For companies like Con Edison, pulling the plug on customers who are behind on paying their bills is usually a last resort, usually avoided during the coldest months. But for the better part of the past two years, when the pandemic caused widespread financial hardship, utility arrears have skyrocketed.
Nationally, the total amount of utility arrears is about $22 billion, after peaking at about $32 billion in the spring of 2021, said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.
But that’s still significantly higher than before the pandemic, when debt totaled about $12 billion. In New York and New Jersey alone, more than two million customers are indebted to companies that supply electricity, heat, water and broadband.
Con Edison says it has refrained from disconnecting residential and small business customers. But on Wednesday, New Jersey’s largest power distributor, PSE&G, began sending representatives to cut off electricity to customers who had not responded to multiple alerts and whose bills were more than 90 days past due, a company spokeswoman said.
Proponents fear that many vulnerable customers, especially the poor and the elderly, will be left in the dark or saddled with obligations they can never repay. Many who owe large sums are working-class workers such as Marisol Rivera, who fell far behind after being out of work for most of the past two years.
Ms. Rivera, a single mother of two living in Brooklyn, owes Con Edison more than $3,300.
Even though New York state utilities are no longer banned from disconnecting delinquent customers, “the last thing we want to do is cut someone off,” said Jamie McShane, a company spokesperson.
Instead, they try to work out installment plans over a period of months or even years. Or, as in Mrs Rivera’s case, longer than that.
