While the pain is widespread, low-income families are paying an even higher percentage of their household income to power their homes.
When it comes time to pay bills each month, Latoya Blue has to decide: how much can go to food and rent, and how much for heat and electricity?
She needs to keep things consistent at her Hyde Park apartment, and make sure her sons — including an 18-year-old with special needs — have what they need. So the rent and food are an easy yes. But that makes energy bills, which seem to keep getting higher, harder to cover.
“It’s never, ever been easy,” she said. At times, her utilities have been close to being shut off. “I don’t know what was going on this year. This year, there was no buffer.”
Blue is one of thousands of Boston residents facing this squeeze. According to a recent report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Boston has among the highest energy burdens of 25 US cities, defined as the percentage of household income spent on energy costs.
Energy bills have historically been high in the city and state because Massachusetts sits near the end of natural gas pipelines, and is beholden to fuels from outside the state, namely oil and gas, and both are known for being vulnerable to price spikes.
Massachusetts has long had high prices for electricity, much of which is now generated by burning natural gas. The average price paid by consumers in 2022 was more than 21 cents a kilowatt-hour, third highest after Hawaii and California, according to the most recent data from the US Energy Information Administration. The US average that year was about 12 cents.
With cold, sometimes punishing, winters, the high costs to heat homes adds up.
In Boston, the pain is widespread. Of the cities highlighted in the report, only four— Birmingham, Ala.; Rochester, N.Y.; Memphis; and Pittsburgh — have a higher household energy burden.
The costs are especially high for Boston’s low-income households. The median low-income energy burden is 13.7 percent of their incomes; one in four homes devotes nearly 23 percent of their income to those bills, the report’s authors found.
Boston’s Black and Hispanic households, regardless of income level, are paying more, too, according to the report.
“Energy burdens can shine a light into the harsh realities that the cost of energy may have on households,” said Roxana Ayala, senior research analyst at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and lead author of the new report.
Brian Swett, the city of Boston’s chief climate officer, called the report “another piece of evidence in that clarion call to say we need to do something big on energy yesterday in the state of Massachusetts and in Boston.”
By 2050, when the state is required to essentially zero out its climate-warming emissions, it is expected that most households will heat their homes using electricity, via heat pumps, and that electricity will be created from wind and solar energy, rather than fossil fuels.
“The sooner we can get people onto electric systems with predictable renewable power supplying them, the more control we have of the situation,” Swett said. But in the interim, costs keep rising.
That’s not only due to the volatile prices of oil and gas.The electrical gridalsoneeds to expand to accommodate the clean energy transition, which costs rate payers, and costs to maintain and repair the state’s leaky gas pipeline infrastructure continue to rack up.
Another factor leading to high bills, Swett said, is that Massachusetts is among a dozen or so states that allow households to purchase electricity directly from the utility, from a municipal supplier, or from a third-party competitive electric supplier.
Several reports from the attorney general’s office have shown that these third-party suppliers often engage in predatory practices that can result in households — especially low-income ones — paying exorbitantly high prices for electricity. State legislators and officials at the state and city level have been pushing unsuccessfully to ban these suppliers in Massachusetts.
Then there’s the housing stock itself. Many low-income residents in Boston live in older buildings that have not been properly weatherized to retain heat and cooling, and that lack of efficiency leads to higher energy bills.
The new report did not take into account outside assistance that low-income households might receive — such as discount rates from utilities, or federal aid from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
At Action for Boston Community Development, a nonprofit that helps administer federal aid and assists low-income households with paying utility bills and weatherizing homes, the high toll of energy costs is ever present.
“We’re getting more and more calls for fuel assistance … and crisis calls as well,” said Sharon Scott-Chandler, chief executive of the nonprofit. It’s not just that more people are calling, she said,but also the amount each household needs is larger, too.
“This is why we continue to fight for federal funding and state funding and utility funding and all of that,” said Scott-Chandler. “Because increasingly it’s needed, and the help that we do provide doesn’t cover it all, doesn’t cover everybody who needs it.”
Currently, households that earn up to 60 percent of the state’s median annual income, about $87,000 for a family of four, are eligible for rate discounts. The state’s Department of Public Utilities is studying whether the cap can and should be lifted.
In Dorchester, Chris Neptune, a part-time health care worker and mother of two, said she’s been grateful to have help from Action for Boston Community Development. Still, she said, the stress of juggling competing bills is “a lot.”
“You don’t want to get into a situation where stuff is going to get cut off,” she said. So no matter what — even if it’s just $20, she makes sure to pay something toward her bills.
But come winter, when the temperatures drop, it’s always a burden, she said. “You want to stay toasty, but you can’t really believe it — like, oh my God, that’s literally how much it’s costing me to heat this place?”
