Description of the video:
it is a distinct pleasure to welcome you to our launch event of the utility disconnection dashboard this morning
thank you for coming out from all across the country and hopefully all across the world as well I am Sonya Carli I'm a
professor at the O'Neill school of public and environmental Affairs at Indiana University and soon also to be a
professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the climate Center for Energy policy
the run of the show today is that I will turn the floor over to my co-director of
the energy Justice lab David kniskey next who will introduce our featured speaker today who is Jackie Patterson
and following Jackie's remarks we will then introduce the dashboard with a few
background statistics an overview and then David will really dig in and walk us through the features of the dashboard
and then we will save time at the end for Q a so with that I will turn the floor over to David
good morning so glad that you can join us today for the launch of utility disconnections dashboard and Sonia
mentioned my name is David kniskey and I am I co-direct the energy Justice lab and I'm also a professor here at the
O'Neill school of public and environmental Affairs at Indiana University in Bloomington
so each year millions of Americans struggle to access affordable Energy Services for their home according to the
most recent data from the U.S Energy Information Administration about one in four Americans experienced some form of
energy and Security in a typical year we also know that there are large disparities in who experiences these
hardships research from our lab as well as the work of many others shows that people living in poverty people of color
families with young children and people with severe medical conditions are all
more likely to struggle to pay their utility bills for some this leads to the
loss of access to energy altogether if utilities shut off their services due to non-payment
utility disconnections are common and I think we are just beginning to understand the full magnitude of this
issue while we hope to contribute to solutions to this problem with the release of this
new data tool many people and organizations have been working for years or bring more attention to this
issue we are incredibly fortunate to have with us this morning one of those pioneers
for several decades Jacqueline Patterson has been advocating on issues of women's empowerment civil rights and social
justice for over a decade Jackie served as the senior director of the naacp's
environmental and climate Justice program where she led the organization's efforts to engage with Frontline
environmental justice communities among her many accomplishments at them at the
NAACP was bringing the issue of utility disconnections to the Forefront of
conversations about energy under her leadership the NAACP published
an influential report titled lights out in the cold which highlighted that disconnection's problem as well as the
limitations of current policies to protect vulnerable households that report inspired our work and we can
think of no better person to provide remarks today as part of this event Jackie Patterson is the founder and
executive director of the chis home Legacy project a resource hub for black Frontline climate Justice leadership
Jackie's also been a generous friend to us at the energy Justice lab and we are absolutely thrilled to have her here
with us today Jackie welcome thanks for being here and we're looking forward to your remarks
thank you so much it is such an honor to be here and as you said it's been a joy to be uh friends and colleagues and
collaborators over the years um so and this is seeing this point in
your in the development and in terms of even having the energy Justice lab and now releasing and and launching the
utility disconnections dashboard it's just an honor to be alongside you on this because you've been instrumental in
in even the work that we have done it wouldn't have been possible Without Partners like Indiana University and and
you and Sonia in particular so thank you so yeah um just a few remarks here
um and it's exciting to see some some old friends also in the in the as the chat comes up I'm looking and seeing
folks that I I know and so it's exciting to see folks there as well so I want to just kind of start by
grounding Us in and and where we are why we are where we are now even in terms of
talking about this issue of utility disconnections and people being cut off from something that's vital for life
um not just quality of life but life itself and so how do we reach this point particularly in the United States a Land
of Plenty particularly on this Earth where energy naturally is in abundance
like Limitless abundance how do we reach this point where we have people having their electricity or other forms of
utilities shut off for for um in this way so first I want to start
with the extractive economy really we know that the United States was grounded
it was founded in terms of what's now called the United States was founded in
in on kind of principles and practices of extraction it was founded uh by uh by
people who came and displaced murdered the original and inhabitants of this
land turtle Island and and and colonized it into the United States all for for
greed and for profit and and for for building wealth and power amongst a few at the expense of others and so I really
it's always kind of a grim note to start on but if we don't kind of recognize those underpinnings and we don't
recognize the the fact that the system it's not the the system is broken that is doing what it was literally an
originally designed to do in terms of extraction um then then we're not going to actually
be able to come to transformative Solutions and so we know that as such we
have currently a utility system where the utility uh utility CEOs on average
make 9.8 million dollars a year um we know that the average worker in
kind of in in some of these uh Utility Systems whether co-workers or otherwise big on average 33 840 a year
um we know that the the level of profits are are not only going towards High
executive pay but they go into paying for lobbying against Energy Efficiency
lobbying against clean energy lobbying against the things that we need not only to have human rights but to have
planetary uh well-being um and so we we know all of this and we
know that this is kind of the notion of you know some of the statistics I think will be provided later on that the um
that that with the dominance of the investor-owned utility model it's the
dominance of a model that that uses the commons and our Reliance on the commons
