The Booming Economy

One in 20 households in this country last year had their utilities cut off.

In addition, 1 in 5 households in 2007 were behind in utility bills.

Here is the complete report.

A snip from the summary:

-22% of all electric customers’ accounts were overdue. (5/1/08) This represents
over 26.5 million consumers nationally. These consumers owed an average
arrearage of $157. This would indicate that consumers owed their utility
approximately $4.2 billion for unpaid electric service.

- 21% of all gas consumers came out of winter (5/1/08) overdue in their bills. This
would represent 12.5 million consumers. This is an increase from the 19.2%
customers’ reported overdue 10/1/07. The average arrearage at winter’s end
was $360 as compared to $258 on 10/01/07. That would mean that almost $4.5
billion were overdue following winter 2007/08.

...

-Over 5.7 million electric households had their service terminated in 2007. This
amounts to 4.7% of all electric customers or almost 1 in 20. Of those terminated,
33% or over 1.9 million customers did not have their service restored in the
reporting year.

- 3 million gas customers had their service terminated in 2007. This amounted to
5.0% of all gas customers or one in 20 of all gas customers. Of those
terminated, 55% or almost 1.7 million households were not able to have service
restored.

- The 2007 gas customer termination rate of 5.0% is significantly higher than the
2001 rate of 2.5%. Over twice as many consumers were terminated in 2007 than
in 2001. Electric termination rates have been stable over the same time period.

- The termination rate in 2007 was 3.8% for customers who had both electric and
gas service with the same utility. Of those terminated, 33% were not able to
have service restored.

Of course this survey was conducted before things got REALLY bad.