Orange and Pitt counties are the least affordable counties in the state for energy, according to the John Locke Foundation’s Energy Poverty Index (EPI), which ranks all 100 counties on how much more people in poverty pay for energy bills related to a benchmark.
“In recent months, rising energy costs, especially including electricity rates, have captured headlines and policymakers’ attention in North Carolina,” Jon Sanders, director of the Center for Food Power and Life at the John Locke Foundation, told the Carolina Journal. “It’s good that the problem is finally getting through to their elected officials, but the bad news is that electricity rate changes lag policy changes. So with the exception of fuel-rate adjustments, the problems that have become evident of late were set in motion a few years before.”
This county-by-county energy poverty index measures how much households living in poverty spend on electricity bills relative to the widely accepted affordability benchmark that no more than 6.5% of household expenditures should be devoted to energy costs, according to Sanders. Two county rankings are generated utilizing this metric: one for households served by the state’s three investor-owned utilities and another for households served by municipal utilities or electric membership cooperatives…