There’s a new sheriff in town when it comes to energy regulation.

Few pay much attention to the day-to-day work of the Illinois Commerce Commission. But the agency’s obscurity came to an abrupt end last week when the regulators ruled on a series of record rate-hike requests by the natural gas utilities serving the Chicago area.

Effectively, what the ICC did under the leadership of Chairman Doug Scott was to order the utilities to halt their wildly out-of-control infrastructure spending, which has led to far higher heating bills in Chicago and the suburbs.

This sounds like a no-brainer, but in the world of utility regulation, this set of rulings was a sea change.

In Illinois and many other states, utility regulation for decades has been close to a rubber stamp for whatever companies thought best in terms of maintaining and upgrading their systems. Scott, a top energy-policy adviser to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, got the ICC job in the spring with an unspoken mandate to ride herd on the industry.

Boy, did he ever.

The most obvious target was Peoples Gas, the utility that serves the city of Chicago. The ICC shaved more than $100 million off Peoples’ $402 million rate hike. But far more importantly, the agency ordered Peoples to halt its complete rebuilding of the city’s underground gas-pipe system, a program now a decade old and plagued with cost overruns and other failures that have contributed to neighborhood disruption and making home heat unaffordable for tens of thousands of households. Regulators will start work in the new year on a cheaper, more targeted program to retire the old, leak-prone pipes needing replacement.

Peoples’ Milwaukee-based parent, WEC Energy Group, outlined the financial pain in a Nov. 20 Securities & Exchange Commission filing. The commission ruled that Peoples couldn’t recover $181 million already spent on new shops and other facilities, concluding the investments were unnecessary. That likely will mean a material hit to earnings, WEC said.

Importantly, too, the regulators’ actions open the door to a future where we don’t rely on natural gas to heat our homes. Gas drilling and consumption is exacerbating global warming. There’s little choice but to move away from it over time — at least if we care about the inhabitability of large parts of the planet. We applaud Scott and Pritzker for beginning the process of limiting the financial damage to all of us from that eventual shift.

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