St. Paul and Roseville officials are pressing Minnesota regulators to launch an independent investigation into Xcel Energy's billing practices, after months of misapplied credits, late invoices, and disconnection warnings tied to errors the utility itself has acknowledged. One St. Paul city facility alone is sitting on more than $20,000 in accumulated credits that Xcel has not promptly returned, while Roseville says it received five separate invoices for the same streetlight account within a three-day span.
The dispute is playing out through a public docket the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission opened last fall to examine Xcel's billing complaints, according to the Pioneer Press. St. Paul has filed a formal complaint with state regulators, joined by Roseville, All Energy Solar of St. Paul, White Bear Lake Area Schools, Bloomington Public Schools, the Centennial School District in Anoka County, Osseo Area Schools, and the Building Owners and Managers Association of Greater Minneapolis, per the same report.
Cities Say They Can't Trust Xcel's Own Numbers
St. Paul officials say the utility has applied credits to the wrong city accounts since 2024 and does not retain the remittance information needed to identify which account a given credit belongs to, the Pioneer Press reports. City accounts have received seven or more statements in a single month, and one account got 12 statements at once, according to the same account. St. Paul has also received automated disconnection warnings tied directly to Xcel-caused billing issues, and staff have had to ask Xcel account managers to explain why certain accounts or meters weren't billed on a regular schedule.
Xcel has said it will return the $20,000-plus in accumulated credits at one city facility during its next annual credit-check round, expected in April 2027, per the Pioneer Press report. St. Paul Mayor’s Office spokesperson Matt Wagenius said St. Paul contests Xcel bills because they contain both underbilling and overbilling, according to the same reporting. St. Paul officials believe the Public Utilities Commission should not rely solely on Xcel's own assessment of its billing errors.
In Roseville, the problems have run in the opposite direction at times, with electrical bills arriving too late to meet their own due dates. City officials say Xcel failed to bill or compile usage data for a Roseville city property for eight months starting in July 2024, and delayed credits for a rooftop solar array on a city building. Roseville's municipal properties are billed both collectively and separately in a pattern city staff describe as inconsistent, and City Manager Patrick Trudgeon wrote earlier this month about the five duplicate streetlight invoices, according to the Pioneer Press.
State Officials and Advocates Want an Outside Review
St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her called on September 22 for an independent third-party review of Xcel's billing errors, saying the utility's representatives have generally been responsive but often cannot explain the root causes of the problems, per the Pioneer Press. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison's office has also called for an outside investigation, reporting on September 24 that new billing errors continue to surface monthly despite Xcel's progress reducing its backlog of unresolved cases, the paper reports. The Minnesota Department of Commerce has joined the call for outside review as well.
The Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota has formally petitioned alongside the Legal Services Advocacy Project for an independent third-party investigation into what they describe as systemic operational problems, a push that led the state to open Docket 25-341. Citizens Utility Board spokesperson Karlee Weinmann said billing problems are surfacing across Xcel's entire service area, not just in isolated pockets, with customers reporting repeated calls, incorrect information, and, in some cases, simply abandoning claims for money they're owed. Regulatory data cited by the Citizens Utility Board shows residential billing complaints against Xcel jumped from 210 in 2019 to 1,191 in 2024, an increase of more than 450 percent, though the Pioneer Press separately reports complaints rose from about 200 in 2019 to roughly 1,200 in 2025 — a sixfold increase by that count.
Xcel Points to Tech Overhaul and Staffing Changes
Xcel Energy, which also does business as Northern States Power Company and serves nearly 1.5 million electric customers across Minnesota according to Xcel Energy, attributes the 2023-2025 rise in billing errors to two technology initiatives layered on top of staffing transitions. The company upgraded its Itron metering and billing platform and replaced its monitoring device management system with a centralized meter device inventory and management system, per the Pioneer Press. Xcel says those staffing transitions reduced its ability to absorb unexpected manual work during the changeover.
In response, the utility says it has expanded its billing staff by roughly 40 percent, increased training for that staff, and worked to automate, optimize, and streamline its billing processes. Xcel maintains that billing errors are declining overall and plans to submit a new filing to the Public Utilities Commission on Wednesday, per the Pioneer Press report. The company's characterization of steady improvement stands in contrast to the Attorney General's office finding that new errors keep surfacing every month.
A Pattern of Regulatory Penalties
The billing dispute follows a string of recent enforcement actions against Xcel. In May, the Public Utilities Commission ordered Xcel to refund $40.6 million plus interest to electric customers after state officials determined the company improperly passed on replacement power costs from a three-month employee-caused outage at the Minnesota Attorney General's Office's Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant in 2023. In July, regulators approved a $131.8 million fuel cost over-recovery refund and an $83.1 million nuclear tax credit refund to ratepayers, while ordering Xcel to explain its persistent cost over-recoveries between 2022 and 2025, according to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.
Regulators fined Xcel $1 million in January 2021 after more than 100 formal complaints from solar installers over delays connecting solar systems to the grid, with All Energy Solar as a lead complainant in both that case and the current billing filings, per the Governors' Wind Energy Coalition. And in October 2024, regulators ordered Xcel to refund tens of millions of dollars with interest for replacement power costs tied to an extended outage caused by a 2011 turbine failure at its Sherburne County Generating Station.
Statutory Limits Shape What Comes Next
Any remedy the commission orders will likely be shaped by state rules governing how far back refunds and back-billing can reach. Under Minnesota Administrative Rules Part 7820.3800, utility overcharges caused by billing or meter errors must be refunded with statutory interest going back as far as three years before discovery, while undercharge back-billing caused by utility error is capped at just one year, according to the Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Those limits could matter directly for accounts like the St. Paul facility awaiting its five-figure credit and for Roseville's long-delayed solar credits.
Xcel's rate increase, approved in July at 2.85 percent — about $2.78 more per month for the average residential customer — required the utility to issue bill credits because its 2025 interim rates had exceeded the final approved rates, adding another layer of adjustment atop the ongoing billing complaints. Separately, the commission agreed in July to investigate a Hennepin County complaint alleging Xcel misapplied net-metering rules to improperly restrict compensation for two county solar facilities, a sign that billing disputes with public entities extend beyond the two Ramsey County suburbs at the center of the current push for an outside audit.
