IRP Book Talk: Diana Hernandez and Jennifer Laird on Energy Insecurity

Siers-Poisson [00:00:05] Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research and Policy Podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’m Judith Sears-Poisson. For this episode, Dr. Diana Hernandez and Dr. Jennifer Laird join us to discuss their new book, “Powerless: The People’s Struggle for Energy,” that was published by the Russell Sage Foundation, and you can find a link to the book in the program note for this episode. Diana Hernandez is an associate professor of socio-medical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She’s also the co-director of the Energy Opportunity Lab at the Columbia Center for Global Energy Policy. Diana, thanks for joining us today.

Hernandez [00:00:46] Thanks, I’m really happy to be here.

Siers-Poisson [00:00:48] And Jennifer Laird is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Lehman College. Jennifer, great to have you with us.

Laird [00:00:55] Thank you, Judith. It’s great to be here.

Siers-Poisson [00:00:58] To get us started, can you share a basic definition of energy insecurity?

Hernandez [00:01:04] So energy insecurity is defined as the inability to adequately meet household energy needs. And it has kind of these three dimensions, which is about the financial aspects, so economic forms of energy insecurity that really kind of look like difficulty paying your utility bills, falling behind and incurring debt, being at risk of or experiencing a disconnection. It also has a physical dimension, which has to do with inefficiencies, and deficiencies in, like, the systems, the energy-related systems in one’s home. In this work, we also kind of include outages because they’re increasingly a part of how people experience energy insecurity. And then there’s the coping dimension, which is all of the work that people do in order to manage those economic and physical aspects, so difficult choices, making trade-offs between heating and eating, for instance, or discomfort, and the dangerous alternatives like turning on your stove for heat or experiencing extreme heat or cold indoors. And then deprivation, so the underconsumption of energy is another kind of big aspect of energy insecurity. And then there’s a piece of this which is felt, and I always like to say that our participants use language like being drained, and they talked about being drained as being financially, psychologically, and physically drained, and then reaching a point of depletion, like they just had no more to give. And so the equivalent on the food insecurity side would be hunger and malnutrition. So, we now also have a way of describing the felt experience of energy insecurity as drain and depletion.

Siers-Poisson [00:02:48] I was really struck by the examples that you have because, Diana, you did a lot of interviews over a long period of time with people who were experiencing energy insecurity. And, you know, difficulty paying and utility debt can sound like, well, everybody has trouble paying bills at some point, but this is something that completely overwhelms people and causes them a lot of despair.

Hernandez [00:03:15] Yeah, to me, the story that really best illustrates this was a woman living in Arizona, and she had a prepaid meter, so she was paying kind of as you go, right? And she monitored every single, literally to the penny, and she understood if she had one light on, how much it would actually trigger her meter, or if she used the oven, or did anything. It was so consuming that, at some point, it felt perverse to have that much access to, like, the information about energy consumption, when the overarching kind of consideration was about poverty and managing financial affairs that are kind of limited. And that information was empowering, but to a point where it was detrimental, and she couldn’t focus on other things because she was so worried about and considering how much energy she was using at any given moment. So that is like when you have access to that information, how there are these kinds of perverse incentives to save energy. And then for most people, where they have a post-paid bill, meaning that the utility bill comes after they’ve consumed energy, it ultimately also means that there’s these kinds of considerations and like trying to do everything you can to make sure that that part of the bill, not just the supply and delivery charges, but the actual use, is within your control. And so that was the story of people like Betty in Alabama, basically turning off her hot water heater, making sure everything was unplugged, really being hyper-vigilant about the thermostat setting. It’s overwhelming. And it’s more overwhelming and probably insulting when you still can’t keep up. You’re doing all of this work, and I very intentionally used the word work to describe this, and then you’re still falling behind and feeling like you can’t keep up. And I think that that was a story that we heard over and over again. And that really is kind of the challenge of a utility bill, which many of us that don’t have those issues just move ahead in our lives. And maybe you get a little frustrated that your bill is in the hundreds and you wish it weren’t, but it’s not something that is going to stop you from living your life day to day. But I think for many households, when the risk is also not having access to energy, it can be a pretty substantial concern and an obligation, really.

