Month: September 2026

How Much Work is Required to Pay Energy Bills? September Map of the Month

By Dr. Amy Lovell
Senior Research Associate, Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance (SEEA)

There is rising concern about energy affordability in the Southeast, with fuel costs and rates rising due to both domestic and international influences.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that costs in the South region have continued to rise, led by housing-related costs including energy, and transportation costs driven by a 29% increase in motor fuels since this time last year. Growing electricity demand and even higher projected future electricity demand has people wondering where new electricity generation will come from and what impacts ratepayers will feel from how states and utilities plan to build what is needed.  With already strained household budgets for housing, medical, and transportation costs, high utility bills are becoming harder to absorb.  All of this has focused national attention on household energy affordability. 

This month’s map investigates energy affordability and some ways that we measure it in the Southeast.  SEEA’s executive director, John Silkey, wrote a recent op-ed focused on the income side of affordability. Here, we dig into affordability across the Southeast and connect it to workers’ wages: How much extra work would a household need to take on just to make energy affordable? 

One way to estimate the gravity of energy cost impacts is to express those costs as a fraction of household income, often known as “energy burden.” The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) affordability guidelines are based on keeping overall housing costs at or below 30% of a family’s income.  If energy costs exceed 20% of housing expenses, or >6% of the residents’ income, the household would be considered to have a high burden from those costs.  Severely burdened households spend over 10% of their annual income on energy expenses. These costs put pressure on budgets for food, medical care, and other housing needs, causing many energy-burdened families to have to forgo essentials to pay for energy, and deepening existing vulnerabilities for low-income households. In addition to household energy costs, high and unpredictable fuel costs for transportation add financial strain. 

Since affordability is often characterized relative to household income, it is important to zero in on energy expenses for low- and moderate-income (LMI) household, because bulk averages may mask affordability challenges. LMI households have incomes at or below 80% of the area median income (AMI), as tabulated in the Low-Income Energy Affordability Database (LEAD) at the U.S. Department of Energy.   

In the Southeast, energy burdens are regionally high for LMI households: only Florida, Virginia and North Carolina are below 8%, which is already above the 6% considered to be a financial burden. Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi are all over the 10% severe threshold, indicating a significant affordability challenge in these areas. Energy costs vary by state and by housing type, but average around $1800/year or $150/month for low-income households across the region.  

Assuming a full-time minimum-wage job, average energy costs represent a high energy burden in every Southeastern state.  In Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, average energy expenses require more than 6% of two minimum wage incomes, as shown in the chart below.   

Also illustrated below is the number of days of full-time labor at minimum wage that would be required each year to pay the average LMI energy expenses. In the majority of Southeastern states, more than a month of full-time salary is required to meet typical energy costs. 

Another metric that can be used to assess energy-related financial challenges is the energy affordability gap (EAG), a measure of the difference between actual expenses and an affordable level of expenses.  The EAG provides an indication of how much funding would really be required to address affordability, so can reveal geographies in greatest need of investments. Energy affordability gaps are over $500/year for an average low-income family in Alabama, Louisiana, or Mississippi, and would require more than 2 weeks of extra full-time work at minimum wage to close the gap. 

The Energy Equity Explorer (EEE), a collaboration between SEEA and the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute (TEPRI), is a tool that we developed for visualizing and analyzing energy costs and burdens, with a focus on low-income household data from multiple public data sets. If you’d like to investigate low-income energy affordability influences in your area, try the tool!  Questions you could pursue include:

  • Where are energy burdens the highest?  How does it vary between urban and rural communities? 
  • How do renters fare compared to homeowners?
  • Do affordability challenges correlate with other social vulnerabilities?
  • Which housing types and ages have higher costs and affordability challenges?

Op-Ed: Energy Affordability Has an Income Problem, Not Just a Bill Problem 

By John Silkey
Executive Director, Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance (SEEA)

The energy affordability conversation has a blind spot. Household energy bills grab the headlines. But in the Southeast, we have some of the lowest electricity rates in the nation, and the highest energy burdens, even before new manufacturers and data centers arrive. 

That’s not a contradiction. It’s a clue: cost is a necessary variable to address, but not sufficient to solve the problem. We need to weigh household income as much as energy costs. 

Rates and efficiency are what utilities and regulators control. Income is driven by job opportunity. Most affordability funding touches only the first two variables. A workforce-focused efficiency program touches the one that changes a family’s trajectory. 

The Treadmill

Energy is a service no household can do without, and usage can’t be meaningfully reduced without upfront capital most Southeast households don’t have. Utility programs help but hit two hurdles: millions of Southeast homes are too structurally poor to qualify for those programs, and many who do qualify still lack the capital for bigger upgrades like insulation, HVAC, or windows. The 33% who rent have no incentive to invest in something they don’t own. 

Affordable rates and utility programs can help prevent shut-offs and predatory payday loans. But they don’t solve what is a long-term problem. 

Walk through the affordability funding ecosystem and you’ll find the same logic repeated at every level: reduce the bill. Weatherization budgets. LIHEAP allocations. Utility rebate programs. Each lowers what a household owes each month. None changes what it earns. These programs were never designed to solve a structural income problem. 

Here’s what that gap looks like in the numbers: 

More rebates alone won’t fix this. The treadmill runs faster than support can keep up. And the energy transition provides a generational opportunity for some to get off it. 

The Wrong Question

Private funding has largely followed the public sector’s lead, funding programs that help households cope with a structurally broken situation. That made sense when federal programs provided the floor and philanthropic dollars filled the gap. 

But the question we’ve been funding, how do we lower the bill, is incomplete. The question we need to ask: why is the bill a burden in the first place? The answer breaks into two parts. 

On the consumption side: low-income Southeast households use 36% more electricity than the national low-income average. Their homes are old, leaky, and inefficient. On the income side: Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Arkansas rank at the top of the nation in low-income energy burden. They’re not the states with the highest rates. They’re the states with the lowest incomes. 

So funding that only touches the bill side isn’t a long-term solution. It’s a maintenance program. 

Utilities and regulators are right to focus on rates, reliability, and bill impacts. That’s the system they steward. But affordability is also a function of aging housing stock and regional income, realities outside any one institution’s authority. Paired with rising workforce shortages in the energy trades, that gap is also an opportunity.

A Different Category of Investment

That opportunity starts with people. Millions of experienced trades workers are set to retire in the next four years, a gap clean energy deployment is already running into. SEEA members feel it now in too few energy auditors and higher costs to reach areas where the skilled workforce doesn’t exist. It’s a challenge in both rural and urban centers. The energy transition will require the largest trades hiring wave in generations, and that demand isn’t going away. The workforce to meet it is. 

That’s the gap Building Opportunity Labs is built to close. At SEEA, we’re developing a model that turns trusted community buildings and cultural institutions into energy upgrade and workforce training hubs. Residents aged 18 to 25 train to install the technologies that lower energy costs in buildings in their own communities. Fellows earn $18 an hour during training, complete stackable credentials, and move into career-track jobs with SEEA members who are hiring for them. 

That’s not only an energy efficiency program. It’s an economic development strategy that addresses two-thirds of our equation at once, consumption and income, and it belongs in a workforce and economic mobility portfolio, not just a clean energy one. The energy transition delivers the opportunity; it isn’t the point of the investment. 

What a Different Conversation Looks Like

The workforce gap is opening now, and the window to put low-income residents on the right side of it is time-limited. There’s a category of investment that works the income side of the ledger, not just the bill side. It uses the energy system as the engine while still reducing consumption, and it needs funders willing to ask a different question. 

Let’s not fund just the treadmill. Let’s fund the ladder.