Lawmakers push bill to penalize utility shareholders for spoiled food and medicine 

Two Ohio lawmakers are drafting a bill that would require power companies to pay customers following power outages that last long enough to ruin food and medicine.

Reps. Tristan Rader, D-Lakewood, and David Thomas, R-Jefferson, say families should not eat that loss.

“If your power goes out, you deserve to be compensated,” Rader told Statehouse News Bureau. “You deserve to be made whole because it’s not your fault when the grid’s not meeting its obligation to provide you power.”

The draft would give households an automatic $50-a-day credit after 16 hours without power under ordinary outages. If that outage stretches to 36 hours during severe weather or 72 hours during a natural disaster that knocks out more than 10 percent of a company’s customers, families could seek $250 to $600 for spoiled food and medicine.

Rader says the problem is not only ice storms.

“Sometimes there’s catastrophes that happen. Sometimes a truck hits a telephone pole and the power goes down,” he told Statehouse News Bureau. “But a lot of times in Lakewood, it’s just been because a transformer blew all on its own because it’s way outside of its useful life essentially, or it’s not been maintained properly.”

The bill’s primary sponsors say they want that cost to land on the company’s shareholders, not on neighbors.

“We’re hoping that the automatic, essentially the penalty on the shareholders of those companies will hopefully incent better behavior and incent them to make the improvements they need in the grid,” Rader told Statehouse News Bureau. He added the payments “may only add up to a few hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s not a lot for a utility.”

On a typical day, outage maps show only a few thousand Ohio homes dark at once due to issues like downed poles or blown transformers. Most of those outages are fixed in a few hours, so many families would never hit the 16-hour mark.

However, a review of Ohio’s last multi-day outage event — fitting the bill’s proposed timeline — shows that over 500,000 customers were impacted by unforeseen circumstances. In March 2026, those circumstances took shape over “snow-mageddon,” a series of back-to-back snow and ice storms that wiped out power statewide for 598,000 customers at its peak.

AEP Ohio alone reported that more than 250,000 customers had lost power for “several days.” For AEP Ohio, which serves about 1.5 million accounts, that peak would have triggered the bill’s 10% catastrophic line, resulting in shareholders owing a conservative estimate of around $31 million, assuming only half of the impacted customers filed for $250 reimbursements.

Following that storm, AEP alone replaced or repaired 292 poles, 1,565 spans of wire, 144 crossarms, and 81 transformers. About 90% of the damage was from fallen trees, much of it off company property.

In its first-quarter 2026 report, AEP reported spending about $20 million in extra operation-and-maintenance costs on that storm through March 31.

In May 2025, months before the storm, AEP Ohio asked for a $97 million yearly increase in distribution base rates. In Jan. 2026, also before the storm, AEP Ohio asked to raise its Basic Transmission Cost Rider by about $127 million. Regulators approved both after the storm damage.

Yet, if a new law creates additional costs, such as automatic outage credits or food reimbursements, there’s no guarantee it will be paid from shareholder earnings.

For costs that reduce earned ROE below what investors priced in, PUCO regulators must balance approving rate increases that socialize those costs against allowing the stock to take a hit—risking the very incentive structure for future investments and “better behavior.”

Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Maureen Willis told Ohio.News that the organization supports exploring reasonable compensation and looks forward to taking part in the legislative effort.

“OCC supports exploring reasonable compensation for consumers who suffer documented losses, such as spoiled food or medicine, during prolonged utility outages,” Willis said. “When consumers pay for reliable electric service, they should not be left to shoulder the financial consequences when that service fails for an extended period. We look forward to being part of the legislative conversation.”

According to Rader, the credit by itself may not have the desired impact unless lawmakers take additional steps.

“By itself, it may not have that impact directly or immediately, but I think coupled with legislation like performance-based rate making or something like that, I think you can actually get to the results you need,” the lawmaker told Statehouse News Bureau.

Sponsors say they want to move fast.

“We’re going to move as fast as we can. I think people need help now,” Rader told reporters.