Staying cool is not a luxury everyone can afford.
Just ask Daurched Fields-moeller. The 37-year-old and her family didn’t have electricity for 25 days ending Aug. 23, 2024.
During that time, nearly a month, the average high temperature outside was 91 degrees, according to data from the Florida Climate Center. This doesn’t account for the heat index, which is what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature, according to the National Weather Service.
“I wouldn't wish anybody to lose power,” said Fields-moeller. “Especially during the hot season or the hot peaks in Florida.”
Fields-moeller is one of the 3 million people who have their electricity shut off every year because they cannot afford to pay monthly bills, according to the Energy Justice Lab, an energy research lab at Indiana University. With summer coming soon, others with limited resources will face similar challenges as the average temperature goes up each year.
Last year was the warmest summer on record in Florida, according to the 2024 Annual Florida Weather and Climate Summary. And the weather is going to keep getting hotter. The number of extreme heat days, classified as days when the weather is 95 degrees or higher, is projected to rise, according to the Florida Climate Center.
But when the temperature keeps rising, air conditioning can be a lifesaver. In the summer of 2023 alone, there were 84 heat-related deaths in Florida, according to an Associated Press analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
Utility bills stay high as the temperature goes up. Florida has the 15th highest average residential electric bills in the country as of 2023, tying with Rhode Island at $130.40 a month, according to Forbes.
Jyoti Parmar, the organizing representative of the Sierra Club, a grassroots environmental organization, said she was agitated when she found out that Florida doesn’t have a law to protect residents from utility shutoffs during extreme heat.
“Everyone deserves to be safe in their home and, you know, bill payments should not determine whether you live or die,” Parmar said.
Fields-moeller is a disabled veteran who served in the U.S. Navy, and she said she supports herself and her three children with a fixed income of child support and VA disability benefits.
“I don't always have enough to stretch to cover certain stuff,” she said, “So, it is either pay rent and lose lights or pay lights and lose housing. It was always a lose-lose position.”
She lost power for non-payment of a $3,000 utility bill, according to Gainesville Regional Utilities records, and it’s because of a history of trouble paying past utility bills that led up to the final number.
When the air conditioning went out, Fields-moeller said the house felt like a sauna. Even wearing clothes felt suffocating inside the hot home, she said.
“I did open up windows, but it did nothing,” she said. “It just added bugs in the house, so I quickly closed those.”
She stayed in the house with her children, adjusting their daily routines to a house without power. They ate grilled food and takeout, and Fields-moeller would heat water on the grill for bathing her children. But when the water was cut off a week later, Fields-moeller said she couldn’t take it anymore.
“With the heat, we needed to stay hydrated at the very least,” she said. So, she took her children, and they went to stay with her children’s grandmother in Sanderson until Fields-moeller could get the power back on. During this period, Fields-moeller said she would drive an hour and a half to bring her children to school in Gainesville.
After losing power for non-payment, customers need to pay additional fees on top of what they already owe after their account is closed, including a security deposit.
These fees can be for returned or late payment, reconnection fees, water disconnection if the meter was removed, requesting reconnection outside of normal working hours and fees if the electric service was disconnected at the point of service. These fees can vary depending on the situation, but it can cost several hundred dollars to reconnect utilities.
“Let's be honest, if I'm needing help with past due amount, how am I supposed to come up with money for a security deposit?” said Fields-moeller. Ultimately, a veterans agency assisted her with paying her bills, but Fields-moeller is one out of many people whose power is disconnected during the hot season, which can start as early as March in Florida.
Between January and September 2024, six investor-owned utilities disconnected service to customers throughout the U.S. more than 662,000 times, according to the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. This was an increase of 21% over the same period in 2023.
This data doesn’t give the whole picture, as 22 states don’t require their investor-owned utilities to disclose data on residential power shutoffs for nonpayment.
While 42 states have shutoff bans for extreme cold, only 21 states as of July 2024 have hot weather disconnection protection policies.
Florida, the hottest state in the country, is not one of them.
