About 23% of American households were unable to pay an energy bill in the last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A new study finds people who live in the South and Southwest are making up an increasing share of those who struggle to pay for household energy costs.
But, the main federal energy assistance program is not keeping up the changing energy needs in a warming climate. In fact, that assistance program was intended to pay for winter heating costs. Congress created the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, after a period of high oil prices.
Lawmakers tweaked the funding formula a few years after the program started in an effort to even out the dollars across the country. But new research published in the journal Science Advances shows that a greater share of LIHEAP funds still went to northern states from 2015-2020. That's despite a higher proportion of "energy poverty" — defined in this study as spending more than 6% of income on energy costs — elsewhere.
“We use a lot of air conditioning in the South,” said Chris Knittel, an energy economist at MIT and a co-author on the paper. “We're using, on a per dollar basis, more air conditioning among low income households than the North low income households are using toward heat.”
Knittel said the way LIHEAP is distributed to states is “stuck in the ‘80s.” This disparity is expected to continue as climate change drives hotter summers in the Southwest and milder winters in the northern part of the Mountain West.
“As the climate changes, the South will obviously need to cool their homes more, but the North will also need to warm their homes less,” Knittel said.
The researchers wondered what would happen if the money given out in 2020 through the LIHEAP program was spread out to address energy poverty equally across the U.S. In the Mountain West, the result was that funding would shift away from Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado and toward Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.
However, Knittel said, in his view, Northern states should not get less money, but instead the overall LIHEAP pool should increase. The program distributes roughly $4 billion a year. But in order to eliminate energy poverty, the study found the funding would need to increase by roughly four times.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
