More than 10,000 FirstEnergy customers lost electricity during a heat wave this month, just one week after Ohio regulators rejected the company’s request to loosen the rules around how many power outages are considered acceptable.
The blackout left the FirstEnergy customers who lost power without air conditioning as temperatures neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit, in some cases for days.
The seven days between the ruling and the widespread outages makes for unforgiving political timing for the Akron-based, investor-owned electric company that’s responsible.
The five commissioners of the Public Utility Commission of Ohio rejected a request from FirstEnergy to essentially give them latitude to allow more outages that last longer. The regulators cited voluminous customer complaints against FirstEnergy, hundreds of millions in recent customer-funded grid investments, and weak performance indicators in their opinion.
“Accordingly, the Commission finds that the existing reliability performance standards are just and reasonable and the [FirstEnergy utilities] are directed to continue to comply with their existing reliability performance standards,” the commission wrote in a June 24 order.
Starting July 1, more than 10,000 FirstEnergy customers in Northeast Ohio lost power, with outages lingering for about 5,000 through July 5, according to local media. FirstEnergy’s outage website states that 1,043 remained without power as of Wednesday afternoon and 610 as of Thursday afternoon.
Beyond inconveniences and discomfort to most of the public, summer power outages can pose danger for older, sicker and poorer residents, especially those with medical needs and no place cool to go. For instance, a 68-year-old Lakewood man told WOIO that he was admitted to the hospital after his air purifiers used to treat his asthma failed at home from the outage.
The blackouts also pose hefty economic losses for businesses that lose foot traffic, can’t access basic communications, or need to throw out spoiled food.
Power outages that trail FirstEnergy’s efforts to soften the rules around power outages speak for themselves, according to the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, a state agency that advocates for residential ratepayers at the PUCO. That’s especially true after the hundreds of millions of dollars FirstEnergy has charged its customers to fund reliability upgrades.
“Ohio consumers have paid for a stronger electric grid,” said the OCC’s executive director Maureen Willis. “They should expect fewer outages – not lower reliability standards. Recent outages reinforce why accountability and strong performance expectations remain so important.”
The city of Lakewood often bears the brunt of the outage problem due to aging infrastructure in its share of the grid. City Mayor Meghan George said in an interview that the city has tussled with FirstEnergy since the major blackouts last summer through the most recent ones this month.
This time around, there’s no freak weather event the company can pin the blame on, she said, just the company’s neglected grid.
“There were no storms,” she said. “It was just a complete failure of their infrastructure.”
A FirstEnergy spokesperson didn’t answer a series of written inquiries, noting that members of the operations teams are still responding to a rash of severe storm damage that occurred after the blackouts began in Lakewood. But in posts on social media, the company attributed the outages to summer heat.
“We understand the frustration and hardship recent outages have caused for Lakewood residents, especially during this period of extreme heat,” it said. “The heat wave has created extreme conditions across our region, driving extraordinary electricity demand and placing significant strain on electric infrastructure.
History of power outage problems
FirstEnergy operates three Ohio utilities – Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., Ohio Edison and Toledo Edison, all of which have struggled with reliability.
All three failed to meet a regulatory standard in 2025 that assesses how many customers sustain service “interruptions,” as the company reported to the PUCO. Toledo Edison failed another test that measures how long those interruptions last.
Only one other utility, Duke Energy in Cincinnati, failed to meet its blackout frequency standard in 2025, according to a Signal analysis of utilities’ reports to the PUCO.
The PUCO has taken note. State records show the agency in September 2024 sent FirstEnergy a formal “letter of notice of probable non-compliance” for Cleveland Electric Illuminating’s failure to meet standards around the duration of outages for two years. The next summer, PUCO wrote the company another such letter noting a failure to invest in an aging grid following “frequent reoccurrence of equipment failures at the same circuit/substation.”