The danger of heat
Energy burden is defined as the percentage of gross household income spent on energy costs, according to the U.S. Department of Energy
In Southeast Florida alone, nearly a quarter of households are highly or severely energy burdened, defined as 6 to 10% of gross monthly income spent on energy bills, while severely burdened households spend greater than 10% of their gross income, according to Southeast Florida Climate Change Compact.
Lynée Turek-Hankins, a doctoral student at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy at the University of Miami, said households can struggle with having both a hot house and high energy bills.
“A good way to think about this could be like if you are a senior with fixed income, it could just be the very baseline energy bill is very high relative to your income, right?” she said. “So it doesn't matter if you lower the AC all the way, it could still be that that bill is unaffordable for you.”
According to the Aug. 20 to Sept. 16, 2024, Household Pulse Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, over 3 million adults in Florida households were unable to pay an energy bill in full in the last year since the survey was done.
Turek-Hankins was the lead researcher in a 2022 study that measured the inside heat index of 57 households, as well as the cost of their bills.
This study aimed to understand the diversity of experiences of indoor heat and energy unaffordability in Miami-Dade County, she said.
The study found even middle-income households can be vulnerable to energy burdens.
There are factors that contribute to a house’s indoor temperature staying hot, according to Turek-Hankins, such as lack of up-to-date cooling technology. Additionally, the house’s envelope, which is the exterior shell of a building that separates the inside from the outside environment such as walls and the roof, can be heat retaining.
Heat can impact people’s health if they’re exposed to it for too long, according to Thomas Clanton, a professor of applied physiology and kinesiology at UF. Age can be a factor, as young children and elderly adults are more vulnerable to heat, as are people with underlying diseases and conditions like diabetes.
Clanton said anyone with a low cardiac output is more vulnerable to heat, and even having a viral infection – like the flu – a few weeks before exposure to extreme heat can make an individual more vulnerable to heat injury.
“It (heat) can sneak up on you,” he said, “and I think that's dangerous.”
Florida has the highest numbers of heat-related illness cases in the U.S., according to the Florida Policy Institute, and the state had 31,011 heat-related illness emergency room visits and hospitalizations between 2018 and 2022.
Whether you’re vulnerable or not, heat doesn’t have a preference. Nor does it have restraint as temperatures continue to rise.
Slow as it may come, heat illness can happen in a home without air conditioning.
A Solution
Rising temperatures and utility bills are issues that demand a solution, according to Parmar.
“That combination of poverty, extended disconnection, and no awareness of how to handle heat is literally fatal,” she said.
Parmar focuses on advancing clean energy policies, and she often works with people who have had their utilities shut off when they cannot pay.
Parmar is from Rourkela, India, a town that she says is very similar to the climate here in Gainesville, except she said it doesn’t have cooler seasons.
“We knew as children what heat stress was, what the symptoms were, and how to try and cool yourself off,” she said. “It's even part of our religion to do heat service.”
GRU officials declined to be interviewed by WUFT, but in a prepared statement the utility said it knows hot summers can lead to high energy usage and financial crisis, and it urges anyone “in this situation to contact a customer service representative to discuss a program that may work for them.”
One of these programs includes the Low-income Energy Efficiency Program Plus, which assists low-income customers with home improvements that can lower their electric bill, improve comfort and reduce energy use, according to GRU’s website.
But getting disconnected means paying reconnection fees and a security deposit on top of past due bills.
“It keeps going up,” Parmar said about utility costs, “and there's no protection in place for the people who are affected by it.”
Taking inspiration from other states that have enacted similar legislation, Parmar has worked with several organizations to attempt to pass the PAUSE Act, which would prohibit utilities from disconnecting service for customers who can’t pay during times the heat index is hotter than 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
House Bill 419 and Senate Bill 330 are identical bills that would have provided this relief, but neither bill has been voted on. Despite this, Parmar is already preparing to take the bill back to the legislative session next year.
“It is nevertheless a Band-Aid,” she said about the bill. “The heat's gonna keep going up unless we take action.”