for profit at huge huge levels um and so this is where we are in terms
of the fundamental flaws and we see where the profit different where what happens when the profiteering from the
economy of the commons goes wrong um just those numbers tell the story and
and I think again those will be shared a little bit later uh but I want to tell a couple of the actual stories to remind
us of the people behind those numbers uh we did it as as David said we did a
report lights out in the cold reforming utility shut off policies or human rights matter and highlighted a couple of these
stories and a couple of stories have happened actually since then because of the situation continues there is a
father of five in Michigan who had a hard time paying his bills and he went
and um bought a generator uh when his electricity was turned off for non-payment and he brought the generator
and but he was in an area in Michigan where he was afraid of crime so he
um he was running the generator but he brought it inside at night in order to because he thought it would be stolen
not knowing that that would literally be a death sentence for himself and his
five children um because of carbon monoxide poisoning again people paying the price of poverty
with their very lives there was a grandmother in New Jersey in 2018 in the
dead of um of one of these heat waves that we know are caused by our Reliance on fossil fuels to a large extent
um in terms of climate change but she she had a hard time paying her bills her son finally found out that she was
having a hard time and he he said oh well let me just go ahead and pay this
pay this bill off you know and so she was dependent on a respirator for her
breathing and he had paid the bill off and but two days later the system hadn't
caught up with the fact that he he paid the bill and her electricity was shut off but and it was in the it was in the
debt of a of an extreme heat wave and she no longer had access to the oxygen
that she needed to be able to breathe and she died as a result so again paying
the price of poverty with her life paying the price of missing a couple of sixty dollar bills while the head of the
um of the utility company is making um upwards of you know again utility on average making upwards of 9.8 million
dollars per year um a family of nine in Baltimore had a
house fire because of a a um a space heater that was in the home
that was being used after their oil and gas had gotten cut off and only six out of the nine people in that family so
actually only three out of the nine people of the fam in the family survived um one of the sad stories I was we were
doing one of the workshops actually on this very topic and one of the people stood up and said she is a she was a
nurse practitioner and that a family had come into her care because their
electricity had been their their oil and gas have been cut off for non-payment and it was so cold that the mom put a
space heater in the in the room of her son and the Space Needle caught fire and
the house burned down everyone survived but they came into her care because the sun felt so guilty
um that he actually tried to commit suicide because he thought it was his fault that the whole the family lost
their home again to have that happening in a Land of Plenty where energy is an abundance and
where people are profiting off of uh off of turning the switch off for certain
people um having that kind of business model is just the very epitome of Injustice
um at another training we had just turning to the solutions and another training we had um there was a person who also had her
electricity shut off for non-payment and she kept um she had her electricity shut off and then when they came brought it
back on she had to not only pay the penalties but then she also had to pay a deposit so you know how that goes that
cycle just makes it harder and harder and so she she kind of got into the
cycle where it kept happening the deposits got to be more the penalties were more and she just was finally like ah I can't do this like I can't sustain
this and she decided to start to to kind of just um squirrel away her the monies
that she was using to pay for um for you know to pay these the cycle
of fees and and deposits and every few months she would have enough to buy a a
solar panel and then every next couple months she would have enough to buy another solar panel until and meanwhile
she just would buy like a cooler and she had like ice that she used for her cold
items and just literally went without electricity and this was in Phoenix which first time I went to Phoenix it
was I I was hotter than the multiple times that I've been to the equator I mean I was so hot in Phoenix I only went
out at night like a vampire because it was just unbearably hot so the fact that she had the the um the fortitude to make
it through so she um so once she had the solar array she actually ended up being
an elect not ended up she was an electrician herself so she then bought this got the solar away got up on her
own roof installed the solar array and then now she is she is uh she is
independently generating her own energy and she we will work with her and she
wrote this article utility utility greed locked me out of the grid but God given
solar Set Me Free and so that is the that's the story that I wanted to kind
of start us with with as we talk about what utility Justice looks like and I know I only have a few minutes left or
maybe one so I'm gonna go super fast on the solutions and then I think we'll we'll you know we'll be able to talk
um more as a conversation proceeds but but this is the importance of why the
the work of the utility of the utility disconnection dashboard is so important to really point out these injustices the
depths of these injustices and to provide the tools that we need to to move towards Solutions per solution we
know is just mitigating what we've got now because we've got these investor owned utilities for the time being
um and so while we have them we have to make sure that the pucs push them to ensure that we have uh that we have
Energy Efficiency Investments places like even the Mississippi the Mississippi uh Public Service Commission
had a a kind of a community friendly member there who helped to push to to
mandate the Mississippi power when they had put forward a very small amount that they were going to invest in Energy
Efficiency that they really put forward a mandate to say that they had to do more even again the Georgia Public
Service Commission um which is not known for its very Progressive policies they also pushed
the Georgia power to make sure that they had a certain amount of solar in there in their investment so we can do this
