Audience: NLIEC

This presentation offers a road map that low-income energy advocates, service providers, and utility providers can follow to ensure that the Excess Shelter Deduction fully reflects home utility costs.

Audience: Illinois CAAs

This presentation offers an analysis of the impacts of unaffordable home energy on the full range of a household's economic, social and physical well-being in Illinois. It offers an action plan response.

Audience: NASUCA

This presentation offers a "tool kit" of affordability assistance, customer service regulations, energy efficiency investments, and other regulatory actions that can help improve the affordability of home energy to low-income households nationwide.

Audience: Indiana CAAs

This presentation discusses the "hidden" costs imposed on customers by "smart meters" and prepayment meters. It assesses whether such meters can achieve usage control objectives and offers reasonable alternatives that are more effective and less costly.

Audience: Indiana CAAs

This presentation offers a "tool kit" of action steps that local Community Action Agencies can take to improve the affordability of home energy to low-income households in Indiana, with a specific discussion of addressing the problems faced by customers of Rural Electric Cooperatives and propane vendors.

Audience: Indiana CAAs

This presentation offers an analysis of the impacts of unaffordable home energy on the full range of a household's economic, social and physical well-being in Indiana. It offers an action plan response.

Audience: Florida Municipal Electric Association

This presentation offers a "tool kit" of affordability assistance initiatives, with the focus on action steps that are particularly appropriate for municipal utilities.

Audience: NLIEC

This presentation examines four types of "decoupling" mechanisms and assesses the impact that each mechanism has on residential consumers (including, but not limited to the poor).

Audience: National Regulatory Conference

This presentation considers the various "cost-effectiveness" tests for energy efficiency and discusses their implications from a residential perspective.

Audience: Nashville Poverty Summit

This presentation considers the multiple facets of home energy unaffordability, including impacts on health, housing, education, work force development, and other items. It offers an action plan to address energy poverty in Nashville.

Audience: NCAF

This presentation focuses on action steps that relate to affordability assistance directed to other than home heating needs in efforts to promote more affordable energy.

Audience: Ohio PUC Workshop

This presentation draws upon a multi-state study of rate affordability programs to assess the legislative, and non-legislative, legal foundations used by regulators approving the adoption of rate affordability programs.

Audience: Canadian Electric Association

This presentation identifies specific government and industry objectives and assesses how energy efficiency investments targeted to low-income customers can help achieve those objectives.

Audience: NLIEC

This presentation draws upon empirical data from multiple states to consider the impacts of rate affordability programs on utility cost causative factors such as arrears, nonpayment disconnections, and other collection activity.

Audience: State Bar Association of Texas

This presentation explores the legal points that advocates for tenants in public and assisted housing should keep in mind as they review utility allowances promulgated by local housing authorities.

Audience: E-Source Forum on Credit and Collections

This presentation documents the impact that skyrocketing natural gas prices had on credit and collections outcomes in one state (Iowa) in 2006 and makes recommendations on various non-utility programs designed to deliver energy affordability assistance outside the regulatory arena.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation to a national consortium of advocates, government agencies, and utility companies documents the relationship between “affordable energy” and “affordable housing” and recommends linkages between the advocacy efforts for the two communities.

Audience: National Community Action Foundation (NCAF)

This presentation discusses three sources of additional household resources that are critical for low-income households to access during this year of spiraling heating fuel prices. It discusses HUD utility allowances for public and assisted housing; the excess shelter deduction in the Food Stamp program; and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

Audience: National Community Action Foundation (NCAF)

This presentation discusses the 12 essential components to preparing a low-income energy needs assessment. It lays out what data can be used to document low-income needs relative to each issue, and identifies what sources are available to use in obtaining that data.

Audience: Annual meeting: Coalition to Keep Indiana Warm

This presentation reports data from the first year of billing and collections reporting by Indiana's six largest utilities. Data on bills, arrears, disconnections, reconnections, payment plans, and related issues is presented for residential and for low-income residential customers.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation discusses how energy affordability issues can and should be included in affordable housing plans submitted to HUD by states and local governments receiving federal housing dollars.

Audience: Detroit (MI) City Council

This presentation describes the comprehensive water affordability program prepared for the City of Detroit (MI), including rate assistance, water conservation, and customer service protections.

Audience: Newton (MA) HOME Consortium

This presentation describes how Energy Star can be used in affordable housing developments to the mutual benefit of the resident and the developer.

Audience: National Community Action Foundation (NCAF)

This presentation describes an entire range of public and private programs that will assist low-income households pay their home energy bills, even though the programs may not involve benefits traditionally thought to of as representing "energy assistance."

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation summarizes and presents Fisher, Sheehan & Colton's (FSC) comprehensive 2004 study of Home Energy Insecurity in Missouri.

Audience: National Community Action Foundation (NCAF)

This presentation identifies an entire series of contemporary utility rate and customer service proposals that have a substantial and disproportionately adverse impact on low-income customers. The presentation explains appropriate low-income responses.

Audience: National Community Action Foundation (NCAF)

This presentation identifies a series of elements that, under typical utility commission regulations, should be subject to negotiation between a utility and a low-income customer in negotiating a deferred payment plan for arrears.

Audience: National Fuel Funds Network (NFFN)

Each year, Fisher, Sheehan & Colton (FSC) calculates the Home Energy Affordability Gap, which is the difference between actual and affordable home energy bills, on a county-by-county basis for the entire country. This presentation describes the multiple uses to which the Home Energy Affordability Gap analysis can be put.

Audience: New York Low-Income Forum on Energy (LIFE)

This presentation describes the paid-but-unaffordable bill, and explains various responses (both regulatory and non-regulatory) to assist low-income customers.

