2024 Reports

Utility Policies and Practices to Alleviate US Energy Insecurity

Krasniqi, Qendresa; Shastry, Vivek; Peek, Alexandra; Hernandez, Diana

Over 30 million US households experienced energy insecurity in 2020, disproportionately affecting low income, Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic households. While energy insecurity is often attributed to income, energy consumption, and housing quality, utility practices also play a critical role. Utilities influence both chronic forms of energy insecurity, including longstanding issues related to affordability, access, and housing conditions, and acute forms that arise from billing practices, limited consumer protections, and infrastructure disparities. Existing programs to provide emergency relief or ongoing assistance have helped, but many eligible customers remain unserved due to administrative burdens, technological and language barriers, underfunding, or lack of coordination across agencies. Structural interventions are needed to address affordability, accessibility, and reliability more holistically. This commentary highlights several key courses of action identified in research on alleviating energy insecurity, including rate structures that are fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory, and take into account ability to pay, providing relief for those most burdened by high energy costs; state and federal mandates for utilities to report data on household debt, disconnections, and outages, disaggregated by race and ethnicity, age, income, and medical vulnerability; elimination of power shutoffs for nonpayment for low income and medically vulnerable households, with the option of long term repayment plans supported by affordability and efficiency programs; and prioritization of disinvested neighborhoods for infrastructure modernization and maintenance, as well as for expedited power restoration during outages. These approaches represent actionable steps that utilities and regulators can take to address both the chronic and acute dimensions of energy insecurity and advance more equitable outcomes in utility service provision.