Almost 213,000 Hydro One customers spent 10 per cent or more of their disposable household income on electricity bills in 2015, according to data obtained exclusively by Global News.
And for more than 37,000 Ontarians, nearly 30 per cent of their income went to paying for electricity.
That means more than one-fifth of the energy distributor’s 950,000 residential customers use between 25 and 400 per cent more of their available income than the anti-poverty advocacy group Low-Income Energy Network recommends.
“LIEN believes an affordable energy burden is six to eight per cent of your total household income for your heating and non-heating energy bills,” said research and policy analyst Mary Todorow.
“And we find that those folks who are at very low incomes, if they start paying 10 to 12 per cent of their total household income on their energy bills, they are going to be having to make difficult decisions.”
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Those choices, she said, are often between keeping the lights and heat on, or paying rent, buying food and getting medications.
The 2015 data was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and is contained in a report produced by and for Hydro One – Ontario’s largest utility provider.
Hydro One’s executive vice president of customer care, Ferio Pugliese, said this is not the first such report the energy provider has produced.
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“It gives us some awareness around affordability. And like I said, we are paying attention to affordability,” he told Global News.
Pugliese explained the rates customers pay, and any future increases thereof, are “simply to maintain the existing system.”
When Hydro one seeks a rate increase, it must apply to the Ontario Energy Board for permission.
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Consumer and Corporate Communications director for the energy board, Karen Evans, said protecting consumers, especially low-income ones, is “at the heart” of the board’s work.
“We protect the interests of all energy consumers, current and future, by balancing price with reliability and quality of service,” she wrote in an emailed statement.
Evans explained the board controls about half of a customer’s electricity bill, while contracts for conservation programs and taxes account for the other half.
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She went on to say the Ontario Energy Board has kept annual growth in average distribution rates at approximately two per cent, which is close to the rate of inflation.
Ontario has several programs in place to provide assistance for low-income households, including the Ontario Electricity Support Program which currently subsidizes the bills of more than 163,000 low-income Ontarians, and the Rural and Remote Rate Protection, which provided about $175 million in assistance in 2016, according to Evans.
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Still, the Hydro One report said more than 12,000 customers defaulted on their installment plans more than once in 2015.
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That year, Hydro One disconnected nearly 10,000 residential customers from their electricity services, roughly one per cent of their total customer base. At present, 1,425 Hydro One customers are living without power.
Last year, utility providers across Ontario disconnected roughly 60,000 customers. And while the vast majority – upward of 95 per cent – of customers are reconnected within two business days, the skyrocketing cost of energy has left hundreds of thousands of families in the province incapable of paying their bills.
In a recent shift in policy, Hydro One said it plans to reconnect those more than 1,400 customers currently without electricity.
The Hydro One Winter Relief Program, which launched this week, will not include debt forgiveness, said Pugliese, but will help customers by relaxing certain rules and policies surrounding reconnection.
While Hydro One collects data and analyses the affordability of its service, LIEN’s Todorow said the data could also be helpful in assessing the efficacy of the support programs in place.
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But the issue goes deeper than the Hydro One graph illustrating the high percentage of income many households are charged for energy, she said.
The broader issue, Todorow said, is poverty.
“We have situations where there’s precarious work, and people who are working aren’t working aren’t making a living wage, social assistance rates were cut back in 1995 by 21.6 per cent, and the amount that people on social assistance receive for their shelter cost is way below, the gap is huge between what they are provided for shelter cost and what the rents are in Ontario,” she said.
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