Siers-Poisson [00:05:50] I want to follow up on two things that you just said, Diana, because I think they’re both really important. One is you gave the example of someone in Arizona, and I think often, if people think about energy insecurity, they think about the struggle to heat a home in the winter. But there’s so much more to it, as you said, cooking and lights and things like that, and we’ll get into medical equipment later. But more and more, with more extreme weather and more effects of climate change, the struggle to cool housing is huge.

Hernandez [00:06:19] Yeah, it used to be that this conversation was topical in wintertime. So, snowing out, it’s cold out, and, you know, energy insecurity, it’s the heat or eat dilemma, et cetera. But with rising temperatures, we’re talking about a very different kind of issue around heat, and it’s excessive heat in summer months, and also in regions that are warmer. And Jennifer definitely can talk about some of the areas like the Southeast that are disproportionately impacted by the kind of confluence of poverty and high temperatures, and the reliance on air conditioning. Jenn, I don’t know if you want to add to this.

Speaker 3 [00:06:55] Yeah, I mean, it creates a complex situation where the high-poverty states are in the South, where it’s very humid. And the funding for energy assistance, because it takes a while to, you know, develop these programs, these programs are decades old, and they do favor cold-weather states. And so, it’s created a political issue now in that we’re seeing, coming out of Washington. critiques of energy assistance programs that they favor the cold-weather states, or there’s like a liberal bias to it. And it’s like no, no, no, this is a cold-weather bias, and we need to shift a lot of thinking and funding towards the warm-weather states that are disadvantaged in many ways and have this fiscal capacity issue too.

Siers-Poisson [00:07:41] The other thing you said was that billing for energy usage is different. The expenditures are different, in part because they do fluctuate a lot. And I certainly see that in our own household’s energy bills. But also, except for the prepaid meters, usually you don’t know how much you’ve used, or the cost associated with it, until you get the bill. And that’s very different than going to the grocery store and seeing the price of a bag of carrots, or you know what your rent is going to be, or other fixed costs. How does that make energy insecurity even more difficult to manage?

Hernandez [00:08:15] Yeah, there’s an aspect about this that is unpredictable, right? So, where choice and control are more limited. So, let’s say you’re looking for an apartment, you have a certain price point, there’s a budget for that. Likewise, if you’re going to the grocery store, you have a weekly budget and you manage that. It’s much more challenging when the bills fluctuate and people call these surprise bills. So, you’ve been kind of going along, let’s say it’s the fall season, and the bills are finally manageable because it is seasonal, and then winter comes. And then the heating bills are pretty high, and depending on the ways that rates are structured, for instance, you might have a time-of-use rate. So, if you happen to be, like, at home during the peak hours, usually in the evening time, and you just need to cook for the family or something like that, then all of a sudden your charge peak rates. And so it becomes much more challenging, also because there isn’t so much transparency on the front end so that you know what the energy is costing you at any given time. And then when the bills do come, a lot of times they’re unexpectedly high. When they’re unexpectedly low, like that’s usually a welcome thing. But I think one of the things that we found, also, were the many instances where people just fretted opening up the envelope to begin with, and that the bills kind of piled up literally in envelope form. And it was just daunting to think that it would be an amount with some kind of, like, red font saying that there’s a disconnection notice or that there is a pending shutoff. And I think that that reaction to this thing that seems like you can avoid it, but when the lights are off, not so much, right? So, there’s really this kind of penalty for non-payment or deferred payment that is really consequential, and that’s actually when people get really activated. That’s when they’re coping in so many different ways. They are not only turning to energy assistance, as Jenn mentioned, but they’re doing everything else to prevent, and then when they’re actually having to respond to something like a shutoff, then they’re looking for help in all of the different places, including tapping their social networks, their friends and family, and other kind of community-based organizations for help.

Laird [00:10:42] I would just add that the debt part of this is something I only learned about after I started collaborating with Diana on this project. And, you know, you look at the participants in her qualitative study, I think the median debt there was $500. And it is runaway, so you get a surprise bill, you know, most people can’t come up with $400 for a financial emergency. So, you get one of those surprise bills, you can’t pay it and then interest accrues, accrues, accrues. And then some people just disengage when the bills pile up, and it’s like, there’s no way I can even keep up. And the snowball effect of utility debt can be really overwhelming for some of these households.

