🏡💚 Energy costs are felt in the home
February 23rd, 2024
In climate advocacy circles, most of the focus is spent (understandably) on where our energy is coming from: clean and renewable vs polluting fossil fuels. But for most people, the main way they experience and interact with the energy system is in their home. Energy is felt through the comfort and health provided by the appliances that consume energy, and through the corresponding cost of powering those appliances. As s utility rates continue to increase, those costs are becoming a greater and greater burden.
In a previous newsletter, I talked about how the COVID-19 pandemic made politically possible a range social safety net provisions and protections, including an eviction moratorium — and the eviction cliff that is resulting as those protections expire. In California, there were also significant protections for utility payments, including both a moratorium on power disconnection due to non-payment, as well as significant funding for utility debt relief from the state. Led by grassroots and equity advocates (including many GND members like LAANE, SCOPE, and Greenlining) the state allocated billions of dollars for paying off utility debt.
And yet, utility debt continues to rise, with estimates last year of California residents collectively holding as much as $3 billion in debt. According to the latest Census data, 1 in 4 Californian households reported that they were unable to pay an energy bill in full in the last year. And because the pandemic protections have expired, in the first 3 quarters of 2023 PG&E reported over 160,000 customers having their power disconnected due to non-payment.
This article in KQED from December does an excellent job detailing how utility costs are exacerbating the housing crisis. In places where extreme heat or cold require running appliances to stay at a safe and healthy temperature, energy costs can skyrocket — leading to what some call the “heat or eat dilemma.” This, obviously, is an impossible choice and a shameful mark on our society that it is one that so many people have to make. As money gets tight, energy bills are often one of the first to fall off, so that “today’s unpaid energy bill is tomorrow’s eviction notice.”
All of these crises collide in the hard and grim choices that many poor families are forced to make. Energy costs increase (doubling in the past decade), climate change intensifies extreme heat and weather, and rent continues to rise with the looming threats of eviction. In the KQED article, UCSF professor Dr. Margot Kushel frames this well when she asks, “Do I keep my air conditioning on, run up my energy bills so I can’t pay my rent, and then be evicted and have neither? Or do I sit here in this stifling heat and risk death?”
There has been a flurry of articles recently about the political pressure to address utility rates, especially in consideration of the income-based fixed charge proceeding at the CPUC (which I won’t go into here, but know many of you are working on). As this Politico article stated: “the energy theme of the year in the California Legislature established itself quickly: it’s affordability.” While we absolutely need to be addressing rate affordability, we also should expand the lens through which we view the problem.
Beyond the raw energy costs, we also need to consider the housing quality as a major factor. Families who have trouble paying their energy bills are also much more likely to report that their homes are drafty, poorly insulated, and inefficient at retaining heat or cool air. Households that are energy insecure actually end up paying higher energy costs per square foot because their homes are less energy efficient.
That is one reason why many groups who are pushing for equitable building decarbonization argue that we need to take a holistic, whole-home approach. It is not enough to just switch out appliances, and we may actually be missing some of the lowest hanging fruit by not making holistic upgrades to improve the health and comfort of homes that benefit from building decarb programs. As we do make these decarbonizing upgrades, we know we need to protect tenants — but considering the lens of energy costs adds another layer to this. We need to make sure switching homes from gas appliances to electric doesn’t cause the rent to increase, and we also need to ensure it doesn’t lead to increases in utility bills.
Energy costs increasing as the result of fuel switching is a major cause for concern as a matter of equity, and it would also fundamentally undermine the decarbonization challenge. Who is going to decarbonize their home if it leads to higher bills?
Our vision for green social housing is a recognition of the way the climate, energy, and housing crises are all converging. We believe that we can address them simultaneously, not through the corporate-dominated, speculative housing market, but by permanently affordable social housing that can eliminate the impossible choice of “heat, eat, or home.”
Climate change leads to greater demand for energy. Source: Getty Images via Politico
WHAT WE’RE READING
Rising Utility Costs Compound California's Housing Crisis (KQED) - referenced above, this KQED article was the primary source for this week’s newsletter
The Landlord Behind Massive Los Angeles Eviction Has Spent More Than $1 Million on City Elections (Capital & Main)
US unions target the housing affordability crisis as their ‘biggest issue’ (The Guardian) - lots of interesting things here! maybe for a future newsletter
We’ve sent this out to everyone on the current CA GND listserv. If you don’t want to get these weekly newsletters, feel free to unsubscribe below. If you know someone that would be interested, send me their email, or you can forward this along to them and they can use this link to subscribe.
