The households in question owe a combined $16 billion in unpaid utility bills, with the average balance owed climbing to $792, a 97 percent jump since 2019.
“The bills just aren’t affordable,” Mark Wolfe, NEADA’s executive director, told Bloomberg. “People on the bottom, they can’t pay this.”
Why Are Energy Rates Too High in Dallas?
According to a report from ABC10, The cost of electricity in Texas has soared over the last year as energy companies raised rates to reflect increased demand for natural gas. Natural gas power plants account for just over half the capacity on the state’s grid, so fuel tends to set prices across all consumers and businesses—notably those powered by coal or nuclear energy sources.Power Cuts and Extreme Weather
A loss of power can be fatal in many households, especially when there’s a heat wave.Prices for natural gas, which fuels about 40 percent of the American power grid, were up 30.5 percent in July compared to the same time in 2021.
The cost of other fuels, such as coal and oil, has also soared over the past year.
Last year, U.S. residential electric customers experienced the largest annual increase in average nominal retail electricity prices since 2008—rising by 4.3 percent from 2020 to 13.72 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), according to data released this month by the EIA and compiled with help from CDP-Labbridge Energy Research Associates International LLC)
This year, the average U.S. household saw its expenses jump by 15 percent from a year earlier—the biggest annual increase in data going back to 2006, according to Bloomberg.
State power companies like California’s PG&E Corp. reported a more than 40 percent jump in the number of customers behind on payments since February 2020, while New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. reported that the number of delinquent customers has risen 30 percent since March, according to Bloomberg.
American utility companies are not generally affected by accumulated debt from unpaid customers, as most state regulators allow them to recover their losses by charging extra fees to paying customers or through taxpayer subsidies.
There have been increasing calls for states and the federal government to take action and offer more assistance, and the state of California recently passed a budget with $1.4 billion to help residents pay past-due utility bills.