Siers-Poisson [00:11:21] We’ll get into more details of what energy insecurity looks like in people’s lives. But first, how many people do you estimate are affected by energy insecurity in the United States?

Laird [00:11:34] So, it depends on how you measure it, but we estimate that more than one in four households experience some aspect of energy insecurity. We know that one in five households, roughly, have to reduce or forego food or medicine to pay their energy bill. We know more than 21 million households, or roughly 16%, have arrearages with their utility provider, and roughly two to three million households every year experience a shut off. 10% of households are getting disconnection notices. So, there’s different ways to measure it and there’s levels of severity, but it’s, I think, more prevalent than people will think. And also once it becomes severe, that’s also what I learned from Diana’s work, is when you have these households experiencing severe energy insecurity, it can be humiliating, it can be life-threatening, and it’s all happening inside people’s homes. So there is a lot of shame involved, too.

Siers-Poisson [00:12:31] I want to ask each of you what prompted you to take on this research, to choose this very specific topic, and a topic that is not as well-known as others. I wonder what brought you each to it. Diana, do you want to start?

Hernandez [00:12:46] Sure. I think this started when I was interviewing people around housing issues more broadly. I had done a study that was based in a clinical setting, Boston Medical Center, and they were providing legal services to pediatric patients to mitigate the relationship between poor housing and poor health. And that was the family advocacy program and has since become the medical legal partnership. And that model has actually grown, you know, since I was doing that evaluation study as part of my dissertation. But I basically sat in the homes of over 70 people in the Boston area, and again and again, there was this hidden story, so all of the housing and health literature had said, think about crowding and asbestos and lead and secondhand smoke exposure and, you know, some of these known housing-based exposures. But what people were telling me as I was sitting in their living rooms and basically on their couches, sometimes myself feeling really cold or observing for myself when there were ways in which people were managing their electricity hookups, and talking about landlords that had transitioned from oil to gas, and basically then transferred over the cost. And to me, I felt like there was a lot of legitimacy to what they were saying, but it was also novel enough that nobody had really taken the time to characterize it well in the academic literature. And I remember sitting with that work for a very, very long time. And then that became the impetus for writing a paper that was published in 2016, but that was just in one place. So while it did the work around conceptualizing energy insecurity, some people could have written it off as “it’s a cold-weather state,” “it’s Massachusetts,” what have you. So, this is really a follow-up, and it’s national in scope, both the surveys that we administered as part of the research, but also then leveraged federal data from the residential energy consumption survey. And then these, like, a hundred interviews around the country to really understand how energy insecurity morphs in these different environments. Like, what are the ways in which, you know, energy insecurity presents itself in warm-weather states, in rural areas, in places that are actually energy producing that are impacted by extreme weather events and climate change, to really try to understand, well, why is it so difficult to diagnose this problem? And then what do we do about it? So how do we kind of think about a treatment plan? So that’s what kind of got me motivated. And I think I kind of brought Jenn along. So, I don’t know, Jenn, if you want to go.

Laird [00:15:26] Sure. So, Diana and I met when I was a postdoc at Columbia and as part of my postdoc, it was during the first Trump administration, and we had foundation funding to write policy briefs, and the Trump administration slashed energy assistance from their budget, and so we did some modeling to estimate the impacts on poverty. And at the time I knew nothing about energy insecurity or even energy assistance, but doing the modeling, I thought, “oh, this is a really small program, honestly I don’t think it’ll make a difference if it goes away.” And then, yeah, hundreds of thousands of households would be affected. And when we presented that work, Diana introduced herself to me at this session and then through my collaboration with her, because she had some other survey data she wanted to analyze, I have only come to understand the problem over time through this collaboration. And what I didn’t realize at the time when I was first looking at this data was that the program is small because we are doing so little to treat the problem. And so now, over time, also seeing the qualitative data that Diana had collected, that really helped me understand the severity of the problem. So, I’m a professor at Lehman College, which is a CUNY college in the Bronx, and I’ve invited Diana to give guest lectures in my classes. Most of our students are from the Bronx and I have them read her 2016 article where she first conceptualized energy insecurity. And the way it resonated with my students and the stories that came out of being shut off or not being able to pay bills. And then they suddenly reach out to me more. CUNY does have some emergency grants and help with bill assistance, or students that are facing disconnections, or that didn’t have hot water. And then the fires that happen almost every winter in the Bronx, it feels like, when people are using space heaters in these inadequately heated buildings. One of my students’ sisters died in one of the most recent Bronx fires. So, seeing the impact of this issue on my students, it kind of came full circle to help me understand the prevalence and the severity of the issue.

