Insight 01 of 10

Illuminating America’s hidden hardship

Stat: The EIA 112 report is the first comprehensive national survey of shutoffs capturing shutoff data for 95% of Americans. ¹ Before this report, the number of states reporting shutoffs by any utility plummeted from a high of 40 in 2021 to just 21 by 2024. ² The vast majority of the country’s 700 cooperative and 2,000 municipal utilities have never been required to disclose shutoffs. ³

Why this matters: Before the federal government stepped in, many states were moving in the wrong direction. Dr. Diana Hernandez, often admired as the “mother of energy justice,” has called energy insecurity America’s Hidden Hardship. ⁴ As utilities plunged millions of households into darkness, public awareness of the problem was similarly kept in the shadows. The EIA data is a hidden gem, helping us to reveal the depth of harm from what was once America’s Hidden Hardship.

Insight 02 of 10

The scale is worse than we thought

Stat: In 2024, utilities in the United States executed 15.1 million shutoffs — about 13.4 million electric (89%) and 1.5 million gas (11%). That is one shutoff every 2.1 seconds, every day, all year. Overall 2 million households were never reconnected.

Why this matters: For years the actual number of shutoffs was a mystery. Many cited 3 million shutoffs reported annually, ⁵ while EEP, extrapolated to an estimate of 7 million shutoffs each year. The new federal data doubles that, including data from cooperative and municipal utilities and states like Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama that had never before reported. The previous conservative reporting underestimated the true hardship by 80%, and even our model low-balled the toll. Whatever the old estimates told us, the real one tells us more loudly: this is not an edge case. Shutoffs are a brutal national practice as commonplace as eviction for past due rent. A system that allows utilities to shut off power 15 million times a year is a system that runs on cruelty.

Insight 03 of 10

Final notices outnumber the shutoffs by nearly ten to one

Stat: Utilities sent 122 million final shutoff notices, across 132 million households, in 2024 — 95 million for electric, 27 million for gas. While many households receive multiple notices in a year, a frightening monthly recurrence, this equates to 9 final notices for every 10 households. 18 states exceed a 1:1 ratio; in Georgia and Louisiana, final notices outnumber households 2:1.

Why this matters: Every notice is a series of frantic calls to financially strapped human service agencies, a skipped prescription, a series of sleepless nights and heart palpitations. The choice between a cold dinner and the energy to cook and refrigerate. Explaining to the children the choice to sweat or shiver through the night to keep a roof overhead. The unseen hustle for a payday loan that demands a 25% cut of hard-earned wages. Utilities and those who regulate them will tell you most notices don't end in a shutoff — as if that is a defense. It isn't. It is an admission that the threat itself is the business model. Utilities use shutoffs to rake in hundreds of millions in late fees, deposits, and reconnection fees. Fifteen million shutoffs a year rest on top of one hundred twenty two million threats a year. The whole structure, built on fear, exacts pain and humiliation.

Insight 04 of 10

This is not a seasonal problem. It is a year-round problem.

Stat: Shutoffs were remarkably flat across the calendar. Every single month of 2024 saw more than 1 million combined shutoffs. October was the worst (1.62M). December was the “lightest” (1.02M).

Why this matters: Seasonal moratoriums are sold to the public as if the problem is merely the weather, but utilities shut people off in January. They shut people off in July. They shut people off in October. With extreme weather on the rise around the country, a protection that only covers the hottest or coldest weeks leaves people at risk of potentially life-threatening consequences. The only dependable protection is ending shutoffs.

Insight 05 of 10

The South is ground zero for shutoffs

Stat: Texas alone executed 3.23 million shutoffs in 2024 — 22% of the national total. Florida added 2.21 million (15%). Together, these two sunny states executed 36% of the shutoffs in America. The top five states (by combined shutoff counts) alone (which adds Tennessee #3, Oklahoma #4, and Georgia, #5) executed 7.29 million shutoffs – nearly half.

Why this matters: Shutoffs are a national practice, but they are not evenly distributed. The geography of pain maps onto the geography of fraught energy policies and regulation: weak Public Utility Commissions, deregulated retail markets, no transparent reporting, and the most profitable utility companies. The concentration of shutoffs in southern states is not a coincidence. It is the product of unmitigated utility power, their financial stranglehold over legislators, governors and elected PUC commissioners. Their disregard for customers can be reversed; decisions can be unmade.

Insight 06 of 10

In Oklahoma, utilities executed one shutoff for every three customers each year

Stat: Oklahoma's 2024 combined shutoff rate reached 33.2%— the highest in the country. Texas followed at 25.2%, Alabama at 22.3%, Florida at 20.9%, Louisiana at 20.8%.