kind of um pcpsc um work in terms of making sure that they are holding these utilities
accountable for more just inequitable systems you might have seen a report who holds the power
um talking about democratizing the PCS and pscs and there's some great models there are communities have really
engaged with pocs and I want to shout out Charles Hua who was the lead author on that awesome report I also want to
shout out the work of the institute for energy Justice people's utility Commons the utility reform Network who are all
doing this work around reforming the utility system as it exists and pointing Us in the direction that we need to go
on um I also just want to say the ideal is really the it to end the IOU model all
together and and at the very least get them to start focusing more on Commercial properties and really making
sure that we have a Energy System for residents that means that no one ever has interruption in this thing that's
vital for for our lives so ensuring that co-ops and municipalities or munis are
actually truly Democratic ensuring that we transition subsidies from fossil
fuels to Energy Efficiency and clean energy really investing in the models of community and locally owned and driven
Energy Efficiency and electrification and we've seen and and making sure as we
talk about the Democratic processes we know that that munis and co-ops are at least getting us towards having
Democratic processes and we need to make sure that we we actually make those bodies Democratic because some of them
aren't as Democratic as they should be um the very modern essence of muniz's service not profit is the utility his
mission within the muni model as it's supposed to be and we need to make sure that it is that groups like Roanoke Electric
Co-op model what a co-op could look like if we actually make sure that people know groups like one voice Mississippi
is working with um Rural Electric co-ops to ensure that they're more democratic so just ending with some of the great
work that's going to make make sure that communities are are holding the power groups like local clean energy Alliance
solo United neighbors native Renewables are some of the examples of of folks who
are making sure that communities hold a power so again just want to end with this is why the utility disconnections dashboard
is so critical knowledge is power as the data is shared it'll be clear to all the
level of deep Injustice in our current system and the examples of democratic liberatory systems will then illuminate
the path that we need to a utility system that truly centers liberty and justice for all so thank you so much to
the energy Justice Center for making this data available and on an ongoing basis through the utility disconnect
from the dashboard and thank you all for your interest in this conversation and for being a part of of the solution so
thank you so much thank you Jackie that was such a great way to kick off uh this
this dashboard event and we're so appreciative of your insights your words uh the Kudos that you gave to so many of
the organizations that are working in this space uh and your ongoing work within this area as well as other areas within the energy Justice domain
I uh I have the pleasure of doing a brief introduction to the dashboard before I turn it over to David so I'm
just going to run through a few slides first I'd like to acknowledge and appreciate our team at the energy
Justice lab this was a huge effort over the last several years with many individuals who worked very hard on this
here's our team over here on the right and then I'll also note that the the link to our general lab page is down at
the bottom if anybody is interested in looking through some of the research that we have conducted on energy and
security and utility disconnections as well as a variety of other issues related to Justice and Equity within our
Energy Systems I am also incredibly appreciative of the
work of our Advisory Board and all of the guidance and feedback that they've provided us over the past few years
these eight individuals as well as others on their team have just um been so supportive of us and have
been so insightful in thinking about how this tool can be as useful as possible what needs to be added how it needs to
be changed and so forth so thank you to all of you and I know many of you are here today uh so so thank you shout out
um thank you also to our funders for helping us support this project in in particular the Alfred peace loan
foundation and Indiana University we're so appreciative and I will also just flag that we're seeking long-term uh
financial support for the dashboard to keep it going to make sure that we continue to gather data and to build it
out in ways to make it as absolutely functional for everybody's needs as possible no what David will walk through in just
a few minutes are the various spaces of the dashboard and here I've summarized the three faces two of them are maps so
these are interactive map features where one face of the map is utility disconnections and here you can look at
disconnections across different months across different years and across different states as well as look at
graphs essentially of utility providers within States the middle one here the utility
disconnections policy map is a different face of the map and that is where you can look at the policy protections or
the disconnection protections that are in place across the States you can look by heat oriented date oriented cold
weather oriented or those that protect vulnerable populations and then the third on the right hand
side is a data viewer where you can essentially look at Trends over time you can select a state you can select a
utility provider and you can look at at disconnections in a Time Trend just a brief note about
methodology we do have a much more extensive methodology document on the web page that I think David will
highlight while going through uh but just a few notes about where the data came from today so the majority of our
data came from Public Utility Commission websites and our team gathered these via web scraping essentially we also gather
data through foia or public information requests primarily through Municipal
Utilities we asked for public information and we had to start with the biggest and work our way down given time
and financial limitations we have not made it all the way through all munis but many of them are are featured here
today we also had great help from various Network contacts who were able to
connect us to individuals who had data or to share data with us so thank you to the National Consumer Law Center and the