Siers-Poisson [00:17:30] And, Jenn, you mentioned those safety net programs that are supposed to help folks deal with the effects of energy insecurity. And those are the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, and there’s also the Weatherization Assistance Program, or WAP. I’d like one of you to describe what each of those is designed to cover, and then we’ll talk about the shortcomings in those programs.

Hernandez [00:17:53] So LIHEAP is basically the primary energy assistance program in the U.S. that supports bill assistance. So, it is a subsidy on utility bills and it’s distributed based on a 1981 and a 1984 formula. And why is that important? Because, basically, it is rooted in the oil crisis of the 1970s and 80s. And so one of the reasons why it kind of overwhelmingly supports cold-weather states is because of its origin story as a heating-fuel-based emergency measure. I always say, think about us in 40 years still using pandemic-era policies that haven’t really been revisited or modernized. So that’s what LIHEAP is. And then WAP, so the Weatherization Assistance Program, is meant to improve housing quality, make it more efficient, thereby kind of reducing energy consumption through these efficiencies, but also helping households achieve thermal comfort because the systems work, they work more efficiently, et cetera. And I mean, from a shortcomings perspective, Jenn can talk about, there’s this enrollment and eligibility gap that really actually affects both of them, probably WAP more so than LIHEAP.

Siers-Poisson [00:19:19] So, who is actually eligible for those two programs.

Laird [00:19:22] Well, it’s income-based eligibility. But what Diana was saying, we know that LIHEAP only reaches roughly 20% of households that are eligible. This is based on prior year’s data; there’s a lot in flux right now. The Weatherization Assistance Program, or WAP, only reaches roughly 0.2% of qualifying households. So, there’s a lot of households who should be getting this assistance who are not. And then the Trump administration just eliminated all of the LIHEAP staff in Washington this spring. And Diana knows more, I believe, maybe, about the state of the federal programs, but they were already not reaching a lot of households, and I worry that it’s only going to get worse. So now I think states and local governments really need to step up.

Siers-Poisson [00:20:06] You also lay out in the book the different energy challenges that renters might face versus homeowners and vice versa. Can you give us a couple of examples that illustrate those differences?

Hernandez [00:20:17] So renters basically have this challenge around, first of all, there’s a housing crisis, a housing affordability crisis. Many renters walk into the transaction around renting a home without full knowledge of how efficient that home is, and it’s kind of dictated by what they call the split incentive. So, when a renter is paying the utility bills, a landlord has less incentive to make it more efficient because they’re not going to directly benefit from the savings. But owners have different issues, especially low-income homeowners. One of the stories that we share in this book is the story of Edith from the Detroit area who actually had an inherited property. So, the home itself was paid off and, according to her, it, you know, had good bones. But she didn’t have the money to maintain the property or upgrade it, and so it hadn’t necessarily seen a major renovation for at least 40 years, 50 years, when she was living in it. And she inhabited that home to take care of her ailing father who passed away. But what she inherited was basically an ailing home, that also was kind of in its own demise, in its own kind of period where, you know, really just needed a lot more of a deep retro fit, in the book we call it, like, the HGTV-type level of renovation to really get it to be functional. And the sad story there is that she was ultimately displaced, and we don’t know what her status was, but the home was put up for sale, and it was purchased within months. And the caption on the real estate notice was “this has all of the space and all of the rooms and a lot of potential, but it needs a lot of love and attention and investment.” And that’s precisely what it was lacking. So, while there are distinctions between renters and owners, when it comes to this, like, intersection of low income status, home ownership, and race, then there’s this confluence of legacy issues that are really rooted in redlining and other mechanisms that have made it more likely for our communities to be racially segregated, and then also for those to also be mechanisms by which people aren’t also able to invest in properties because of wealth gaps and other things that are racially rooted.

