(Photo: Ronda Churchill/Nevada Current)

Researchers estimate that about one million households in the United States lose power each year because they don’t pay. However, the exact number of Nevada households that experience power outages during heat waves is largely unknown.

A bill should be introduced for that, a panel of state lawmakers decided during a recent committee meeting.

Nevada does not require utilities to disclose the number of customers they disconnect, leaving little transparency about the scale of the problem. NV Energy, a regulated utility monopoly with more than a million regular customers, has shown little interest in publicly sharing the number of disconnected customers.

Advocates argue that public data on power disconnections across the state would allow researchers, community organizations and policymakers to identify patterns of disconnection and support communities that are more vulnerable to service disconnection.

“Both the reporting and the associated demographics would help us get a better picture of what’s going on in terms of people’s ability to pay their energy bills every month,” said Olivia Tanager, director of the Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter of Northern Nevada.

The Nevada Legislature’s Joint Interim Standing Committee on Growth and Infrastructure voted unanimously to take up the bill in August. Requests for bills are not official bills, they are requests from lawmakers for a draft of the proposed bill that they can further amend and discuss during the legislative session. The bill was recommended by the Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter.

The bill would require Nevada’s Public Utilities Commission (PUCN) to require Nevada energy providers to publicly report power outages, the location of the outage, and household demographics to utility regulators.

NV Energy’s recent request to increase base rates for service in Northern Nevada has prompted advocates to recommend the bill, Tanager said. In June, NV Energy asked utility regulators to allow the energy provider to increase its shareholder returns by tripling of the monthly basic service costs for residents of Northern Nevada from $16.50 to $45.30.

The PUCN has the regulatory authority to approve or deny tariffs for electricity, gas and water utilities. But data on how those rate increases affect households and whether or not they can afford them is largely private.

“It’s just really hard to get that information in Nevada,” Tanager said. “People can request disconnection data, but the PUCN doesn’t have to honor that request, and NV Energy doesn’t have to make that data public.”

While the utility is not required to share the number of disconnected customers, and has previously said it “does not share this type of data publicly,” it “is working diligently with customers and doing everything we can to prevent power from being disconnected.” NV Energy did not respond to a request for additional comment late last week.

The utility is required to disclose the debts of uncollected bills that they need from the remaining customers to cover. Limited data assessed by the Current last year found that NV Energy’s debt from unpaid bills, which NV Energy can pass on to customers, has grown steadily year over year, totaling more than $13 million in unpaid bills from its more than one million customers in 2022.

“We see this as an equity issue and something that should be made public so people can have this information and make the decisions that are best for themselves and their communities,” Tanager said.

According to the latest data from the US Energy Information Administration, 1 in 4 American households experience some form of energy insecurity every year – the inability to meet household energy needs – with little improvement in the past decade.

Nationally, Black and Hispanic households are twice as likely as white households to reduce or give up basic necessities to pay their energy bills, and are statistically more likely to have their power turned off, according to a report from the National Institutes of Health and Health Administration (National Institutes of Health). Report 2023 on the electricity shutdown by the Congressional Research Service.

Congress has also become interested in determining the size and scope of power shutoffs in recent years. Proposals to address electricity affordability and shutoffs were included in multiple pandemic relief bills introduced during the last two years of Donald Trump’s presidency, but none passed.

Last year, Congress gave the U.S. Energy Information Administration $3 million in funding to begin collecting monthly utility disconnection data. However, only 25 states require utilities to make their disconnection data public, making comprehensive national data difficult to obtain, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Tanager, director of the Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter, said the full extent of household disconnections in Nevada cannot be evaluated or addressed without public data.

“Ultimately, we just don’t know without the information. If we have hundreds and hundreds of people every month who have their lights out because they can’t pay, that’s a problem that we need to address and that legislators need to be aware of. Without that knowledge, it limits our ability to respond effectively and support our neighbors,” Tanager said.