As summer heat has Texans laser-focused on their thermostats, many are being forced to choose between paying their utility bills and paying for basic necessities, according to a new analysis from the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute.
Texas Standard spoke with Margo Weisz, TEPRI’s executive director, about the difficult choices facing low-income Texans as energy bills are set to increase. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Your latest report is based on survey data from 2022-2023, and it suggests that 72% of low- to moderate-income families in Texas are cutting back on basic household needs to pay the power bills. Can you give us a sense of the choice families are making?
Margo Weisz: Sure. I think one of the things that we often don’t understand is how foundational energy is in the modern world. So almost everything we do uses energy, even something like the internet. So people really need to have their electricity turned on. It’s their heating, it’s their cooling, it’s the internet, it’s their lights.
So to do that, people are giving up all sorts of things. They’re giving up medicine, they’re giving up school supplies. People report keeping their thermostats at very uncomfortable levels just to keep it on.
So yeah, I think that it’s a really big challenge for people. There are quite large energy burdens right now and, as I think we’ll talk about, we’re going to see electricity prices going up. So these energy burdens are expected to continue.
72% of low- to moderate-income families in Texas are making these sorts of choices, but certain regions like the Gulf Coast are apparently affected more than others, no?
I think that there’s different vulnerabilities in different parts of the state.
We’re seeing a lot more weather-related events along the Gulf Coast. So when we talk about vulnerabilities and energy burdens, we’re also thinking about things like outages and how people respond to that and their concerns around that.
Texas has quite a complex energy market. So electricity prices can vary in different parts of the state, as well as these different vulnerabilities related to weather-related outages.
Well, what sort of programs exist to help Texans who are struggling to pay their utility bills?
Not many. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges. Some of the municipally-owned utilities have programs to assist people with lower incomes to meet their energy bill needs. In the competitive market, there’s less.
We have had, historically, a federal program called LIHEAP that is projected to go away. LIHEAP provides some bill assistance to people. In the past, we had something in Texas called the Systems Benefits Fund that helped people who couldn’t meet their monthly energy needs, but that went away. There was discussion this session about bringing it back, but that did not happen.
So we’re seeing both state and federal resources really drying up to help people. In that survey of almost 7,000 low- and moderate-income Texans, 12% of respondents reported having their electricity shut off during the year prior to the survey. So it’s quite a large number.
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Your study is based on data from 2022 to 2023. What sort of changes in federal and state energy policies has there been that might alter the equation for low-income Texans since?
So when we did the survey, we were already seeing a high degree of energy burden and energy vulnerability. But going forward, I think all projections show that electricity costs are set to increase.
So I think in the new budget bill that just passed at the federal level, we’re going to see a slowing down of renewable development. And there’s different projections. It could be anywhere from about $150 to $250 annually over the next five years that would increase.
And as tax credits for more energy development begin to phase out and these complex sort of sourcing requirements move in, by 2035, it’s projected to see an increase of almost $500 in people’s energy bill. So that’s quite a lot.
We have a lot of different policy implications, both at the federal and state level. So we’re going to see a slowdown in economic development in Texas, a lot of construction halts and companies that are closing. So we’re gonna see it across the board.
In Texas specifically, the utilities are the lines, the distribution and transmission lines that carry our energy. We’re seeing huge investments in these lines to help with the growing demand. We’ve heard a lot about AI and data centers, as well as weatherizing these lines for more weather volatility.
So there’s just billions and billions of dollars projected to be invested, and this will flow down to energy bills. So it’s really hard to get a handle on all the different things that will be affecting the bills, but we know that they will be going up.
Since we’re talking about grid upgrades and climate resilience — something that a lot of Texans and a lot of politicians have been calling for — if customers aren’t paying for this, who should? The state? the utilities? What is TEPRI suggesting when it comes to policy changes on this front?
We would say that those who are the greatest users of energy and putting the demand on the grid should probably be responsible for these upgrades because it is the incredible amount of load, of demand, on the grid that is requiring the upgrades. Most of that demand is coming from the data centers, the AI, so really looking at how to have them internalize those costs.
That would be one way that we would look. I think that when the market was created for the energy system, we couldn’t really see what the future would look like. So I think who’s paying for that now doesn’t necessarily reflect a fair and just present. So we would suggest a wholesale look at who’s covering the cost, who’s paying.
I mean, the utilities make quite a bit of money, so they should be annualizing some level of upgrades, which they do, but for the changes that are going to be happening onto the grid, too. So, I think it’s not sort of one entity – it’s shared, but certainly we don’t think that low-income households should be bearing the burden of these upgrades.