Laird [00:22:57] And I’ll just add to that. Generally, if you just look at the data, renters have higher rates of energy insecurity than homeowners, in part because there are wealth differences there. But the race issue that Diana brought up, if you just look at white and Hispanic households, renters had higher rates energy insecurity. But once you look at black households, particularly those in the lower income groups, homeownership increases the probability of energy insecurity. And so, you can see this legacy effect of redlining, and the concentration of black households in these inefficient homes that make home ownership a risk factor for energy insecurity.

Siers-Poisson [00:23:36] Before we move on to your detailed recommendations for policy and practice reforms to address energy insecurity, I do want to touch on the health aspects of the topic. You say in the book that poor health can both be a cause and effect of energy hardship. Can you explain that to us?

Hernandez [00:23:53] Sure. So if energy insecurity is the exposure, then that exposure increases the odds of being unable to afford food, so being food insecure. Also, mental health, respiratory problems, sleep is especially impacted by energy insecurity, and also the use of electronic medical devices. Again, thinking about how those life-sustaining devices end up being compromised by this exposure to energy insecurity. But I think one of the things that we found to be pretty interesting is that people also living with chronic illness, so high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, cancer, and experiencing economic and physical expressions of energy insecurity were more likely to be energy insecure. It makes sense if you think about, you know, we have the story of Camila in the book, a cancer survivor. She was uncomfortable and couldn’t tolerate extreme cold in the home. So, she had to not only use her heating, but also supplement it with space heaters. So, you could see how living with chronic illness or more fragile health might increase the likelihood of experiencing energy insecurity as an exposure or as a kind of an outcome.

Siers-Poisson [00:25:19] I’m guessing that as we do see more extreme weather events and more severe effects of climate change, all of those health concerns are just going to be magnified.

Hernandez [00:25:30] Climate change is interesting because it comes up in two different ways, right? On the one hand, you have its slow expression, which is oftentimes in the rising temperatures. And then you have these more aggressive instances of flash floods or hurricanes and tornadoes and things like that. And the property damage and other things that come from these more extreme weather events, I think, is in a totally different category to some extent. But it’s actually the fact that more people are experiencing much hotter areas. As we speak, we are on the, I think it’s the 30th anniversary of the 1995 heat wave in Chicago, which, from a social science perspective, taught us so much about the importance of social resilience and, like, having community ties and making sure that people were checking on neighbors. But it could have also told us a lot about access to cooling and how necessary that is, also, to kind of manage through these heat waves. And 30 years ago, we weren’t really thinking about this as the pattern that we’ve now seen climate change take on. But definitely, you know, at this point, we know that air conditioning is durable medical equipment, that it really helps people to get through the summer seasons, and the more intense everyday expressions of rising temperatures, and how people are actually more proximally experiencing climate change.

Siers-Poisson [00:27:02] I want to spend the rest of our time together discussing your recommendations for policy and practice reforms. You start with the premise that there needs to be a commitment to recognizing household energy as a human right. What would that look like in the United States?

Laird [00:27:18] Well, I’ll set Diana up to answer this question because she came up with some brilliant policy solutions. But we do argue the main premise of the book is that access to energy is a human right and should be observed as a human right. Other countries treat it as a human right. And so, the fact that we’re having to make a case for it in a way that, I think it’s now generally understood that access to food is a human right, and no matter where you are in the political spectrum, you know, you generally support access to food, we have food pantries. And some of what Diana has conceived is along those lines, be more creative about how we think about some of these solutions and how we might need to not just think in the traditional safety net mindset but might need to expand our frame of thought. But Diana can go into more detail about the SPARK framework.

