Now calls from advocates and congressional Democrats are growing louder for the federal government to step in and issue a nationwide ban on shut-offs. They are eyeing the coronavirus relief package, which administration officials and lawmakers are negotiating, as their best chance to pass a moratorium.
“This is the worst possible time for a family to lose access to electricity,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who is sponsoring separate legislation for a federal ban on electricity and water shut-offs but hopes the restrictions will be included in the broader aid bill.
As disconnections are on the horizon, lawmakers are at odds about what to do next.
House Democrats passed a relief bill in May that included assistance for paying utility bills and a nationwide moratorium on electricity disconnections for four months after the national emergency is declared over.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). also supports a federal ban on shut-offs. But the provisions were not included in the Senate GOP relief proposal.
For months, investor-owned power companies have lobbied against federal intervention, arguing it would be better for them to work with local regulators to respond to a viral outbreak that is hitting each state differently.
Thomas Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for investor-owned electric utilities, told congressional leaders in an April 28 letter that a nationwide ban on shut-offs and debt collection “fails to recognize that different states will recover at different times from the pandemic and, instead, imposes a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to recovery.”
Investor-owned utilities were quick to offer relief to customers at the beginning of the outbreak. All of EEI’s members suspended disconnections for nonpayment in March because of the virus, and the trade group urged Congress to boost funding for an energy assistance program for the poor.
But the Center for Biological Diversity, one of several left-leaning advocacy groups pushing for a federal ban on shut-offs, argues that those commitments from companies are not legally binding and can be undone at any time.
“We can’t rely on corporate largesse to get us through this,” said Jean Su, a staff attorney at the organization.
A total of 32 states, plus the District of Columbia, put in place legal restrictions on electricity disconnections during the pandemic.
That’s according to an analysis from the Center for Biological Diversity.
But since late May, 10 states — Colorado, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina and Texas — have ended their shut-off bans. Another dozen states’ restrictions are scheduled to expire by early September.
The challenge to keep the lights on may only get worse for many Americans as the country continues to sink into an economic recession. Congress allowed an enhanced $600-per-week unemployment benefit to expire for 30 million people, further straining many families’ finances, and a federal moratorium on evictions also expired last week. President Trump says he might try to unilaterally continue them.
And even if disconnections are banned nationally, many customers will still be on the hook to pay deferred bills.
Between April and June in North Carolina, where shut-offs are banned until September, residents were late for or missed $218 million in utility payments — nearly double the amount from the same time last year.
“Pretty clearly, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump never listen to people in pain. They just don’t,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who in addition to supporting a federal ban on disconnections is seeking $100 billion in emergency assistance to help people pay rent and utility bills.
Some members of McConnell’s caucus have urged him to stand firm against a moratorium.
Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) warned McConnell and Schumer in a June 2 letter that a federal shut-off moratorium for electricity, gas and water would be “unprecedented” and was likely to lead to “increasing rates for those who do have the means to pay their bills.”
Low-income Americans — and minorities — are more likely to be affected by the problem.
A survey by Indiana University researchers in May found that 13 percent of households at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line could not pay an energy bill the previous month — three times as high as the previous two months. For a family of four last year, that annual income threshold was $51,500.
The study, conducted online by YouGov, also found that African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans were more likely to have trouble paying for electricity during the pandemic. “Covid is revealing or exacerbating some deep-rooted inequalities,” said Sanya Carley, a professor at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
And not everyone was protected by governors’ orders, which often apply only to larger corporate electric utilities, leaving customers of rural cooperatives and other power providers vulnerable to shut-offs.
Disconnections are resuming soon as the state bans expire. Duke Energy went beyond other power providers in March by voluntarily suspending shut-offs and waiving late fees. But the Charlotte-based electric power company is preparing to resume disconnections in Florida, Indiana and Ohio.
“We will continue to assist customers experiencing economic hardship from the pandemic as we begin to return to standard billing and payment practices” in those states, spokesman Philip Sgro said.
American Electric Power, too, voluntarily stopped disconnections in March. But a month later, the Columbus, Ohio-based utility was lobbying against a federal ban on shut-offs, according to a public records request in West Virginia obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute, a clean-energy advocacy group.
David Pomerantz, head of the Energy and Policy Institute, says electric utilities are trying to have it both ways. “They say they’re going to do the right thing by keeping the lights and air conditioning on during summer heat waves, all while furiously lobbying behind the scenes to avoid being held accountable to that promise,” he said.
AEP has since resumed shut-offs in Oklahoma, as well as for “a very small number” of customers in Michigan, according to spokeswoman Melissa McHenry. “Disconnecting customers is always our last resort when dealing with unpaid bills, and customers who work with us on a payment plan will not be disconnected,” McHenry said.
Correction: This story originally referred to Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) as the Senate majority leader. He is the Senate minority leader.
Power plays
The Tennessee Valley Authority rehired 102 tech workers days after President Trump fired two of its board members and criticized TVA’s move to outsource jobs.
