In any business, if you have less traffic, less demand the answer seldom is to raise your prices. With less demand the price should be reduced.

Thanks xcell for being so greedy

Sheer chutzpah for Xcel to ask for a rate increase AFTER increasing its profits and AFTER encouraging consumers to cut back on consumption. Xcel is like the kid who kills his parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he's an orphan.

Are you kidding me? I think we need a constitional ammendment banning energy rate hikes during windfall profit years.

They need to seriously look at their advertising dollars. Every year I get the power saver switch or whatever that program is called. The first year I got the flier, I called them and told them I don't have central air. Maybe they should be sending that advertisement to people that do have central air.

I guess the law of supply and demand doesn't hold for near-monopolies.

WHAT!? Energy demand is down, so they want to raise our rates? If aggregate energy consumption had increased, they'd say they need to raise our rates due to increased demand and providing more power to more customers!! This is a joke... Xcel executives do not care about how much citizen Q pays for electricity, they only care about their Net Profit, and the only way that increases, is by requesting rate increases from states and other municipalities they serve. "Dead Weight Loss" anyone?

So when we use a lot of energy, Xcel insists our rates must be raised because of the strain on the resources. As consumers, we take that to heart and scale back (or Mother Nature gives us kind temperatures), and now we need to raise rates because we're conserving energy? Come on, Xcel, pull someone else's leg for awhile.

Sue, lie to us, make us purchase big energy saving appliances saying all the money you will save and then hike the rate wipng out the savings,

it's nice that they were able to get rid of federal regulations for pollution control in Texas so they can make even more profit and not worry about the health of the people breathing that pollution.