Thread by @SteveCicala

Some new results that highlight the stress that American households and businesses are currently under: Utility disconnections and fees in IL.

Thread:

This spring the Illinois Commerce Commission requested zip code-level statistics from utilities on a variety of metrics, including disconnections, disconnection notices, fees, and deferred-payment agreements.

More info here: icc.illinois.gov/notice-of-inqu…

I've compiled these numbers through November, 2020 for the two largest utilities, Commonwealth Edison and Ameren. Combined, they serve 4.9M residential and 600k commercial/industrial accounts. So this won't be a Chicago-centered story, it's about the whole state.

For referece, here's the county-level vote for @realDonaldTrump in the 2020 election where I have coverage.

Though Illinois imposed a disconnection moratorium through August (and has a regular winter-months moratorium in place now), the statistics are nonetheless horrifying. For residential customers in October:

1% were disconnected for non-payment.
4% were served disconnection notices.
18% were charged late fees.
5% were on deferred-payment agreements.
4.5% were on low-income programs.

These numbers are multiples of historical averages:

There has fortunately been an expansion of the safety net, with a 4x expansion of the number of customers on low-income programs. But that clearly has not been sufficient to stem the tide of disconnections and mounting debt.

In lower-income zip codes over 5% of accounts were disconnected for non-payment in October. In many zip codes over 10% of households received disconnection notices. You can't connect to school remotely if you don't have power.

It's not just households. For commercial and industrial accounts, over 20% were assessed some kind of late payment fee in October (though I don't have a pre-pandemic baseline for comparison). These are for business that already survived through October in the first place!

I'll be writing up more results over the weekend, but while stimulus negotiations are ongoing, I wanted to get @SenToomey's take on whether this looks like the right time to disarm the @federalreserve so it is unable to respond to credit crises.