The Places Where Americans Are Deciding Between AC and Food

In 135 years of record-keeping, Tampa, Florida, has never been hotter than it was last July.

Though often humid, the city on the bay is typically breezy, even in summer. But on July 27, it broke 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the thermometer for the first time ever; two days later, it hit its highest-ever heat index, 119 degrees. The family of Hezekiah Walters, the 14-year-old who died of heat stroke during football practice in Tampa in 2019, urged neighbors at a local CPR certification event to take the heat warnings seriously. Local HVAC companies complained about the volume of calls. Area hospitals struggled to keep their rooms and clinics comfortable. Experts later said the record temperatures were made five times more likely by climate change.

But according to data from Heatmap and MIT’s Electricity Price Hub, Tampa Electric customers used 14% less electricity in July 2025 than they did in the same month of 2020, which was Tampa’s previous hottest July on record — about 216 kilowatt-hours per household less, roughly the equivalent of running a central AC a couple hours fewer per day for an entire month. Tellingly, Tampa Electric raised rates over that period by 84%, with the average bill growing from $111 to $190 per month.

Though there are many instances in many places around the country where usage has dropped as rates rose, the correlation doesn’t necessarily mean people were rationing their electricity. Climate-related factors like anomalously cool summers can lower summer bills, while energy efficiency upgrades can also result in changes to residential consumption. Southern California Edison customers, for example, used 24% less electricity in 2025 than they did in 2020, at least in part due to the widespread adoption of rooftop solar.

Thanks to recent efforts by the Energy Information Agency to track energy insecurity and utility disconnections, however, we can start to tease out deficiency from efficiency. By cross-referencing that data with rate and usage statistics from the Electricity Price Hub, we find a handful of places like Tampa, where people have seemingly reduced their electricity usage because they couldn’t afford the added cost, even during a deadly heatwave. (Tampa Electric did not return our request for comment.)

The EIA’s tracking program, known as the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, tells a clear story: Across the country, people are struggling to absorb the rising costs of electricity. In 2020, nearly one in four Americans reported some form of energy insecurity, meaning they were either unable to afford to use heating or cooling equipment, pay their energy bills, or pay for other necessities due to energy costs. By 2024, the most recent data available, that number had risen to a third — and two-thirds of households with incomes under $10,000. In 2024 alone, utilities sent 94.9 million final shutoff notices to residential electricity customers.

Since 2020, 98% of the more than 400 utilities in the Heatmap-MIT dataset have raised their rates — more than half of them by greater than 20%; about one in 10 utilities have raised their rates by 50% or more. And 219 of those utilities raised rates even as usage in their service area fell, meaning that as customers used less, they still paid more.

“I don’t feel like [the rates have] ever been all that affordable, but they have steadily increased more and more and more,” Janelle Ghiorso, a PG&E customer in California who recently filed for bankruptcy due to the debt she incurred from her electricity bills, told me. She added: “When do I get relief? When I’m dead?”

The people hit hardest by rate increases tend to be those already struggling the most. For example, about 30% of Kentucky residents reported going without heat or AC, leaving their homes at unsafe temperatures, or cutting back on food or medicine to pay energy bills, per the EIA’s 2020 RECS report. Since then, Kentucky Power has raised rates in the eastern part of the state by 45%, adding about $64 to the average monthly bill in a service area where the median monthly household income can be less than $4,000.

The Department of Energy’s Low-income Energy Affordability Data, which measures energy affordability patterns, actually obscures some of this burden. It reports that for all of Kentucky, annual electricity costs account for about 2% of the state’s median household income, which is about average for the nation. But in Kentucky Power’s Appalachian service area specifically, many households live under 200% of the poverty level, and $15 of every $100 someone earns might go toward their energy costs, Chris Woolery, the residential energy coordinator at Mountain Association, a nonprofit economic development group that serves the region, told me. “The situation is just dire for many folks,” he said.

Kentucky Power is aware of this; its low-income assistance charge has grown by 110% since 2020, the Heatmap-MIT data shows. Woolery also noted that the utility agreed to voluntary protections against disconnections, such as a 24-hour moratorium during extreme weather, in a rate case settlement with the Kentucky Public Service Commission. The commission rejected the proposal, but the utility kept the protections anyway, Woolery told me.

Customers in other areas are not so lucky.

In states like Oklahoma, where one in three households reported energy insecurity in 2020, rates rose about 30% from 2020 to 2025, according to our data. Per the EIA survey, Oklahoma’s monthly disconnection rate is more than three times the national average. Oklahoma doesn’t have the highest electricity rates in the country — far from it. But median incomes there are low enough that even moderate rate increases leave some with hard choices.