national energy assistance Directors Association the center for biological diversity has
been a front-runner here has been really doing incredible work and Gathering utility disconnection data and they were
very generous with us as well and sharing their data particularly from the 2023 report powerless in the United
States and then finally I'll note that we also employed eia Energy Information Administration data we have
disconnection rates so you'll see that we show both Total disconnections as well as disconnection rates and the
rates the denominator is essentially how many customers that utility has that either came from the utility itself who
put it in the reporting documents or if that was missing then we would find the customers by year in the Energy
Information data our policy data that you'll see today come from Lexis uni as well as
regulatory dockets now let me just give a sneak peek of a few statistics here one is what's
included in this dashboard the dashboard contains data for 42 States in Washington DC and this is to our best
abilities as well as many other people that have helped us out are our best understanding of where data actually do
exist if they are gathered this includes 332 utilities counting utilities more
than once if they actually span across States seventy percent of these utilities have data for three or more
years on average we have about seven years of data for the Municipal Utilities in our
data set six years for the investor-owned utilities in five years for co-ops and this amounts to an
approximate number of customers in terms of the coverage of the data 2020 it's 83
million customers 2021 is 81 million customers and 2022 is slightly lower
it's 56 million and that is because the disconnection rate data again we had to rely on Energy Information
Administration data for customer accounts and these have only been updated through 2021 at present but we
will update them as soon as the eia data are available we know from these data that total
disconnections in the last year 2022 amount to almost 3 million individuals across the United States that's 1.6
million from electric providers 680 000 from electric and gas and 340 000
from gas and here we've pulled just a little bit of the data this is is mostly just a way
to show you what one can do besides playing interactively with the databases that we'll show you in a minute you can
also download the data and put it together and here we have the highest Utilities in terms of disconnection rate
in the data investor owned utilities on the top with the first five and Municipal Utilities on the bottom with
the first five with the highest disconnection rates
so from here I will turn it over to David and I will just note that this is our website
utilitydisconnections.org where David will take it over and and walk us through some navigation
okay thank you Sonya so wow I have the pleasure of sharing this new website
with you and taking you through these data tools that Sonia has begun to
describe so uh what an honor let me just also say there's so many people behind this work and I want to just acknowledge
all the tremendous dedication we've had from from Partners the students working on this over the last couple of years
so here's the new website called utilitydisconnections.org it is essentially a landing page where you can
find and get access to the different uh tools that I will walk you through here in a moment
um the other thing I wanted just to note is that on this website you can find links to our research in this area as
well as links to a new report we have written onto on sort of the landscape of
disconnection policies across the country and importantly the technical documentation behind the dashboard
behind the data so if you really want to get into the weeds with where we got the data how we made coding decisions the
technical documentation provides that kind of information for you to uh to
peruse okay so let me take you to the first of the tools
um this is the um the data dashboard and as Sonya noted it has two main
components um just to orient you a little bits if you come over to the right uh to these
drop down menus on the right this is where you can toggle back and forth between the two main Maps the one you're
looking at right now is the um the utility disconnections dashboard of the
data around total disconnections as well as disconnection rates
um down if you were to select this National policies this will show you the policy side and I'll walk you through
that uh in a few minutes to further Orient you the basic way the dashboard is set up is that you can
select different time periods first looking at individual years and if you
select a different year the map will change dynamically depending on which utilities we have data for and how that
gets reflected across the country if you're interested in particular months
let's say you want to know about disconnections during the winter or summer then you can select individual
months or groups of months and the map will will change dynamically as well
if you click on a particular State you'll see a few things that right now were selected on Indiana a few
additional features that are built into the dashboard first there's some text at
the very bottom that describes uh just in a few sentences the nature of the
data what we have available for that state both if it's for for ious or if we
were able to successfully do open records requests with Municipal Utilities they're reflected here as well
the overall time frame this is just a summary again the more detailed information is available in the
technical documentation on the right hand side you also see that a bar graph will appear so if you were
to hover over an individual State it'll give you the total number of disconnections
um for a particular period of time so if I go back and select um 2021 for the state of Indiana for all
months it will show you in the bar graph all of the the totals for the utilities
for which we have information so lots of different ways for you to look at the
data and everything again kind of changes dynamically as you select on different states you will note that for
some states we have no information right that's because Utilities in these states are not required to disclose and we have
not been able to get any information from those from those States
let me just highlight a few other features if you were interested in capturing or extracting one of the
images you can click on the little camera icon and in image will quickly
emerge and you could take that map and embed it into a report or something of
that nature similar feature exists if you wanted to look at the bar graph you