The grid reliability docket FirstEnergy opened has become a magnet for critics to sound off. PUCO staff have received “considerable” input during the past year that FirstEnergy isn’t meeting its customers expectations of reliability, according to a PUCO staffer who testified in opposition to FirstEnergy’s most recent application. More than 800 complaints came in after violent summer storms left tens of thousands of FirstEnergy customers without power last year.
Two Cleveland city councilors wrote in a public letter that “FirstEnergy has fundamentally and repeatedly failed” its basic duty to provide safe and reliable electric service. The city itself offered comment in the PUCO case, warning that weakening standards by 11.5%, as the company proposed, would harm residents. Health equipment like electric wheelchairs or oxygen machines could fail, they said, and kids would need to miss school.
A panel of bipartisan lawmakers in the Ohio House said weakening utilities’ performance standards will shift costs onto working families and small businesses in the form of lost income, spoiled food, business disruption and health risks.
Plus, they said ratepayers spent billions on modernization over the past two decades, justified to customers on the promise of a stronger, and more resilient grid.
“It is deeply troubling for a utility to now argue that, rather than delivering on those commitments, the state should simply lower the bar for what constitutes acceptable performance,” they wrote.
There’s a structural problem from the regulators, said Karin Nordstrom, a senior attorney for the Ohio Environmental Council. They’re approaching each of FirstEnergy’s three utilities on a “patchwork approach,” targeted to this utility or that outage, when the problem span’s the company’s entire service territory.
Residents speak out
Specifically, FirstEnergy requested more lax performance standards for its Customer Average Interruption Duration Index (which measures how long outages last) and the System Average Interruption Frequency Index (which measures how frequently they occur).
Customers didn’t get lost in the complexity. Some of the public comments in the PUCO docket lay bare the anger felt when electricity service fails, and the human risks associated with them.
Ionne Freedman and her husband lost power June 27, 2025. Around 10 p.m., they went outside seeking relief from the heat. In the darkness – the streetlights were out – her husband fell and required hospitalization.
“I want the Illuminating Company to know that these outages that the city has been experiencing can have severe, even fatal consequences,” she said.
Whatever statistical analysis FirstEnergy is offering as rationale to roll back reliability standards “means nothing to people sitting in the dark with no power,” wrote Bonnie Sikes, of Lakewood.
Others agreed.
“We have had three outages in the last two years and have been told that these will continue until the service wires are replaced,” wrote Christopher Miller. “Since our outages have taken at least 10 hours to fix, the proposed 15 minute (average) increase would mean that we might see additional HOURS in our return to service. With every outage we lose a refrigerator of food, with no compensation. I do not want to increase our outage time – I want a long term fix to the problems.”
Big money for grid modernization
Several parties noted that FirstEnergy’s current reliability standards were set by a 2019 PUCO order that allowed the company to spend $516 million and $139 million in ratepayer funds on capital expenditures and operations and maintenance expenses, respectively, to modernize its grid.
That money comes with controversy. The Ohio Supreme Court in 2019 overturned – but didn’t demand refunds for – $458 million FirstEnergy collected from customers that it called a “Distribution Modernization Rider.”
The DMR later played a bit part in the ongoing criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits alleging FirstEnergy’s ex-CEO Chuck Jones and senior vice president Mike Dowling conspired to bribe Ohio’s former PUCO chairman, Sam Randazzo, as well as its House Speaker, Larry Householder. Randazzo died by suicide before his trial. Householder is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for racketeering. Jones and Dowling are set for re-trial this spring after a long awaited crucible ended in a mistrial earlier this year.
The legal action pressured PUCO to audit the DMR. The resulting audit, released in 2022, was largely inconclusive, finding that because FirstEnergy mingled the DMR with other pots of funding, examiners couldn’t be certain where the money went.
“We were not able to tie any of the Rider DMR funds to any specific use,” they wrote. “Therefore, we cannot suggest that Rider DMR funds were used definitively in any [grid modernization].”
