North Carolina program helps low-income utility customers pay their bills

This article was originally published by Canary Media.

Duke Energy’s poorest customers use more power per square foot than wealthier ones. A year-old program is connecting them with bill and weatherization help.

 

(March 25, 2025) – Clean energy advocates in North Carolina remain bullish about a Duke Energy initiative to help its poorest customers pay their bills and access weatherization programs, even though participation in its first year fell short of predictions.

A side deal Duke struck in 2023 to lessen the blow of its rate hikes, the Customer Assistance Program offers a monthly bill credit of up to $42 for households under a certain income threshold. For example, a family of four making less than roughly $50,000 a year would be eligible.

Totaling to about $500 a year, the benefit is ​“very significant,” said Carol Hardison, the CEO of Crisis Assistance Ministry in Charlotte. ​“That could prevent someone from having to come here,” she said of her group, which helps families in danger of disconnection or eviction. The credit could seem small to a middle-class person, she said, but ​“that’s half of somebody’s rent.”

Beginning early 2024, Duke automatically provided the credit to any customers who’d benefited in the prior year from one of two buckets of federal aid: the Crisis Intervention Program, designed to prevent or reverse life-threatening emergencies like utility shutoffs, or the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program, which offers one-time payments to ratepayers with overdue heating bills.

North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services administers the two funds and has a data-sharing agreement with Duke, which then automatically enrolls customers in its assistance program — a process designed to minimize overhead expenses such as vetting ratepayers for eligibility.

The data-sharing agreement has impressed advocates in other states, said Claire Williamson, energy policy advocate with the North Carolina Justice Center.

“They have to deal with a much higher administrative cost,” she said, ​“because each place is trying to pay people to check pay stubs and get them enrolled.”

When Duke and a host of advocates crafted the Customer Assistance Program, they expected it could reach roughly 124,000 households, the number that benefited from the federal funds in the wake of the pandemic.

But far fewer customers accessed that aid in 2024, when the post-COVID burst of recovery money had subsided. While the company has not made public the total number of beneficiaries for the year, filings with regulators and interviews with advocates suggest it was about 55,000.

“The predicted 124,000 was ambitious from the outset,” Williamson said. Still, she stressed the need has not lessened.

Indeed, in a report Duke submitted to regulators in 2022, the company estimated 16% of its North Carolina customers, nearly half a million households, were ​“arrears struggling” — meaning they were significantly behind on bills.

The utility also found that its poorest customers and those who struggled to pay their monthly bills tended to use more kilowatt-hours per square foot than wealthier households.

“A correlation may exist between higher usage and bills and inefficient housing, heating, and cooling systems,” Duke hypothesized in its report.

That’s why the Customer Assistance Program was also designed to automatically refer eligible customers to weatherization programs. A Duke spokesperson said the utility did do that, but she declined to provide numbers.

Over the next two years of the three-year pilot program, the challenge for advocates and Duke is multifold. One item on the list: expanding help beyond those who are receiving federal crisis assistance.

“We cannot underscore enough the impact and benefits [the Customer Assistance Program] has produced for the Duke Energy customers enrolled,” the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association wrote to regulators last fall. ​“However, due to significant under-enrollment … using the current process,” the association and others advising Duke ​“will renew and increase their efforts to recommend alternative enrollment methodologies.”

For instance, Hardison noted that the Crisis Assistance Ministry administers a separate Duke assistance program, the Share the Light Fund, which is fueled by ratepayer and shareholder donations. She suggested her group and other administrators of that fund could also screen participants for the $42 bill credit scheme.

“You have trusted this agency directly with your dollars,” Hardison said. ​“What if that agency could also be the entity that puts an application in for the [Customer Assistance Program]?”

More work may also be needed to track the program’s impact on weatherization and energy efficiency.

Nick Wharton is president and CEO of the Charlotte Area Fund. An anti-poverty community action agency, his group deploys money for yet another Duke program, the Helping Home Fund, which finances critical repairs to qualify homes for weatherization assistance. At least this year, he and his colleagues haven’t seen an increase in applications to the repair fund.

“There’s definitely not a direct relationship between the two,” Wharton said.

Finally, there’s the current political climate, proving that past progress toward clean energy and climate justice is not necessarily prologue.

In 2023, a powerful group of paper mills, pipe foundries, and other industries nearly killed the Customer Assistance Program, in part because they objected to paying a flat monthly fee of $1.70 to help finance it.

Because it’s reaching fewer households than expected, the initiative will only cost commercial and industrial ratepayers 33 cents each month or less in 2025. But even that doesn’t mean the program is safe from attack.

“I’m under no guise that this is inevitable,” Williamson said.