can easily download these images and pull out information as you find helpful
one more thing to note here a couple more things to know before I move to the policy side at the very bottom here
you'll see there are a couple of additional options importantly one of our principles is to make all this
information freely available so there all the data are available for download if you click on the download data
feature you have either the ability to download selected data or to download all of the data if you'd like to look at
that if I just clicked it on selected data you will see an Excel sheet pops up
and all of the raw data as we collected it is populated into this spreadsheet
and you have the ability to look at the data in that format if that's of interest to you
finally I'll just note here at the bottom there's a link to the technical documentation this is a report that we
have written that provides again the real um sort of nitty-gritty of how we put
together this information state by state so for those of you who really want to
get into the weeds with how the data was collected decisions we made this report is available for you to to have
okay um finally the thing is I want to say here is that we want help
um we I'm sure that we we're very uh we thought our best to sort of put together the data as completely as possible
um I'm sure there are errors and bugs um if you identify them please let us know if you have new data for us to
incorporate please let us know um there's an email link here and we would certainly encourage everybody
reaching out to us okay let me quickly take you to the policy side of the dashboard
um generally speaking the orientation is quite similar you have a map um and as Sonya mentioned what we did
here was go through all the available Regulatory and statutory code around
protections that states may have in place to limit the circumstances when utilities May disconnect customers due
to non-payment so these could be due to sort of seasonal seasonal requirements so during the winter months or in some
cases summer months they could be for people who have medical conditions or
other verbal populations and what we've done in this this part of the dashboard is sort of summarize simply whether or
not a state has a particular policy in place um the um the options here you can sort of
Select by protection type um and you can select by policy type so
if I want to look at he's heap-based protections um the map changes dynamically if I want
to see which of those heat based protections were based on sort of a date based they're just a handful of states
that way or a temperature-based standard you can see the map update in that in
that fashion um one of the things to note here is that anytime you are reducing the world
to does a policy exist in a state yes or no you are really reducing information
to um it's almost too simple right um because the policies themselves are quite nuanced quite complex
and that gets lost a little bit in this feature in this way of sort of
displaying the information so to address that we've done a couple of things right one if you select on a given State
you'll see in from information text pop up on the right hand side the first thing this tells you is which Utilities
in the state are covered by these policies that's important because depending on the state the policies may
only pertain to customers who receive energy from ious in other cases co-ops
might be covered immunities in some cases as well more importantly I think
is if you there's a button here that says click for more State policy information and if you click on that
what's produced is a PDF of a detailed State profile of how the policies look
in a particular state which both directs you to the original code the Vasa of interest but I think
hopefully sort of summarizes this information uh
in terms of what each of the policies actually cover right so yes maybe there are weather protections but there could
be limitations and this is designed to provide sort of detailed policy information that is easily understood uh
to get a better sense of what these policies actually say and how far they do or do not reach
okay uh again Links at the bottom here if you wanted to extract the data
um either for a particular state or for the country as a whole all the information is freely available and that
gets populated into Excel spreadsheets okay so that's the main utilities uh
utility disconnections dashboard let me take you now to a second tool that we have created
um and show you how this works um so these are the same data but it provides another entry point another
portal to get a sense of how the data look in particular the ability to investigate particular utilities very
easily to look at Trends over time to look at different types of utilities
ious versus munis Etc to select different time periods really trying to provide the user with a lot of
functionality and flexibility in order to to examine these data in ways that
they may find particularly useful so I'll just do a couple of examples here before I conclude so if for example one
wanted to look at Utilities in California right so what pops up um is a graphic showing all the data
that we have from utilities on disconnections in California they're all listed here you see Trends over time you
can change from Total disconnections to a disconnection rate so you see here that disconnection rates
for these utilities vary from just above zero to about one and a half percent in
the extreme case so this gives you an opportunity to look at particular Trends
over time for different sets of Utilities in this case for those in the state of California it's a really nice
feature where if you wanted to turn off a particular utility you can sort of click on it here and that utility is
removed from the graphic so that's kind of an interesting feature below is actually a readout a table of
all the raw data right so um this is essentially the information you would get if you were to
download one of those Excel sheets that I was showing you a few minutes ago but
also another sort of Handy way to look at particular outcomes during for a particular utility at a given point in
time just to show you a little bit more about what's really interesting about this
data Explorer tool um I just wanted to show you one example of uh from Florida and look at a Muni in
particular this the um the city of Tallahassee for which we have data for over a decade
um this gives you a really nice sense of Trends over time you can see basically from 2010 to 2020 you know it's a little
bit noisy from month to month but you know pretty uh regular pattern of disconnections about 4 000 people or