Hernandez [00:28:05] So I think that energy is an enabler of human flourishing and also necessary for other human rights to kind of exist. So, the right to health, the right to housing, the right to food, a lot of that is actually premised on having access to energy to store and prepare food, to make a home livable, to be able to access health because your environment is health conducive. So, what do we do about that, right, now that we’ve established that it’s an issue? We’ve also kind of made an argument that it is important from a human rights perspective. What’s there to do? And we lay out this SPARKed framework, and that’s an acronym. And as Jenn said, the whole point of this is to be more like an umbrella. We often think about a safety net as catching people as they’re falling. But what we really need is people to be grounded. We need them to carry about their lives but have coverage. And so, this SPARKed Action Framework is meant to be that coverage. So, the S is for survey screens and public health surveillance, so making sure that we have data that allows us to be able to track this issue at different levels and for different populations. Participation in energy decision making: energy decision making right now operates in this very like abstract way. Most people’s primary way of interacting with energy systems is actually through their utility bills. In many places, over 70% of the US is actually covered by an investor-owned utility. Those are regulated utilities, so there are ways to participate, especially with state-level public utility commissions. Most people do not. So there are definitely calls for ways of expanding that participation. Affordable bills. We have, for most other goods and services, some variation in terms of price points, right? We talked about food and housing at the outset, and we don’t have that same level of variability when it comes to energy. In fact, there are legal standards that feel a bit outdated, especially now that we understand that there are these disproportionately impacted populations, that are about fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory ratemaking. And the way that those legal standards have been interpreted is that everybody pays the same amount, but that actually doesn’t necessarily mean that the result is equal, even if the kilowatt per hour, for instance, is priced at the same amounts. So, I do think that there’s some rate redesign necessary, a robust energy and social safety net, because when people have their food needs met, their healthcare needs met, they’re more likely to be energy secure, and vice versa.

Siers-Poisson [00:31:02] We talked earlier about the LIHEAP and WAP programs. Do you see any potential there to expand the coverage or to reach more people through some form of energy assistance?

Hernandez [00:31:13] I think in the current moment, what we will need is more participation from state and local actors and utilities. In the past, LIHEAP was primarily distributed at the federal level, and there weren’t a lot of supplemental resources on the part of states or municipalities or utilities. And I think that now, with energy becoming more expensive for different reasons, some of it including the data center AI drive right now that is doing a lot in terms of water and energy, is also to think about, including potentially some of those companies, like, helping to offset the cost of energy. In fact, they are right now more likely to contribute to its increase than it is that they would contribute to the decrease of burden. And so, I think that, notwithstanding what happens at the federal level, typically in appropriations, Congress has supported and backed LIHEAP. And in this administration, they do actually talk a little bit more about energy affordability kind of more bluntly. So, I think that there’s some hope there, but I do think that there are also a lot of drivers that are making energy less affordable, actually. So, I think that there is going to be more needs for varied actors to kind of become more involved.

Siers-Poisson [00:32:37] The next element in the SPARKed Action Framework is knowledge and energy literacy. How do you see that as improving access to affordable energy?

Hernandez [00:32:47] Well, I think, definitely, people don’t know the answers to basic questions. Like, is lighting more expensive than heating and cooling? Most people are obsessing over turning off the lights in a room if you’re not there, but that’s actually, it’s probably better for you to keep your thermostat at a more regulated point from an energy cost perspective. We need to know more about how our energy systems operate, how they’re governed, and what we can do to insert ourselves in these processes. Otherwise, we are subjected to this reality, but without many points of engagement and interaction. Jenn, I don’t know if you want to add anything.

Laird [00:33:31] I would just add that, being relatively new to this project, I still don’t know how a lot of the stuff in my house works, you know? I’m learning about induction, but I know that I’m currently in a room where I have a window AC unit and I know the installation here isn’t great, and I know the windows aren’t great, I’m sure the windows are old, so it’s a lot to get on top of that. And what was heartbreaking from the qualitative data was you would see households experiencing severe energy insecurity, and in many cases, it wasn’t for lack of trying to gain knowledge. And like Diana was talking about, this vigilant conservation of obsessing over bills and calling utility providers, and they’re doing research in many cases, and collecting data, and trying to make sense of the data from different sources. But why do we have to go to so much effort to figure this stuff out? There are ways to make this information more accessible.

Siers-Poisson [00:34:23] Well and that leads into the next part of the SPARKed framework, which is promoting efficiency, electrification, and clean energy access. What do you think the priorities would be there? Because it sounds like a lot of the elements there would be a big upfront investment.

Hernandez [00:34:41] Weatherization and energy efficiency are the fundamentals, right? I think it doesn’t make sense to do electrification, housing decarbonization, if you’re in a place that is drafty and poorly insulated. So, I think that there’s a big piece of that. And I think, you know, the Weatherization Assistance Program is helpful, but obviously it doesn’t have a large enough reach. And I think part of that is really needing to have more community-based, trusted resources that help people kind of make those choices. And also, having the financial backing under the prior administration, there was a lot of money that was dedicated precisely to this, and I think rolling back those incentives and those benefits, or not really fully implementing them is not only harmful for our climate and the environment, but also for our households and their stability, their ability to enjoy their homes and stay there, too.

