Xcel’s faulty billing has residents, businesses and cities fired up

Xcel Energy’s billing practices are causing financial and logistical headaches for Minnesota residents, businesses and even municipalities, according to complaints filed with the state utility regulator this year.

A municipal facility in Roseville and a private printing business in St. Paul were owed months of bill credits for on-site solar production. More than $6,500 in late fees were incurred by the city of St. Louis Park due, it says, to billing errors. Residential electric invoices canceled due to billing issues rose more than 50% from 2023 to 2026, according to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.

Those are just some of the issues clocked by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Affairs Office during an investigation into the billing practices of Xcel Energy’s Minnesota electric utility, which serves about 1.5 million customers across the state.

The five-member commission launched the investigation about a year ago following a sharp increase in customer complaints since 2022.

“This alarming trend indicates that urgent action is needed to identify the causes of this significant increase in billing errors and determine how to bring billing error complaints back to acceptable levels,” the commissioners wrote.

The commission asked Xcel to detail what was behind the rise in billing errors, what it was doing to correct those errors and what it would do to prevent similar errors in the future. It directed Xcel to provide monthly data on new and existing billing errors, along with its efforts to remediate them, until further notice.

Billing errors continued in the subsequent months.

Rebel Ink Printing owner Todd Turfler told the commission this month that his business had not received any production payments yet this year for the solar array they installed at their building on West Seventh Street in St. Paul, despite being told by Xcel in December that they were eligible for the payments. An Xcel employee, he said, confirmed earlier this year that the solar system was producing more energy than the building consumed.

“The inaccuracies in billing have completely undermined the financial viability of (the) commercial solar investment since we are receiving no credit for any solar energy generated,” Turfler said.

A Roseville municipal property received no electric bill — nor any monthly credits for solar energy produced by on-site solar panels — for eight months in 2024 and 2025, followed by a $15,000 bill in April 2025, City Manager Patrick Trudgeon said in a Sept. 24 complaint. The error, which occurred even as Xcel’s gas utility continued to bill the property as usual, “caused issues in annual reporting for city electricity usage,” Trudgeon said.

Roseville’s complaint also detailed more widespread billing issues that created dozens of hours of additional staff work. The city only avoided late fees thanks to “staff checking each week for new incoming bills,” Trudgeon said.

The city of St. Louis Park wasn’t so fortunate, according to a complaint this month cataloguing multiple billing irregularities.

Xcel told the city it had incurred more than $6,500 in late charges in a recent 12-month period, St. Louis Park Administrative Services Director Cheyenne Brodeen told the commission. And the city lost $16,000 in 2023 — and likely more in the years since — because Xcel failed to give notice that it was eligible to switch to a lower-priced renewable energy subscription program that later closed to new subscribers, Brodeen said.

Separately, St. Louis Park continued to receive bills for a city-owned property months after it had been demolished, and at one point received a bill for a private business at another property the city no longer owns, raising privacy concerns, Brodeen said. She asked the commission to authorize an independent audit into Xcel’s billing and remittance practices and require the utility to notify affected customers of significant rate or program changes.

Xcel Energy spokesperson Megan Boldt said the utility is moving in the right direction and disagrees that an independent audit is needed.

“We have taken these issues seriously and have made significant progress improving our billing processes, reducing backlogs and addressing the underlying issues that contributed to errors,” Boldt told the Reformer in an email. “We are not suggesting our work is done … but we do not see systemic issues warranting a third-party investigation.”

Invoice cancelations typically happen when a utility discovers a billing error, such as an overpayment or incorrect rate, and voids the affected bills. Earlier this month, Xcel said the number of residential customer invoices cancelled “due to controllable factors” fell from 7,098 in July to 4,812 in August, the lowest monthly level in more than two years. The drop bucked a seasonal trend that typically sees invoice cancellations rise during peak moving season, the company said. 

Xcel also said it’s working to reduce billing errors affecting participants in Solar*Rewards, a compensation program for customers with on-site solar energy systems, while suggesting the apparent pattern of errors is overstated. 

An internal review found most of the nearly 600 accounts affected by “non-payments” in 2025 were either ineligible to receive payments under the program, were vacant or had other issues beyond the utility’s direct control, Xcel said this month.

Ellison’s office appears unconvinced. In a filing last week, the attorney general suggested Xcel is selectively defining — and thus undercounting — billing errors. It asked the commission to cast a wider net in its investigation.

“Xcel’s reporting of billing errors shows that problems persist in its billing system, even as it appears that Xcel is under-reporting the actual number of errors experienced by customers. Xcel should therefore provide further information about the errors that it has excluded from its reporting in this docket,” Ellison’s filing said.