three to five thousand people per month um if one wanted to hone in on a particular time period you can use this
slider bar at the end another obvious uh pattern here you see is that during
covid um the city of Tallahassee suspended disconnections so they went down to zero or near zero but then they
quickly resumed at the um at the end of that temporary oratoria
that's one more example um and just to illustrate how these different tools can work together I
wanted to show you uh an illustration from from New Hampshire
uh and in particular if I wanted to select a particular utility I can come over to this toolbar here and select a
particular utility I should note that these other pull down menus allow you to select by electricity
um utilities that provide electricity and gas or just gas only over here you can select ious or munis or co-ops but
in this case I'm going to select a particular utility eversource New Hampshire and what you see here is that
we have data for this utility for about uh you know five six years and what you
see here is a pretty interesting pattern right you see that essentially every December January there is a strong
decline in the number of disconnections right and this is pro is not surprising
because New Hampshire has a policy in place that limits disconnections during the
winter months right so you see that reflected very much in the data if you
wanted to get a better sense of what those what that policy actually looks like is an opportunity to go back to the
other dashboard to select the policies feature to go
look at cold weather Protections in New Hampshire and we can see because it's marked in blue that yes in fact New
Hampshire does have a policy that limits disconnections during the winter if we were to go pull up that state profile
that I was mentioning a little bit earlier we get a sense of what that protection actually is right and what we
learn is that in New Hampshire um customers may not be disconnected
from the service was from from an electricity service During the period of time of November 15th through March 31st
as long as these conditions are met right and New Hampshire has a policy that has minimum amounts of rearges in
place uh before um a customer becomes eligible for a shutoff
so I think that illustrates the ability to kind of use the data and to go back
and forth between the different types of different ways of looking at the data
that we have collected um so I think I will leave it there I'm
just going to quickly show you the disconnection rates because I realize I forgot to do that just another way to sort of display the data in the map
so let me just conclude by saying that there are bugs that we know of and I'm
sure they're bugs that you're going to find um and that's great this is an attempt for us to
um get what get out there what we have now but we certainly have improvements we want to make so again
um if there are errors that you see or Corrections you think we should make um please help us um this isn't Meant To
Be A Tool uh public good that's out there for everyone's use whether you're Advocates or researchers or government
officials and we have every intention on um on making this better and better as
we go in in the future our immediate plans are to update disconnections as
well as the policy data on a regular basis um that we certainly already know of
cases where policies have changed since the last time we have surveyed the landscape which was at the beginning of
this calendar year and we'll be up making those updates to policies as quickly as we can and we'll be
constantly updating the disconnection data with more with more utilities and more up-to-date information as we're
able to process those data incorporated into the dashboard we also have plans to
incorporate new features into the dashboard and just to give you a couple of illustrations we hope to be able to
display the disconnections data for different geographies looking both at service territories as well as zip codes
for places where the data are available at the ZIP code level and that is true for a handful of States at this time
although that the number of states were that are making data available with as much granularity is increasing and we
hope to build that into that dashboard as well as well as adding additional features we've been collecting data on
customary urges as well as reconnections and reconnection rates and as we sort of
update the dashboard and Avail of version 2.0 at some point in the future we hope to have those features part of
the dashboard as well so I think I will stop there hopefully that gives you a sense of what we've
been up to and some of the um some of the user friendliness and the
ability for someone to extract what they find most useful for their work uh and
again we're just absolutely thrilled to have this now available after years of work on our side and we look forward to
partnering with everybody to make this as accessible as usable and as
beneficial for making progress on this issues as we can in the future thanks
all right thank you David so we will now turn to q a and I've seen them they've
they've been coming in which is fabulous I'm gonna ask the rest of our team to turn on their cameras as well and join
us here so that we're not spotlighted but it's the full team they're going to help us answer questions as well uh and
I think Jacob has the honors of getting to relay the questions to us as we then
answer them are you up for that you bet all right
do you want to kick us off with the first one yeah I do so uh David just
touched on the first one which is a question about geographies uh and and when essentially those updates will
come about and when uh or how to make those uh questions how to make those updates known uh to people who are
interested in the updates of the data
great so I'll take a step we plan to update regularly we will soon establish
set timelines when we update and the hope is that at least twice a year but if not more frequently we can have a
team working on updates and we will figure out a way with your that great question we'll figure out a way to flag
on the website a date of when it was last updated so that anybody who goes on can see if the date the data have been
updated since the last time they gathered the data
another question uh we've had a couple of comments and thank you for these comments uh about the the nice design of
the dashboard so a few people wanted to know how the dashboard we built the dashboard what tools and those kinds of
things I went into building the dashboard I suppose that one yeah yeah so the
dashboards built on uh plotly Dash as well as plotly itself for the actual visualizations it's housed in uh judge
