Photographer: Thomas Ryan Allison/Bloomberg

U.S. utility companies have shut off natural gas and electricity service to more than three-quarters of a million households across just 10 states during the pandemic, according to a report released Tuesday by the Center for Biological Diversity. 

That number may be big, but it’s also incomplete: It didn’t account for commercial customers who are also having trouble paying their bills, or the 14% of U.S. residents using public power, instead focusing on households served by private utility companies. And it omits the 30 states with utility commissions that don’t require companies to disclose how many households they disconnect, or that failed to provide easily searchable data. Just three utilities companies that operate in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida reported shutoffs to the equivalent of 2.6% of their customers.  The report estimates that, if the same ratio was applied to all U.S. households, the toll could reach 3.14 million.

The threat climate change and natural disasters posed to utility customers and consumers was put into stark relief in February, when winter storms and power grid failures left more than 4 million homes and businesses without power in Texas, causing an estimated $90 billion in economic damage and at least 57 deaths. (The full scale of the winter storm blackout is unknown, and Texas’s Public Utilities Commission does not report statewide shutoff data.) But the report highlights the more daily phenomenon of highly energy-burdened households — disproportionately Black, Native American and Latino, and  concentrated in the Southeast — who are an unpaid bill away from being left in the dark.

“At any time, it’s a really traumatic experience for somebody to lose their power because they can’t pay their bills,” said report author Greer Ryan, an energy policy analyst for the Center for Biological Diversity. The Arizona-based nonprofit is an environmental advocacy organization. “But during Covid, it’s actually a matter of life and death.” 

A January working paper from Duke University researchers estimated that if bans on utility shutoffs had been enforced nationwide, nearly 15% of Covid-related deaths could have been avoided. When families lose water and electricity service, they may double up with friends or family, leading to household crowding and fanning infection rates. 

A federal eviction moratorium  was extended in September and is due to expire at the end of March, but no such national ban on utility shutoffs exists. Instead, states have instituted piecemeal bans, starting when the initial public health emergency was declared in March 2020. Where in use, they’ve been largely effective: Another 10 of the states the Center for Biological Diversity surveyed, including California and Hawaii, had moratoria in place and reported zero shutoffs.

Nationally, estimates on the size of the debt accumulating from unpaid utility bills and rent payments have varied, and comprehensive data on how many households have had their power turned off have been hard to come by. That’s partly by design, as Rachel Cohen recently wrote in Bloomberg CityLab: “Civil rights groups like the NAACP have long called for federal reporting requirements on utilities, but most states do not require electric or gas providers to disclose how customers are accessing or retaining services, and utility companies have historically fought efforts to publish the information, aware of the public relations fallout that disclosing shutoffs could bring.”

Without an understanding of the scale of the shutoffs, energy justice advocates have had trouble gaining traction as the crisis continues, said Ryan. The Center for Biological Diversity is part of a national #NoShutOffs Coalition of more than 1,000 organizations that are pushing for a federal utility shutoff freeze, which could be advanced legislatively by Congress or via executive order. 

Many local shutoff pauses will end soon. As of the end of February, Covid-related utility shutoff moratoria covered 57% of the U.S. population, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. By the end of April, however, only 33% will still be covered, the association estimated. If none of the pauses are extended, by the end of July 2021, 27 states’ moratoria will have expired. Two states — New York and Virginia — and D.C. have extended their moratoria indefinitely.

For an example of what an expiring moratorium may mean for energy-burdened households, look to North Carolina, whose pandemic pause on shutoffs lapsed at the start of September, and whose cold-weather moratorium, which protects certain low-income households from disconnection during the winter months, will expire on March 31. Between November 2020 — when bills came due again — and January 2021, more than 45,000 households served by just one private utility, Duke Energy Corp., had their utilities shut off, the Center for Biological Diversity report states. The disconnection rate was only 16% lower than it had been during the same period in 2019, said Rory McIlmoil, the senior energy analyst for Appalachian Voices, an environmental advocacy organization. An estimated 650,000 households in the state have fallen behind on their payments, owing more than $150 million combined.

In a statement to Bloomberg CityLab, Duke Energy highlighted its March 2020 initiatives to waive late fees and suspend service disconnections. “As a provider of an essential service, we remain committed to delivering reliable power as well as protecting the health and safety of our customers and employees,” the statement read. “Our state utility commissions have been very thoughtful in their decisions, and we will continue to work with each individual commission to monitor the impacts to our communities and customers and update plans as necessary.”

McIlmoil’s organization is trying to fend off utility companies’ proposed rate increases, and is lobbying for North Carolina to stop future shutoffs. “[U]tilities are shutting off access to water, electricity and heating during an economic and public health crisis, putting millions of people at increased risk of contracting, spreading and possibly even dying from the virus,” he said in a statement. “The governor and Commission can no longer act as if utilities are going to behave any differently and should enact a new moratorium until all available funding gets distributed and this crisis is over.”

But experts also acknowledge that a statewide moratorium is no cure-all: Passing the full burden of paying for power onto utility companies could lead investor-owned utilities to jack up rates for consumers down the line, or spell bankruptcy for smaller municipal power companies that are already in debt. The Edison Electric Institute, which represents investor-owned utilities, has resisted blanket disconnection bans. “Disconnecting customers is always an electric company’s last resort for dealing with unpaid bills, and customers who get on a payment plan will not be disconnected,” says Adam Benshoff, EEI’s vice president for regulatory affairs, in a statement. Frequently, “customers with unpaid bills will not work with their electric companies on a payment plan until they receive a disconnection warning. We have seen this play out across the country with both the state-mandated and voluntary moratoriums put in place by our members.”

Funds that help individual homeowners and renters keep up with their power bills is “the most immediate way to provide people relief,” said McIlmoil. The most recent coronavirus relief bill includes $4.5 billion earmarked for low-income home energy assistance — but the need, according to National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association Executive Director Mark Wolfe, is more like $10 billion.