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AES Indiana, one of the state’s “big five” investor-owned utility companies, logged the country’s fourth-highest rate of residential disconnections, according to data from an Indiana University dashboard launched Friday.
A dozen researchers with the university’s Energy Justice Lab and several others spent about two years creating the dashboard, which includes electricity and natural gas shut-off data for more than 330 utilities in 42 states and the District of Columbia. It also offers information on local policy.
Advocates emphasized that utility service can be a life-or-death issue for low-income Americans.
Jacqueline Patterson of the Chisholm Legacy Project recounted the 2018 case of a New Jersey grandmother with congestive heart failure, reliant on an oxygen machine to breathe, who died after utility PSE&G cut her electricity. She’d been behind on bills, but her family said it had paid the debt days before the shut-off.
Patterson said Linda Daniels was “paying the price of poverty with her life — paying the price of missing a couple of $60 bills.”
Those behind the dashboard said they hope the data would be used for good.
“This is meant to be a tool, a public good out there for everyone’s use, whether you’re advocates or researchers or government officials, and we have every intention on making this better and better as we go in the future,” said lab Co-Director David Konisky at a virtual kick-off. He is a professor at IU’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs
“Where the data exists, knowledge exists, right?” said lab Co-Director Sanya Carley, also an O’Neill professor. “This is providing useful knowledge for being able to dissect this issue. We’re hopeful that more data can come in.”
A national tool out of Indiana
Dashboard-included utilities disconnected 1.6 million Americans from electric service in 2022. Another 340,000 people experienced a gas shut-off, while 680,000 more were cut off from both electric and gas services.
The website averages seven years of data for municipal utilities, six years for investor-owned utilities and five years for utility cooperatives, according to Carley. She said the team obtained the data by scraping it off utilities’ public websites, through public records requests, and via connections to other organizations with data.
Users can search the website’s “utility disconnection” dashboard for disconnections by state, month and year, and by either rate or total number. Results are downloadable as spreadsheets. On another drop-down menu, users can search disconnection policies by state — and click to download short policy summaries for each state.
But for more elaborate analyses, there’s a data “explorer.”
“These are the same data, but it provides another entry point — another portal — to get a sense of how the data looks,” Konisky said. “… [We’re] really trying to provide the user with a lot of functionality and flexibility, in order to to examine these data in ways that they may find particularly useful.”
The co-directors said they plan to update the website’s data regularly — typically as utilities file new information — but also hope to establish regular update schedules, with dates noted on the website.
They also spoke of goals to someday include data on customer debt and reconnections, and to allow users to search by different geographies: utility company service territory, ZIP code or even Census tract, depending on availability.
Carley noted that IU and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation had provided support thus far for the project, but said the team is seeking long-term funding.
“Information is power. Evidence is power,” Konisky said. “And I think [in] putting this all together, one of our main goals was to allow others to take this information and to use it for advocacy.”
“… The data, as displayed here, allow one to … design strategies for moving towards having fewer disconnections across the country,” he concluded.
Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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