The federally owned utility’s chief executive, Jeffrey Lyash, and acting board chairman John Ryder met with Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone on Thursday, Steven Mufson reports. Later, Lyash released a statement that TVA is “taking immediate actions to address this situation.”
“We were wrong in not fully understanding the impact on our employees, especially during the pandemic,” Lyash said. “…TVA fully understands and supports the Administration’s commitment to preserving and growing American jobs.” Ryder added: “We expressed that our IT restructuring process was faulty and that we have changed direction so that we can ensure American jobs are protected.”
“Trump had complained that the TVA was replacing Americans with foreign workers,” Mufson adds. “In reality, the number of foreign workers — those on H-1B visas — at the TVA is quite low and the total number of employees it initially let go was also relatively modest. Moreover, like all government agencies, the TVA is required to use contractors who do their jobs only on U.S. soil and only with U.S. citizens or people legally entitled to work in the United States.”
A coalition of environmental groups filed the latest suit over the Trump administration’s move to change the National Environmental Policy Act.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and eight other groups filed the challenge to the decades-old environmental law the administration scaled back, claiming that it slowed down the construction of highways, pipelines and other major projects.
“Countless unnecessary environmental harms—including deadly air pollution in residential communities already overburdened by environmental hazards; the individually small but cumulatively devastating climate change impacts of dirty fuels; and the piecemeal destruction of the habitat of species on the brink of extinction—have been identified, disclosed, and often avoided, simply because NEPA requires federal agencies to think before they act,” the groups wrote in their suit.
It’s the third legal challenge against the administration’s changes to NEPA.
Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Bernard McNamee announced he plans to step down in September.
The Republican commissioner could leave the agency short of a quorum necessary to approve new infrastructure projects or approve other action items. “Though his term expired on June 30, he previously said he would not depart the commission if it would mean FERC could not continue operating with a working quorum,” E&E News reports. “While President Trump last month nominated two new commissioners — Democrat Allison Clements and Republican Mark Christie — to the five-member panel, McNamee’s departure could spell trouble in an election year if the Senate cannot move quickly to confirm the nominees.”
The report adds: “Still, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) expressed concern last night over McNamee’s departure, saying the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee lacks the necessary paperwork to hold a confirmation hearing for Trump’s recent nominees.”
Thermometer
NOAA’s new hurricane outlook shows so many storms, we may have to turn to the Greek alphabet.
The new outlook predicts 19 to 25 named storms, with seven to 11 expected to become hurricanes. There have already been nine named storms during the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, including Hurricane Isaias, which was the earliest ninth named storm on record, Andrew Freedman reports.
The outlook includes so many storms that to name them, officials may have to turn to the Greek alphabet, after the 21 names on a predetermined list run out.
The update is a “sharp increase from NOAA’s initial prediction, released in May, which called for a 60 percent likelihood of an above-average season, with a 70 percent chance of 13 to 19 named storms, six to 10 of which would become hurricanes.”
We name storms. A new coalition is pushing to name and rank heat waves, too.
Public health, weather and climate experts have long tried to figure out how to raise awareness of heat waves that kill more people than any other weather hazard in the country, Jason Samenow reports.
“A new, international coalition put together by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center has declared naming and ranking heat waves its “number one priority,” Samenow reports. “….The call to name and rank heat waves originates from the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, launched this week. Its members include emergency response organizations like the Red Cross Global Disaster Preparedness Center, science research hubs like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, several cities including Athens, Mexico City, Miami, and Tel Aviv, corporations, nonprofits, and reinsurers.”
More than 1 million people were still in the dark in the New York region.
And some people won’t have their power restored until at least Sunday following Isaias.
There were at least 400,000 without power in New York as of midday Thursday and more than a million in the dark in New Jersey and Connecticut, Bloomberg News reports.
“Despite the pandemic, more than 2,500 out-of-state utility workers have flocked to New York and New Jersey to help restore power,” per the report. It’s the second-largest storm-related outage in Consolidated Edison Inc.’s history after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the “outages are hitting at an especially difficult time as millions work from home instead of commuting to office buildings, which often have back-up generators.”
A new study found parks serving mostly non-White communities are on average half the size of parks that serve majority White populations.
The parks serving non-White populations also may be five times more crowded.
That’s according to research published by The Trust for Public Land that found “parks serving mostly low-income households are, on average, four times smaller — and potentially four times more crowded — than parks that serve mostly high-income households,” NPR reports.
Oil check
Mining companies don’t always tally transportation-related deaths, which allows them to keep death tolls lower than they are.
That can also allow companies to get more funding after “zero-fatality years,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“In recent decades, companies have made mining much safer—and reported fatalities have fallen. But governments and companies sometimes report statistics in a way that underestimates the true death toll in what remains one of the world’s most dangerous professions,” per the report. “…This year, 16 out of 27 members of the International Council on Mining and Metals reported zero casualties to the trade body—a record in the eight years it has collected this information. But several companies, including Australia’s South32, didn’t include fatalities in transportation, which the ICMM classifies as occupational deaths.”
