‘It is an extraction machine’: 24-year-old state House candidate takes aim at Puget Sound Energy

A 24-year-old candidate for the state House wants communities to replace Puget Sound Energy (PSE) with public utility districts and to limit corporate money in Washington politics.

Jamie Keenan-DeVargas, who is running in the 22nd Legislative District, joined “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio to discuss his criticism of PSE and his plan to move customers to community-owned power.

“Puget Sound Energy is not a public service. It is an extraction machine,” Keenan-DeVargas said in a campaign video played during the show. “It’s a foreign-owned private corporation whose only legal mandate is to pull as much wealth out of each county as the state will let them.”

Candidate targets Puget Sound Energy political donations

According to Keenan-DeVargas, his opponent is among the legislators who receive money from PSE.

“She is one of the 128 legislators in Washington State that get money from PSE,” he said.

In another campaign video, he pointed to PSE’s 30% rate increase next year and tied it to the company’s funding of most state lawmakers.

“They’re only able to hike your rates without government pushback because they bankroll 87% of our state legislators,” Keenan-DeVargas said. “My team built a list of every single legislator in PSE’s territory who takes their corporate cash.”

How he would limit corporate money

When KIRO host John Curley asked how he would cut what Curley called the “marionette strings” between corporations and lawmakers, Keenan-DeVargas outlined several approaches.

He described a recent Hawaii bill limiting corporate political donations as “the nuclear option,” though he expects it to be challenged under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. He also argued that PSE’s ownership offers another route.

“Citizens United was pretty specific that it only protects U.S.-based corporations, corporations that are associations of U.S. citizens,” Keenan-DeVargas said. “PSE doesn’t have a single U.S. citizen as part of its ownership structure. It’s all foreign-owned.”

Curley pointed out that PSE is incorporated in Washington. Keenan-DeVargas countered that the company is licensed to operate in the state but is owned by investment firms in British Columbia, Australia, the Netherlands, and other places. He also wants Washington to bar companies with state procurement contracts from donating to lawmakers.

“We’d be joining dozens of states if we were to limit those corporations,” he said. “They’re getting paid by the state. They shouldn’t turn around and pay the state back.”

Candidate says PSE delays upgrades to boost profits

Curley cited a report on PSE’s proposed rate increase, putting the added cost for the average customer at $612 a year by 2029, and asked whether voters who supported the Climate Commitment Act bear some responsibility.

Keenan-DeVargas responded that the Clean Energy Transformation Act, which mandates clean energy generation infrastructure, has a larger effect on PSE rates than the Climate Commitment Act, which mostly affects people at the gas pump. According to Keenan-DeVargas, PSE does not profit from the energy it sells, because that is a pass-through cost, and instead makes its money on infrastructure upgrades.

“They love to push infrastructure upgrades back as far as possible until it is the last possible minute about to explode, and then they get to charge as much as possible right on those infrastructure upgrades because that’s where their profit margin is,” he said. “That’s where they are actually guaranteed by the state a profit margin.”

Keenan-DeVargas put PSE’s necessary infrastructure upgrades at about $1.5 billion, with tens of millions of dollars going to foreign shareholders. He also compared PSE’s 2025 profits to those of Hasbro.

“PSE only operates in 11 counties in Washington State,” he said. “And they made more profit than Hasbro, an international corporation.”

Curley noted that Hasbro has to compete with other companies, while PSE customers have no other choice.

Public utility districts as an alternative

Keenan-DeVargas described public utility districts as owned by the communities they serve, with no profit margin and leaders chosen by voters.

“The public utility district is accountable to the people,” he said.

Keenan-DeVargas cited rankings naming Clark County’s public utility district the most popular in the western U.S. and noted that public utility districts get first access to the state’s cheapest and cleanest energy, including hydroelectric power from dams.

The cost of transitioning, Keenan-DeVargas explained, is paid off through municipal bonds by energy customers, not taxpayers. He offered Jefferson County, which switched from PSE to a public utility district, as an example.

“Sure, their rates didn’t go down, but it’s amazing that they were able to do all of that infrastructural upgrades and not increase the cost to the consumer,” he said.

Would be youngest ever elected to state House

If elected, Keenan-DeVargas, who lives in Olympia, would be the youngest person in state history to win a seat in the Washington State House.

Curley described the race as “David and Goliath” and called Keenan-DeVargas “a one-man wrecking ball.”

“I want to get corporate money out of politics in Washington for good,” Keenan-DeVargas said. “Those legislators that are taking money from PSE have never and will never actually vote to do anything substantive to address the extraction that PSE is making so much profit off of.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The John Curley Show” weekdays from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM.

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