you'd look at me and go, ‘Are you crazy?’ But if I was the only pen salesman in town, and they're $80, you're gonna be like, ‘Well, I mean, I have to have a pen,’” Tackett said. “It's the same concept. If you don't know you're getting screwed over, you can't do anything about it.”
Public Service Commission spokesperson Sheri McMahon said in a statement that the audit is designed to assess the operations and the management at Kentucky Power, “not to conduct a financial or rates audit.” She said the commission is in the process of drafting the scope of the audit, which Kentucky Power will get to weigh in on, and then they will hire an auditor. She said the final report will be issued publicly.
Kentucky Power spokesperson Sarah Lynch said in an email statement that Kentucky Power is already required to operate “with extreme transparency.” She pointed to Kentucky Power’s recent base rate case, which delves into how much revenue the utility can generate and how much they can charge various tiers of customers. That base rate doesn’t include all sorts of added fees, fuel adjustment costs and environmental compliance expenses. Lynch said state regulators already allow public input and oversight in their process before decisions are finalized.
“In many ways, a base rate case itself functions as a detailed audit of the company’s operations, investments, expenses and service responsibilities,” Lynch said.
The Public Service Commission has previously ordered comprehensive audits of the state’s largest investor-owned utilities, though rarely. In 2010, a scathing audit of the Eastern Kentucky Power Cooperative, a neighbor of Kentucky Power, found it had responded poorly to financial difficulties and that the board needed major restructuring. The commission said several years later that the cooperative made “core changes” in response to the audit.
State lawmakers discussed, but did not pass legislation this year to limit utility shutoffs. One Republican-led bill would have blocked service disconnections during extreme cold or heat, on weekends or holidays or if a customer’s medical provider indicates a risk to their health; it failed to get a hearing. Another bill that would add protections for ratepayers if a data center moves in also failed to pass in the final days of this year’s legislative session.
Kentucky’s Republican supermajority did pass a bill that adds two more members to the Public Service Commission and introduces new qualifications for the governor’s appointees. The bill’s sponsors argued it could help lower rates to have more qualified members reviewing utilities’ requests.
Advocates for affordable electricity say many residents have a feeling of hopelessness around their utility costs, that rates will continue to rise, outpacing their paychecks.
Many, including Knott in Perry County, are struck with fresh anxiety over the introduction of massive, energy-hungry data centers into Appalachia. One enormous project was announced in the northeast corner of the state in May, and Knott worries it will leave her on the hook for further costs, while power companies hold them up as a new revenue stream to potentially offset rising costs.
Knott said she already pays exorbitant electricity bills and has had to make difficult choices while juggling groceries, bills and rent. She said she wants Kentucky Power to focus on the infrastructure it’s already got instead of worrying about providing new capacity for data centers.
“They don’t need to be doing that. They need to focus on their local areas first,” Knott said. “Why does my power flicker every time it rains?”
Teresa Amburgy says she does her best to pay her $500-plus power bill for her home in Hazard, Kentucky, but when you get behind, the bills snowball so quickly, forcing her neighbors to sacrifice other essential goods to keep the lights on.
“I can actually see people having to live without electricity, I mean, just like the Amish, or whatever. I'm serious,” Amburgy said. “Because it's coming down to are you going to eat or pay the power bill? You could sit in the dark or be hungry.”
Transparency and coal in Kentucky
Tackett arrived at the Perry County fiscal court building in late May, hoping to add another to his list. He’d already successfully pushed for the resolution in several other Kentucky counties and a resolution to address the management audit was on the agenda in Perry.
As Judge-Executive Scott Alexander began reading a resolution to a sleepy room of Perry County residents, it became clear it was not the same as what other counties had passed. While it mentioned support for “transparency and accountability” among utility companies, it placed a different emphasis on coal. It’s not surprising for a community that once revolved around the coal industry.
After the meeting in which the resolution was unanimously adopted, Alexander told Kentucky Public Radio that he supports transparency, but thinks reinvigorating the coal industry is the best path to lowering the energy prices squeezing his community.
“It will take a lot of growth to stabilize the energy rates in our area due to the loss of the coal mining, so if we ever opened up a coal-fired plant again, there would be a lot of coal companies that would go back to work, that we could potentially would use a lot of power that would help stabilize the rates here,” Alexander said.
Many residents, including Alexander, still express frustration over the unpopular 2015 decision to close coal power generation at the Big Sandy Power Plant in Louisa and instead buy into the Mitchell Power Plant over the border in West Virginia. Kentucky Power has said, and the PSC agreed at the time, that Mitchell was a cheaper option than upgrading Big Sandy.
Kentucky Power customers are already paying to maintain the West Virginia plant.
While many advocates for low-income Kentuckians and the environment say they don’t believe moving back toward coal is a viable path, Alexander said he still thinks coal can make a comeback.
The latest data show 3,600 coal workers in the state, the lowest number on record. While western Kentucky saw a modest increase in coal production in the fourth quarter of 2025, eastern Kentucky saw its production and employment numbers continue to fall.
“Since we lost the coal-fired plant, our rates has just continued to skyrocket,” Alexander said. “We went from on the bottom to we're gradually creeping up towards the top, and so I want them to look at not only natural gas, but to go back and look at the coal and the reliability of coal.”
Aside from the environmental costs of coal, which is one of the most polluting energy sources, Byron Gary with the Kentucky Resource Council noted it also makes less sense economically and has gradually declined in prevalence in the U.S. energy mix over the course of the last two decades, even as Kentucky holds onto coal as its top source.
Gary said the council has found that the best way to lower costs is to lower demand for energy, not increase it, especially in eastern Kentucky where energy bills peak in the winter.
“Instead of investing in new fossil fuels, we could encourage utilities to invest more in demand side management, and to supplement that with new renewables, rather than supplementing it with new gas plants,” Gary said. “Then costs would actually be less than what utilities are projecting right now.”
Tackett, with the Creek Don’t Rise Coalition, said he understands why communities continue to fixate on coal, but holding the company responsible and elevating transparency should take priority over promoting a specific industry.
Boyd and Greenup also declined the transparency resolution, according to Tackett. Coincidentally, it’s at the intersection of those counties that bitcoin-mining company Terawulf is setting up a major data center campus, powered by Kentucky Power.
That proposed data campus is already causing much consternation in northeastern Kentucky as residents question why they weren’t made aware of the project before county officials inked a deal with Terawulf and ask what safeguards are in place to protect ratepayers, who fear they’ll end up paying for upgrades.
Mary Cromer, deputy director of the Appalachian Citizen’s Law Center based in Whitesburg, said she also worries about data centers looking to set up in rural Kentucky.
Cromer said that many ratepayers in the region already feel powerless — crippled by ever increasing power bills and unsure how they can weigh in on the process.
“To some extent people have to understand all of these different pieces of the puzzle to be able to advocate for themselves to really push for something,” Cromer said.
The law center provides training for customers who want to give comments to state regulators during rate cases. Cromer said she also hopes the audit process allows for ratepayers to participate, either in determining the scope or in offering input during the process.
“That would go a little ways to making people feel like their complaints are being heard, or that they have some power to help resolve this situation.”
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
