Energy disaster also in the US: one in six households has overdue bills
According to Bloomberg , which cites data from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada), at least 20 million star-striped households, or about 1 in 6, are late with their bills, due to soaring electricity prices. which unleashed the worst crisis ever in the late payment of utilities.
Neada said electricity prices have risen significantly since 2020, after a decade of stagnation. The sharp increase led to billions of dollars in overdue bills.
Electricity inflation is fueled by rising costs of fossil fuels, such as natural gas, coal and oil. Natural gas feeds about 40% of the US electricity grid and on Tuesday reached the highest levels since 2008. The blame for the increase in gas prices is linked to exports to Europe, which caused domestic availability to drop and therefore increase prices.
The graph below shows that real electricity prices have been relatively stable over the two decades, with the exception of the commodity boom periods around the 2008 financial crisis. Now CPI minus energy has peaked, too. if electricity continues to skyrocket 30% year-on-year.
Utility outages have become more common across the United States, as some low-end households are thousands of dollars behind their bills.
Jean Su, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, who follows utility disconnections across the United States, warned of a "tsunami of disconnections" as the highest inflation of the past forty years is devouring wages and financially devastated the working poor.
Adrienne Nice is one of those troubled Americans, over $ 3,000 overdue on bills. Last month he received a "final notice" from power company Xcel Energy Inc. that he disconnected the electricity to his one-bedroom apartment in Minneapolis as temperatures approached three digits.
Across the country, power companies have seen a surge in non-paying customers. California-based PG&E Corp said that since February 2020, the number of overdue residential customers has increased by 40%. The Public Service Enterprise Group of New Jersey said customers who are at least 90 days late have increased 30% since March.
"People on the low end can't pay" their electricity bills, said Mark Wolfe, executive director of Neada. These are consumers who have often exhausted all financing options and are at their best on credit cards. Once the financial availability is over, the bills are not paid, and therefore the utilities are disconnected.
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The article Energy disaster also in the USA: one in six families has overdue bills comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/disastro-energia-anche-negli-usa-una-famiglia-su-sei-ha-bollette-in-arretrato/ on Thu, 25 Aug 2022 07:00:56 +0000.