Siers-Poisson [00:35:38] And finally, you discuss disconnection reform. What would be the most important steps towards achieving that?

Hernandez [00:35:46] Well, I think it’s partly about increasing the protections and expanding who is protected. I met this woman, and I was in her house while she was living through a disconnection in Fresno. This was Marissa in California. And she could not use her home. She was paying rent, but her home was no longer usable because she couldn’t cook. She had no hot water. She could not bathe her children. So they were only sleeping there. And what she described living through a disconnection, she said they were savaging it while living through a disconnection. So, there’s nothing more inhumane to me about what that feels like and what that is. And, I think, not only are we in a position to extend more protections for different groups, she was pregnant at the time, so households with children, the groups that we know are disproportionately impacted, not just by energy insecurity, but also by health disparities. So really thinking about that. And then, I think, societally, we need to ask ourselves the question, is it okay to shut people off, to penalize people for non-payment in this harsh and inhumane way? And I think that that’s like a moral question as much as it is about the practicalities. I mean, COVID showed us that we can, from one day to another, have federal-level moratoria around shutoffs, and then we could also see how those kind of go away over time, and it’s costly. I think that it isn’t sustainable necessarily to have widespread disconnection protections that basically are, you know, financially kind of complicated. But I think there are these questions about our most vulnerable populations and ensuring that they have access to energy that they need and they aren’t shut off in this really punitive way.

Siers-Poisson [00:37:32] Is there anything you would like to add, Jenn?

Laird [00:37:32] Yeah, I would just add there’s a myth that we actually saw in the most recent skinny budget from the administration that states already provide disconnection protections. And the last time I looked at that data, there were at least 10 states that didn’t provide cold weather disconnection protections, 21 states don’t provide hot weather disconnection protections,12 states—there are disconnection protections for vulnerable families—12 States don’t have those, you know, like Florida, for example. Last time we looked at the data, less than 10% of eligible households in Florida receive LIHEAP, and they don’t have protections that I’m aware of. And so, there’s a lot more that could be done at the state level to protect people from disconnections.

Siers-Poisson [00:38:18] Clearly a lot of research and work and love, I would say, went into this book. What further research would you each like to do or see done on the topic? Jenn?

Laird [00:38:29] What I have learned from this project is that, even though I’m a quantitative sociologist, I think the qualitative data is, in this case, sometimes more compelling than the quantitative data. And I would love to see funding for some of the solutions-oriented research. So we have these ideas about interventions. Let’s fund some experiments at the state level, and let’s try stuff. One of Diana’s ideas was an energy pantry where you have people actually, you know, donating. Let’s try it and see what happens. I would like to see more funding go toward some of these SPARKed related interventions.

Siers-Poisson [00:39:07] And Diana?

Hernandez [00:39:10] Yeah, I agree. I think that more of the kind of experimental work, demonstrations, and things like that. You know, I’ve also come to a place where, I think we also need to just think about other ways to tell this story and reach different kinds of audiences. So, I think, we’ve also been working with social media and with elected officials and other people that are, like, in decision-making capacities. Because I think one of the things that we needed to do, for sure, was to tell the story with the academic kind of backing, lots of data, the different stories, organizing it in a certain way. But I do think that translating that information to wider audiences is really necessary. And then also thinking about other settings where this matters, housing settings, clinical settings, and definitely state and municipal governments, again, trying to move in a more localized fashion toward solutions and not necessarily relying so extensively on the federal government, which I think is no longer as reliable a partner.

Siers-Poisson [00:40:13] Well, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book. I learned a lot and thank you both so much for taking the time to discuss your work with us.

Hernandez [00:40:21] Thank you, Judith, for having us.

Laird [00:40:24] Thank you Judith, this was great. We really appreciate it.

Siers-Poisson [00:40:27] Thanks so much to Dr. Diana Hernandez and Dr. Jennifer Laird for joining us to discuss their new book, “Powerless: The People’s Struggle for Energy,” that was published by the Russell Sage Foundation, and you can find a link to the book in the program note for this episode. Please note that views expressed by our speakers don’t necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the Institute for Research on Poverty or of any other sponsor, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Music for the episode is by Poi Dog Pondering. Thanks for listening.