Utilities Cut Power to Millions of Homes as Profits and Pay Soared: Report

Private utilities have shut off electricity to U.S. households more than 3.5 million times since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, even as the power companies have reaped windfall profits and their executives’ compensation has skyrocketed, a report published Monday revealed.

The research—entitled Powerless in the Pandemic 2.0—was produced by the advocacy groups Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and Bailout Watch. The report is a follow-up to a September 2021 publication that showed how utilities took $1.25 billion in pandemic aid and then disconnected households’ electricity nearly a million times.

“Utility companies are deliberately prolonging their dependence on fossil fuels and passing volatile fuel prices on to consumers,” Chris Kuveke, data analyst at BailoutWatch, said in a statement. “Our research shows that millions of Americans are disconnected when they can’t pay their monthly electric bills, while these utilities pass windfall profits to shareholders and executives through dividends and bonuses.”

Among the report’s key findings:

• Utility shutoffs soared 79% from 2020 to 2021;
• Seven companies—Nextera Energy, Duke Energy, The Southern Co., Exelon Corp., American Electric Power Co., Ameren, and AES Corp.—accounted for 78% of all identified disconnections;
• Only 33 states and the District of Columbia have made disconnection data public, while 17 states and Puerto Rico do not require private utilities to disclose information about shutoffs; and
• More than 40% of the disconnections in the report occurred in Florida, while nearly 70% of the shutoffs were in just five states—Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

The alarming rate of utility disconnections, coupled with soaring energy prices resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and fossil fuel industry greed, have created a crisis for low-income households.

“It’s appalling that millions of families in the United States have lost electricity while utility oligarchs reap huge windfall payouts,” said Jean Su, director of CBD’s energy justice program. “Russia’s war on Ukraine has only heightened household energy fragility and put more folks at risk. This moment is a clarion call to the federal government to reform the broken utility power sector, which relentlessly puts profits over people and the planet.”

The report’s authors offer a set of policy recommendations, including recognizing household utility services as a basic human right, creating a federal shutoff database, imposing meaningful oversight on utilities, and transitioning to a renewable energy system.

“The system is failing,” the report concludes. “Until it is changed fundamentally, these companies will continue pursuing these same perverse incentives to arrive at the same inhumane conclusions.”

Originally published at Commondreams.org, written by Brett Wilkins.