tree which is IU's open source Cloud configuration um and uh yeah it just uses a whole
bunch of Open Source information and products such as plotly Dash but for most part it's all Dash
and a few things on the back end dashes it's in Python Dash Dash and
plotly are also available in r as well as Java if you're interested in any other systems
thanks Jason I think there are a couple of questions that David maybe you could touch on about these different
geographies and plans for example to incorporate zip code level data or
incorporate different uh different ways of sorting through the data like like
service territories and that kind of thing what are the plans on on incorporating those different levels of
aggregation and and sorting through all the data sure right so at the present time as I
as I sort of went through this you see the data are um sort of searchable or displayable by
either state or by utility right um geographically it's a little more
complicated to display that information um for other levels but that's why that's why it's not part of this
particular release um but we do have uh there is some information about service territory
geographies and it is um generally that's probably our next step is to incorporate those so the
service territories into the maps you can sort of see a little bit more um sugar granularity how disconnections
disconnection rates vary within States graphically right so geographically um so we're working on that
um the you know the challenge there is that of course that these are not static right service territories change
um so it uh companies merge right so um it's if that's that's kind of the complication of doing that but we have
plans to figure figure that out as we go the for the most part the way utilities
have been required to report disconnections is for the entire service Tory service territory on a monthly
basis there are a few exceptions in a handful of states where there are also requirements for that disclosure to
happen at lower levels of geography so zip codes um in zip code level recording reporting
uh is required I want to say in four to five states um that's been increasing as some States
passed laws about disconnections but they're required more granular disclosure
um I I think it's in Minnesota where they also require Disclosure by census tracts so you can get that's another
unit of geography um so it's not incorporated into this stage of the dashboard because it's not
available everywhere right but I think our plans are to make it available in the places where it is I think it's
really important that we do so because that level of detail allows you to begin
to do analyzes as to patterns of where disconnections are occurring at higher
frequencies right is this correlated with race is this correlated with um quality of household stock and
household conditions and that gets a little bit lost or disguised in the way we're describing the data here but the
Zippo level displaying of the information will allow people to begin to do that kind of analysis so we're excited to do that um I can't give you a
particular timeline but hopefully in the next release we have we made some progress toward that goal
maybe I'll just add on top of that not only is that our goal for the next round but in the future we would like to also
add other layers there's a great question that came out about whether you could essentially layer and look at more
granular data but then also look at demographic social demographic characteristics and so longer term we'd
like to build that in and the model is fully able to take that it's just an issue of gathering all of those data and
entering it into this this dashboard as well in the future
thanks Sonia thanks David uh another couple of questions just about some of the some of the data like what what the
definitions are so questioned about residential versus industrial customers versus commercial customers and then a
question about some of the determinations for example on on that rate David you mentioned that
we are displaying a rate that's divided by and if you could talk a little bit about what those customer levels are how
we infer where they're missing data and uh and then distinctions between the
three different categories so there's electric gas and electric and gas customers
so I kind of looped a bunch in in there but a couple different definition questions sure I can I can take a go at that so um
all very good questions so the data we have focused on our residential accounts
right so in some of the reports that we have there is also reporting for commercial accounts for example
um we have focused mostly on residential accounts and that's all that you see um displayed uh in the dashboard
um in terms of utility sort of type if you will not ious versus munis but in
terms of the type of service so we have focused our collection of information on electricity and natural gas
as I'm sure most people on this call no like in some cases utilities provide one or the other but um but in some cases
they provide both um it is uh there's a little bit it sort of depends on how the information is
reported out and how in terms of how we present it right so some cases all we know is if an electricity and gas
customer had their service disconnected um and we have sort of put that into one category so depending on which utility
you might get your service from if it's both electricity and gas that is kind of
put together into a single category for displaying purposes because we can't quite differentiate if it was one or
both accounts in the data in most cases um Jacob help me remember the third one
another question about inferring missing customers oh right thank you
um yeah so also in the reporting that utilities have done in some cases they
are required to tell us the number of customer accounts they have in a particular month right in all those
cases we use that information right the challenge was in with some of the reporting requirements that information
is not required to be disclosed and in those situations we relied upon sort of
standard reports that are done by utilities to um to the eia to the Energy Information
Administration to estimate what those customer accounts look for those data
are annual in the most cases we may have had to impute or interpolate on values for particular months
um but we use those as a second best approximation um as to the number of accounts and that
becomes the denominator uh in the disconnection rates that you see um we don't have that all the time
purely for some the Municipal Utilities right so you may see some situations in the dashboard where we are able to