Why this matters: These are not extreme outliers. These are the normal numbers for a belt of states running from the southern Plains through the Deep South. There was nearly one electric or gas shutoff for every 3 utility accounts in Oklahoma. These shutoffs are salt in the wound of $1,800 to $4,000 additional surcharges for each household incurred when gas prices from $2 / MCF to $1,200 per MCF during 2021 Winter Storm Uri. ^{6 7} If a third of drivers had their license revoked every year, the country would call it a crisis. When it happens to a family’s electricity, we call it business as usual.

Insight 07 of 10

The “best” states still shut off tens of thousands

Stat: The lowest electric shutoff rates in the country were in Wyoming (1.9%), Montana (2.6%), Rhode Island (2.6%), and Massachusetts (2.7%). Even so, Massachusetts alone executed over 72,000 shutoffs in 2024. New York — often cited as a progressive leader on utility policy — allowed more than 267,000 shutoffs.

Why this matters: There is no “best actor” in shutoffs - there are only states that do it less. A 1% shutoff rate still means tens of thousands of lives routinely disrupted and endangered. Every “model” or “high performing” state is still doing something we believe no state should do at all. Celebrating relatively low numbers is how the floor gets mistaken for the ceiling.

Insight 08 of 10

Alabama's gas shutoffs show what deep inequity looks like

Stat: Alabama shut off gas to 10.05% of gas customers in 2024 about 5x the national gas shutoff rate (2.23%). Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Oklahoma all have gas shutoff rates above 5%.

Why this matters: This is what the system looks like when there is almost no effective regulation. Gas is heat. Gas is hot water. Gas fuels the stove that feeds the kids. ⁸ The people on the other side of the shutoff valve are disproportionately Black, disproportionately poor, and disproportionately in the South. The pattern is not an accident.

Insight 09 of 10

Texas and Florida shut off power 650k times in the two hottest months of the year

Stat: In July and August 2024 alone, Texas utilities carried out ~300,000 electric shutoffs. Florida added another ~350,000 in those same two months. Combined, that is over 10,000 households per day losing electricity during the deadliest heat of the summer, in two states that regularly see heat indexes above 105°F. In Houston, low temperatures never dipped below 80°F from August 5-24. ⁹ Florida has no shutoff protections for any level of extreme heat.

Why this matters: Heat kills more Americans every year than any other weather event. Shutting off air conditioning along the Gulf in August is not just a routine utility practice . It is a gamble with a human life — a gamble the utility makes without the customer’s consent, all to ensure an uninterrupted flow of dividends to an air-conditioned building on Wall Street. The federal government values a statistical life at roughly $13 million. ¹⁰ For whom is a 105° apartment with no power “cost-effective”?

Insight 10 of 10

The wealth to ensure universal affordability is already in the system

Stat: U.S. investor-owned utilities collect on the order of $50 billion per year in excess revenue over operating needs. Less than 2% of IOU shareholder dividends would forgive every customer arrearage in the country. As with many economic questions before Americans, it's a question of a more equitable distribution and political will, not whether the richest country in history can actually afford it.

Why this matters: When someone tells you we can't afford to stop shutoffs — remember this: the money is in the system. It is sitting in dividends and guaranteed 10% returns on equity ¹¹ and executive compensation packages that can top $30 million. ¹² The people’s money is subsidizing data centers and multi-billion dollar companies, and paying for a safety net that treats the symptom and ignores the disease. The question has never been whether America could afford to stop shutting people off. The question is whether we will decide to.

The data must end the death trap of shutoffs now, not be complicit in it.

Resources

• EEP's Shutoff Abolition Hub — The central resource for EEP's position, articles, and advocacy materials.
• IOU TKO Resource Hub — Testimony templates, discovery requests, and cost-disallowance guidance for PUC interventions.
• "Why Do We Still Have Energy Shutoffs? Another World Is Possible" — The core manifesto and rebuttal framework.
• "The Story of Cal and Lena" — The structural inequity argument in one family's bill.
• "Shielding a Single Stone" — What procedural cruelty actually looks like.
• Energy Equity Project homepage — About us, our team, and how to get in touch.

Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration Form EIA-112, 2024 reporting year. Processed by EEP.

Acknowledgements

• IU Energy Justice Lab — "The Lab mission is to explore, measure, and improve the equity and justice dimensions of society’s ongoing energy transition"
• Center for Biological Diversity / Powerless in the Pandemic series — "The Center wages innovative legal and grassroots campaigns to drive this urgent transition for energy justice."
• Dr.Diana Hernandez — "A pioneer in energy, equity, housing and health research and practice"
• Sarah Alvarez & Outlier Media — "A groundbreaking nonprofit newsroom designed to center and respond to Detroiters’ needs."
• isaac sevier — "Energy engineer, policy advocate, organizer, and strategy advisor collaborating with others for systems change and a just transition."
• Interrupting Criminalization — "Projects focus on interrupting criminalization in health care, supporting transformative justice and liberatory harm reduction, and strengthening abolitionist journalism"