ConEdison Seeking 11% Rate Hike As It Cuts Off A Record Number Of Customers - 88,000 For Jan-June 2025

An energy company seeking to hike utility bills in New York City by 11% disconnected more than 88,000 households during the first six months of 2025, signaling a crackdown on families struggling to cover rising energy costs even as the climate crisis drives extreme temperatures.

Con Edison, the monopoly utility that provides electricity to 3.6m homes across the country’s largest city and neighboring Westchester county, disconnected almost 2.5% of all its customers between January and June this year – triple the total number of families left without power in 2024. One in five disconnected homes remain without power for at least a week. The utility shut off 16,327 households in the month leading up to 25 June. New York was hit by its first heatwave between 23 and 25 June, breaking daytime and night-time records in Central Park and driving a surge in emergency room visits.

New York is among the most expensive places for electricity, with families shouldering above-inflation price hikes in recent years on top of unaffordable housing and the broader cost of living crisis stemming from the Covid pandemic. Heat-related deaths account for about 3% of all fatalities from May through September, making New York the second deadliest city for heat after Phoenix, Arizona.

In the past five years, more than 40% of New Yorkers have fallen into arrears, and 23% of households were disconnected at least once – leaving families without access to a fridge, internet, cooking facilities and heat or cooling until they can find the money to pay for reconnection. Black and Latino New Yorkers are more than twice as likely as white residents to fall behind, and almost eight times more likely to have a utility shutoff, according to the 2024 Poverty Tracker/Robin Hood report on energy insecurity.

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But as Con Edison ramped up disconnections over the past six months, the debt fell to $840m by the end of June with 12.5% of New Yorkers now behind on their bills. At the current rate, Con Edison could disconnect 150,000 households by the end of the year, the highest number by any utility in the country, according to Mark Wolfe, an energy economist. “Energy is unaffordable so people fall behind. The disconnection numbers show that Con Edison is aggressively cracking down, and life is going to become harder for poor people in New York,” said Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (Neada).

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/08/new-york-con-edison-disconnections-climate-crisis