report total disconnections but not disconnection rates and that's because we don't quite have enough information
to reliably estimate a disconnection rate thanks David uh we have a couple of
really good questions about uh sort of the use case some of the difficulty in
collecting the data and how Advocates might help to to collect better data or
to to essentially petition or Advocate at the Public Utility Commission to to
incorporate better data or in some of those missing States how to get data from those States
well the data that we present are the data that are available and so we're hopeful that this tool is useful in the
sense that it shows where data are available and where they're still missing and that alone can be used as a
tool to advocate for more extensive data Gathering as Jackie says where where the data exists knowledge exists right this
is providing useful knowledge uh for for being able to dissect this issue
um so we're hopeful that more data can come in I will also just flag if you remember David showed at the bottom it said email
us share data if you know of data that exists that we weren't able to find please let us know if data become
available if your organization creates data in the future inspired by this or inspired by any of the number of
organizations that are working on this please let us know so that we can add those data going forward we've got one
question about how to and David maybe this is something you could show just quickly about how
how people can access the data just how to download the data there's a there's a button but it might just be useful to
show that really quickly yeah happy to do that so um if you're on one of the dashboard
um Pages um you are there's a blue button at the
very bottom right um which will allow you to download the data directly and just to highlight
again I showed you two different um two different sort of sets of tools
this map based dashboard plus the data Explorer vendor line data are the same
right so um the information that is being used in both those tools is identical by simply
clicking on either the selected data which reflects data that you've selected on the map or if you wanted all the
information available you can select download all um and this will create an Excel
spreadsheet that has all the information um and is freely available for for
people to to use and organize I'm not sure if you're seeing
the uh we're not seeing the Excel but I think that I think that's helpful yeah
uh look here's another question um one quick question about uh
incorporating other informations like water utilities or Community Choice aggregators like in California uh so
plans of getting a lot of questions about this is great how can we improve it it's awesome we want that so maybe
you can touch on that and then another question just about incorporating this into like additional
advocacy efforts at the energy Justice lab is planning to do any additional advocacy as a result of this dashboard
so our starting principle with this project was to incorporate as much
information for as many utilities um for as many in as many places as possible for as many years as possible
that we could right so if there are other utilities out there um that this information is is
um is there we would love to incorporate into the dashboard as a starting point we made a decision to focus on
electricity and natural gas um sort of given that the research interests of we have at the energy
Justice lab but we've had many conversations along the way for people who want to see data let's say from
Waters right and we know that disconnections for from water services is just as important an issue shutoffs
are seem to be pretty common as well my intuition my impression from those conversations is that data are less
plentiful um but they do exist in some cases we may have collected it incidentally as
part of our disclosure from utilities that are providing let's say both electricity and water maybe some some
munis but for the most part we have not yet set out to collect that information but that is an obvious place for
expansion and we'd be interested in partnering with folks to help us collect that information if that would be
something people would like to do um in terms of advocacy you know that's
a little bit less the focus of us at the energy Justice lab right we are sort of a research body that is trying to
collect this information make sense of it analyze it try to understand underlying patterns but we often partner
with advocacy on groups and individuals and we hope the dashboard itself becomes a powerful tool for advocacy right
um yeah as Jackie eloquently said you know information is power evidence is power and I think putting this all
together one of our main goals was to you know allow others to take this
information and to use it for advocacy whether that's in a particular particular utility that you work with or
a particular Community or particular State there's lots of different ways one could use this information I think what
the dashboard allows is the identification of where there are really
big problems were there utilities who are doing better right we're discussion rates lower there's a tremendous this
amount of variation across the country and I think that the data as displayed here allow one to see that in a way and
to design strategies for you know for moving towards having fewer
disconnections across the country David thank you so much uh this is our we're at time so maybe you can just give
people an idea of how we can how they can stay in touch how they can follow where they can see the recording and things like that afterwards
thank you so much everyone for your great questions yeah thank you I I just put in the chat our direct email
addresses we also have the Justice lab email address which is on the website feel free to continue to send questions
to us suggestions data anything along those lines we are very happy to accept
all of that um we can make this recording available and we also I just also put this in the
chat Charlie suggested the possibility of recording a tutorial I see that you say that that would be great so that's something we can do and follow up and
put it on the website too so anybody can go who missed this webinar and be able to access it
so maybe I'll do the honors of thanking everybody thank you to the team that's here on the webinar thank you to
everybody for coming out thank you to everybody for caring about this issue along with us we're so thrilled to be a
part of this growing Community working on this really complex and challenging issue problem
so with that I'll close it out and have a great day everybody
