A shift to a low carbon future offers an opportunity to make energy costs equitable.
found that they use more household energy per capita than any other demographic in the United States.
In other words: though low-income families use less energy per person, they still pay a larger percentage of their income in energy bills—probably in large part because of the inefficiency of their housing. “People who are struggling to pay their bills will make tradeoffs to try and keep the lights on,” Harmon says. “That can be tradeoffs in food or clothing, which are the top two that we see.
Other aspects of energy inequity simply don’t have enough data for researchers to quantify the full scale of the crisis, says Justin Schott, the project manager at the Energy Equity Project at the University of Michigan. “The energy problem we hear the most about from people in frontline communities is shut offs,” he says. When customers don’t pay a bill on time, utilities are allowed to disconnect that household from electric services.
Only a handful of states require utilities to report shut off data. The lack of insight makes it hard to understand how certain communities are impacted more than others and if interventions likein federal bill assistance programs are effective. “We also have very specific data gaps—we have very little data from tribal lands,” he says. Indigenous communities may not receive support to conduct studies on energy inequities, or researchers may not pay attention to the community’s needs.
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