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Report: Duke Energy Could Do More For Low-Income Customers

By Rebecca Thiele

Posted June 3, 2020

A photo of a Duke Energy electric bill.

Duke Energy Indiana gives out about $750,000 a year to community programs that help customers with their bills. (Rebecca Thiele/IPB News)

A new report from the Environmental Working Group says Duke Energy should be doing more to help customers who struggle to pay bills. 

Duke Energy Indiana gives out about $750,000 a year to community programs that help customers with their bills. That helped more than 3,700 people in 2018.

But the Citizens Action Coalition says to cover all of Duke’s customers enrolled in the state’s energy assistance program that year, it would have needed more than $16 million in low-income assistance.

“What we really need to see is a movement towards addressing the affordability issues within monthly utility bills and reducing those bills to an affordable level for all households so that crisis funding is not needed as often," says Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition.

Olson says money for low-income assistance should be built into customers’ rates so there's a reliable source of funding.

Duke Energy Indiana spokesperson Lew Middleton says the utility has increased that funding by about $250,000 over the years. He says it also has to strike a difficult balance.

“It would be nice if we could lower rates to the point where it was affordable for everybody," Middleton says. "But if we did that, then that would not give us the money we need to provide clean and reliable service.”

Citizens Action Coalition is also disappointed Duke Energy didn’t offer more assistance to low-income customers in its request to increase the average resident’s bill by about $24 a month.

Contact Rebecca at rthiele@iu.edu or follow her on Twitter at @beckythiele.

Indiana Environmental reporting is supported by the Environmental Resilience Institute, an Indiana University Grand Challenge project developing Indiana-specific projections and informed responses to problems of environmental change.

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