Audience: Entergy Services Corporation

This presentation lays out the factual and legal reasons that HUD utility allowances should cover the air conditioning needs of low-income tenants of public and assisted housing.

Audience: National Community Action Foundation (NCAF)

This presentation discusses the problems associated with the use of prepayment electric meters along with the basis for concluding that such meters are not a cost-effective conservation investment.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation describes why, given the substantial effectiveness of self-certification in enrolling low-income customers in the telephone Lifeline program, that self-certification has inherent limitations. Self-certification for telephone Lifeline must be supplemented with additional enrollment mechanisms.

Audience: Entergy Services Corporation

This presentation describes a recent study for Entergy Services Corporation, a multi-state electric utility serving the middle-South, that quantifies the economic development impacts of energy assistance programs. It concludes that energy assistance is one of the most effective and cost-effective economic development programs that can be designed.

Audience: Residential Energy Assistance Challenge (REACH) grant evaluators conference

Evaluators looking at energy assistance and weatherization programs have historically had problems developing a comprehensive measurement tool for home energy "affordability." This presentation describes a tool developed for the federal LIHEAP office that measures "home energy insecurity," a mechanism for pulling together all aspects of affordability into a quantitative measurement.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation explains how unaffordable energy translates into "frequent mobility” as households move in search of more affordable bills. It describes the social impacts of frequent mobility, including the decreased educational attainment linked to frequent student mobility.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation describes the deadly nature of hot weather and describes the Heat Response Plan as an appropriate local response.

Audience: National Fuel Funds Network (NFFN)

This presentation describes how internal utility data can be combined with publicly-available Census data to design effective EITC outreach specifically targeted to payment-troubled customers.

Audience: National Community Action Foundation (NCAF)

Some program implementation problems for rate assistance initiatives are common to all types of programs. This presentation identifies such problems and discusses responses.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation describes a process for examining regulatory issues presented to state utility commissions for decision, identifying the low-income interest, and protecting the low-income customer.

Audience: National Fuel Funds Network (NFFN)

This presentation identifies the reasons to be concerned about credit insurance offered for utility bills, and discusses the consumer protections that are needed.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

Receipt of benefits through the federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) is often used to qualify low-income households for other benefits as well. This presentation describes the dangers of using the receipt of LIHEAP as the exclusive door through which to access other energy benefits and/or regulatory protections.

Audience: Entergy Services Corporation

Specific populations of low-income households tend not to claim their EITC refunds. This presentation identifies how innovative partnerships can reach those populations, to the benefit of both the utility and the low-income customer.

Audience: Entergy Services Corporation

This presentation identifies a range of initiatives that an electric utility can take to respond to home energy unaffordability. It identifies non-utility partnerships and programs that can and should be pursued by an electric utility.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

Ratepayer-funded and government-funded energy assistance programs have both similarities and differences. This presentation discusses how to integrate the two types of programs to minimize the conflicts and maximize the synergies so as to benefit both types of programs in a state having (or seeking) to have both.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

The federal Food Stamp program takes energy prices into account through its Standard Utility Allowance (SUA) regulations. This presentation explains the SUA process and describes how low-income energy advocates should monitor the SUA to ensure that it is consistently updated in an era of increasing home energy prices.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation describes how innovative partnerships can be used to reach specific populations that have vulnerability to unaffordable home energy and that would benefit from enrollment in the federal fuel assistance program.

Audience: Indiana Community Action Directors

This presentation describes public and private partnerships, ranging from the state department of insurance to the federal Center for Disease Control (CDC) to local public schools, to use in seeking to reach particular vulnerable populations that might benefit from receipt of federal fuel assistance.

Audience: National Community Action Foundation (NCAF)

This presentation identifies the essential components of a Universal Service Program and describes the “lessons learned” from the design of programs to date.

Audience: New Hampshire legislative committee

This presentation identifies the business advantages to a utility from offering low-income rate affordability programs.

Audience: Affordable Comfort, Inc.

This presentation describes the many alternative ways to structure and fund a Universal Service Program in a restructured gas and electric industry.

Audience: Duquesne Light Company (4th in a set of 4)

This presentation identifies how to assess whether customers, as well as utilities, are generating the performance expected given rate affordability programs.

Audience: Duquesne Light Company (3rd in a set of 4)

This presentation identifies how a utility can segment its low-income customer base by customer characteristics and design appropriate rate affordability programs that respond to the unique needs of each segment.

Audience: Duquesne Light Company (2nd in a set of 4)

This presentation identifies how a utility can segment its low-income customer base by type of nonpayment and offer responses that are appropriate to each type.

Audience: Entergy Services Corporation

"If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see all your problems as nails," begins this presentation. The presentation describes how to segment a utility's low-income population and to develop low-income programmatic responses appropriate to each segment.

Audience: New York Low-Income Forum on Energy (LIFE)

This presentation describes the "obligation to serve," an age-old concept applicable to public utilities. It describes how to apply this legal doctrine in a competitive natural gas and electric industry.

Audience: Duquesne Light Company (1st in a set of 4)

This presentation discusses the multiple aspects of "good payment." It identifies how full, timely, regular and ongoing payments are all important attributes of a good payment history.

Audience: Delaware State Energy Office

This presentation describes the benefits of implementing a Home Energy Ratings System (HERS) from the perspectives of the lender, the developer, and the home owner.

Audience: Rethinking Credit and Collection for Gas and Electric Deregulation Conference

This presentation draws upon lessons from the insurance industry to describe a recommended mechanism for providing home energy to the residual customer classes that are not likely to be served by a competitive retail natural gas and electric utility industry.

Audience: National Low-Income Energy Consortium (NLIEC)

This presentation describes the unique interests that low-income customers have in a utility merger proceeding and proposes remedies to the problems that mergers can create for low-income customers.