Interestingly, in bottom-income-quartile states, where median household incomes are below $81,337, only about 30% of utilities show a pattern of rising bills and falling electricity usage, which would suggest energy rationing. The other 70% of utilities show the opposite effect: usage is rising despite electricity rates becoming a bigger burden of customers’ incomes. In Kentucky Power’s service area, for example, bills may be up $64 a month, but usage remained essentially flat.

“Think of it this way: The electric company goes to the front of the line,” Mark Wolfe, the executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, a policy group for administrators of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, told me of how households triage their bills. If you need to buy something from the grocery store, the drug store, or pay your electricity bill, then “the utility goes to the front of the line because they can shut off your power, which causes lots of other problems.”

Wolfe added, “Plus, if you’re really in dire straits, you can go to the food bank. You can’t go to the ‘other’ utility company.”

Even as resource-strapped households put a higher share of their income toward electricity, they’re also least able to afford energy efficiency upgrades like newer appliances, smart thermostats, or solar panels. The pattern is prevalent in places with extreme climates, such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, where turning off the AC in the middle of summer could mean death. It shows up most starkly among the most extreme rate examples in our data set, like the utilities serving remote Alaska villages — despite astronomical electricity prices, usage hasn’t fluctuated much because its customers are already using it as little as they can afford. The elderly and other individuals living on fixed incomes are also often unable to cut their electricity usage beyond what little they’re already using.

In middle-income states like Florida, roughly 60% of the utilities in our dataset show rising bills and falling electricity use — more than twice the rate we see in the lowest-income states. While the poorest Americans have already reduced their electricity use to the bare minimum and are cutting groceries and medicine in order to keep the heat and AC on, in places like Tampa, where the median income is $96,480, the electricity rate shocks have caused even middle- and even high-earning households to start worrying about their bills. According to a new survey released Tuesday by Ipsos and the energy policy nonprofit PowerLines, 74% of respondents with household incomes over $100,000 said they are worried about their utility bills increasing.

“People are seeing their utility bill as one of the few things that changes so much month to month, that is so unpredictable, and that they don’t have any control over,” Charles Hua, the founder and executive director of PowerLines, told me.

Wolfe, the executive director at NEADA, agreed, saying that for the first time, the association has begun hearing from families with incomes above the threshold who need assistance. “An extra $100 a month for a family, but they’re middle class — that shouldn’t push them over the edge,” at least in theory, Wolfe said. But for those with no flexibility in their budgets, anything additional or unpredictable “pushes them close to the edge — from going from middle class to lower middle class — and I think that’s why this affordability crisis is becoming such an issue.”

We can also see this phenomenon in the explosion of line items on utility bills going toward funding assistance programs. Appalachian Power Co.’s low-income surcharge, for instance, is up 3,200% for customers in Virginia; Puget Sound Energy’s low-income program is up 970% for customers in Washington; and PacifiCorp Oregon’s low-income cost-recovery charge, up 879%.

The EIA data, too, bears this out: Florida had one of the highest rates of people reporting they were “unable to use air conditioning equipment” due to costs in the RECS data, and in 2024, there were 186,202 disconnections in the state in July alone — every one of which would have meant people no longer had the power to run their ACs. (FPL and Duke Energy Florida also show usage declines as rates rose, although neither raised rates as much as Tampa.)

The data also shows places where higher-income earners have aggressively pursued efficiency upgrades to lower their usage. In the LA Department of Water and Power service area in California, usage is down more than 11% overall between 2020 and 2025, one of the biggest drops in our dataset. But the lower usage is more evenly distributed month to month, indicating that things like solar adoption and efficiency programs are likely behind the drop, rather than cost pressures. (Rates there still rose more than 28%, or about $15 per month.)

Even doing everything right wasn’t enough to save customers in the end — households that cut their electricity use still saw their bills rise by an average of $20 a month, our data shows.

Perhaps most concerning, though, is the relentless upward trajectory. PowerLines reports that utilities have submitted $9.4 billion in new requests in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Heatmap and MIT’s numbers show that 79% of utilities raised rates in 2025, and 55% have raised them again already this year.

But the advocates I talked to stressed that utilities have more agency than they get credit for. Take Kentucky Power, for example, with its voluntary disconnection protections. “It just shows that you don’t necessarily have to make disconnections to be financially solvent,” Woolery of the Mountain Association pointed out. Or take Ouachita Electric in Arkansas, which passed a 4.5% rate decrease after investing in efficiency upgrades in consumers’ homes through a pay-as-you-save model.

But that’s the rare exception. For most customers, relief is not obviously on the way. Signs increasingly point to the imminent onset of a super El Niño, which could bring punishing, climate-change-intensified heat waves across the United States. The July 2025 record in Tampa will almost certainly not stand; someday, it’ll be the second-hottest summer, or the third. In a few decades, it might even look cool.

And still there will be bills to pay.