As the lights start turning again after nearly a week of outages in Texas, residents who have already struggled to pay their utility bills may find it harder to recover. Costs are piling up that may continue to restrict some people’s access to heating and electricity, even after the blackouts.
“The ‘heat or eating dilemma’ is a very important issue,” said Emily Grubert, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We know that many people will basically choose to pay for heating or to pay for other things they really need. ‘
Indoor temperatures probably dropped sharper in homes that were less insulated against the elements. If the heat is restored, it costs more to re-dedicate those homes to bearable conditions. As a result, some Texans may carry higher bills, which will require people who regularly pay for food or medicine to maintain power in their homes to take greater tolls.
Images of ridiculously high energy bills are already making the rounds on social media. This is because the wholesale cost has skyrocketed amid the weather-induced fuel shortages. Prices rose from about $ 50 per megawatt hour to more than $ 9,000 per megawatt hour on Feb. 15, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). As a result, Texans who opted for wholesale prices, which are usually quite low, saw an astonishing increase in their utility bill.
According to Joshua Rhodes, a research fellow at The University of Texas at Austin, a very low percentage of Texans are subject to the rise in wholesale prices. Most people buy their electricity from suppliers with fixed rates that will remain relatively stable. Nevertheless, they may have a sticker shock when their next bill arrives.
The lucky people who had power this week will sustain the cost of maintaining heat in their homes during the icy temperatures. Those who have lost power will have to pay to reheat their icy homes. For each degree you increase the heat, the cost usually increases by about 3 percent. With temperatures well below freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit) in many homes, it will take a lot of energy to reach a comfortable 68 degrees. This could mean higher than normal bills for people, even if they lost power this week.
The disruptions have also caused other costly problems for Texans, which could lead some families to make difficult decisions about what they can afford as disaster expenses increase. Homes across the state are now facing floods and water damage due to frozen pipes bursting. And there are concerns about price depletion, as the supply of water and food in stores is small.
“People will have to make really difficult choices about where to invest their resources,” says Dana Harmon, executive director of the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute (TEPRI), a nonprofit. “Part of what it shows us is how amazing our food, water and energy systems are.”
The ‘heat or eat’ dilemma was already a problem before the freezing point came: 29 per cent of residents surveyed by TEPRI said they had slowed down or skipped spending on food to pay energy bills.
And it’s not just limited to Texas. Prior to the pandemic, 1 in 3 households in the U.S. struggled to pay their energy bills, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. As people lost their income during the COVID-19 pandemic, the problem increased: 4.8 million Americans were unable to pay at least one energy bill last year and received a notice of disconnection from their utility company, a recent study found of Indiana University Bloomington. Black and Hispanic households are more likely to disconnect their service than white households. People who need electronic medical devices and people who live in inefficient homes with poor insulation are also likely to struggle to pay their utility bills.
“The usual social and economic and racial injustices in our society are only magnified from the start if you have this icy cold weather that Texas is not designed for,” said Basav Sen, director of climate policy at the Progressive Brainstorming Institute. for Policy Studies.
There is a lot of work to be done to prevent another energy crisis, such as the one that devastated Texas this week. There are increasing calls for upgrading the state network to make it more weather-resistant, including heat waves, which are increasingly occurring due to climate change. These changes will be costly, and experts are already concerned that it has hurt people who are already experiencing the high energy costs.
‘Who pays for it? The customers, right? ” says Tony Reames, director of the Urban Energy Justice Lab at the University of Michigan. “We are likely to see increases in utility bills as utilities then try to recover the cost of the improvements they make to the infrastructure.”
According to TEPRI, low-income households in Texas spend on average about 10 percent of their income on energy. This is compared to 2 percent for higher-income homes. Anything above 6 percent, according to the US Council for an energy-efficient economy, is already considered unaffordable.
Keeping the lights on for everyone – disaster or not – may need to rethink the way we treat energy, says Reames. “Energy is a basic right, and instead of treating it like a commodity, how can we think of it as something that people should have access to?” he says. “Especially when they need it most.”