Insulating the Energy Poverty Gap - The Margin

On a chilly March morning, a crew of workers pulls out fluffy bales of pink insulation from the crawl space of Lisa Moorer’s house in Renton, Washington. They’ve been hired by King County to weatherize Moorer’s house, sealing up leaky windows and door frames, replacing the old insulation, and adding weather stripping, so that Moorer will use less energy to heat and cool her home. 

A couple of weeks earlier, the county also helped the 65-year-old, who has been living off a fixed income from Social Security disability payments for more than a decade, replace her broken gas furnace with a new, cost-effective, and energy-efficient electric heat pump. It was an upgrade that Moorer would have been hard-pressed to make on her own. Her average monthly income is about $2,600, pooled from Social Security, a small pension from a previous job before her disability stopped her from working, and dog-sitting. She also rents out a room in her house to a family friend. The cost of replacing her old furnace could have topped $10,000.

For years, she had paid repairmen $50 here and there to keep the furnace running, despite being warned about how long those repairs would actually last. “I try to conserve what funds that I do have – I intend to live here for the rest of my life, so I need to be able to have some smart avenues in order to maintain it,” she said. As the cost of property taxes, insurance, and other basic living expenses continues to rise, her budget gets that much tighter.

In November, when Moorer’s furnace went out completely, she layered sweaters and ran space heaters in her den, where she naps with her two dogs, Kimi and Anna Stella, and the ones she dogsits, Izzy and Dozer. “The rest of the house was an icebox,” she said. When it got really cold, she even ran her electric oven just to heat up the house. In January, her electric bill from Puget Sound Energy was over $250. Her usage had skyrocketed, and her bill was more than three times its usual amount.

Despite her financial situation, Moorer wouldn’t have qualified for federal assistance programs aimed at reducing energy bills for low-income households. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) directly pays people’s utility bills, and the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) funds upgrades of old, energy-hogging HVAC systems with newer, cost-efficient models. The income cut-off for those programs is tied to the federal poverty line, which Moorer hovers just above.

Instead, thanks to assistance programs run by King County, where Seattle is located, and funded in part by Washington State, Moorer got the help she needed without having to choose between draining her savings or staying uncomfortably cold the rest of winter. The King County program, called Energize, helps households pay for energy-efficiency upgrades and connects residents to other funding sources, like the county’s housing repair program, to cover weatherization costs. Energize is part of a slew of energy assistance programs funded by the State of Washington’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA) – a statewide carbon cap-and-invest program, which incentivizes high-emissions businesses like fuel suppliers and utility companies to reduce their emissions – with the overarching goal of reducing state-wide carbon emissions by 95 percent by 2050.

The funds have been used to shore up climate change planning, clean energy projects, and other programs that reduce carbon emissions. Household energy consumption accounts for some 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually in the United States. The CCA offers funds to swap out gas heating systems for electric heat pumps to reduce energy consumption and make homes more efficient for low-income residents, addressing both economic and social inequities. 

According to a 2025 report from the state’s Department of Commerce, more than 270,000 low-income households in Washington are considered energy burdened, meaning that they pay more than 6 percent of their monthly income towards electricity bills. In some rural counties, nearly a quarter of the population is energy burdened. In rural Ferry County, in the state’s north east corner,  the number rises to 41 percent— the highest rate in Washington. About 15 percent of the county’s population is Indigenous, and the Colville Indian Reservation makes up a large swath of the county. 

When families and households can’t afford their energy bills, some simply turn off their heating and cooling; others might forgo necessities like food, medicine, or clothing to keep the lights on. Energy burdens are often cyclical. Lower-income households tend to live in homes or apartment buildings with inefficient appliances, walls and ceilings that lack insulation, and windows that let hot or cold air from outside seep in. For Moorer, running inefficient space heaters constantly meant it took even more energy to heat her home to a semi-comfortable temperature, which then cost more at the end of the month.

“We initially came at this from a direct emissions climate perspective,” said Terry Sullivan, King County’s climate and energy program manager. “But then increasingly with the climate justice perspective, [we’re] trying to make sure that homes are [prepared for] extreme temperatures.” The county has mapped urban heat islands, identifying which neighborhoods have more exposure to high temperatures during heatwaves, for example. “We use that as a scoring mechanism for most of our programs, since there’s such a high demand,” Sullivan said. King County is also directing resources to places that need upgrades the most, he added. This includes energy-efficient insulation to withstand cold spells or heat waves in the event the power goes out.

King County includes renters in its weatherization and assistance programs, a group often left out of federal programs if landlords don’t participate. A 2025 survey found that more than two-thirds of renters in the region making less than $50,000 struggled to pay their utility bills over the past year.

In 2024, Washington launched its own version of LIHEAP, the State Home Energy Assistance Program, with a $35 million budget from CCA funds. The income threshold is set at 80 percent of the area median income. That means regions can have different metrics that more closely reflect the local cost of living, said Brian Sarensen, the program manager at the Department of Commerce who oversees the State Home Energy Assistance Program as well as LIHEAP. In Seattle and the surrounding county, the income threshold for a family of four rises to $110,950; in areas with a lower cost of living, like Spokane in Eastern Washington, that number is $78,300. 

“There’s a little piece of the population where you make just enough that you don’t qualify for any [federal] services, but you’re not quite self-sufficient,” Sarensen said. “We want them to spend the money to heat their homes so that they can be safe and healthy, but at the same time, where does that money come from?” 

In its first year, the program has served over 20,000 households with bill assistance and furnace upgrades, and prevented utility disconnections for over 4,000 households. The average household reduced its energy burden by over 50 percent. “After 10 years, we see that a home has saved basically the same amount of money we’ve invested in it,” Sarensen said. 

As energy costs are predicted to rise across the country, energy assistance and weatherization programs will continue to be vital tools that help families afford higher bills and reduce overall energy use. An analysis of census data shows that nationally, 48.5 million households struggled to pay at least one monthly energy bill in 2024. Despite this, the Trump administration has signaled a desire to slash assistance programs such as LIHEAP and WAP that have a proven track record of making energy costs affordable for millions of Americans.

Moorer is already seeing the benefits: In February, a couple of weeks after her heat pump was installed, her electric bill was already $100 lower, and her average daily electricity usage dropped from 45 kilowatt-hours in January to 30 kilowatt-hours in February. The heat pump also provides her with central air conditioning for the first time. During the 2021 heatwave that broiled Seattle with temperatures over 100 degrees, Moorer remembers running a window AC unit all day and night, and it eventually leaked all over the floor of her living room.

As climate change will cause more frequent heatwaves, Washingtonians without air conditioning— nearly half the state’s population, according to federal data— are also at risk of prolonged exposure to heat and a plethora of negative health effects from kidney failure to stroke, and in extreme circumstances, even death. A 2019 report from the state’s Department of Health estimated that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, average temperatures during a “normal” year by midcentury will be hotter than 20th-century records.

In Central Washington, where the weather isn’t as mild as in coastal cities like Seattle, the need is particularly pronounced. “The bills are so damn high right now, in the summer, it’s the extreme heat where you need an AC running 24-7,” says Oskar Zambrano, a Yakima-based community organizer with Washington Conservation Action. 

Over the past few years, the city has had to set up more cooling centers at community centers on 100-degree days for people who don’t have AC. “Like during the pandemic and other times that there has been an urgent need, the funding [for energy assistance] dries up,” he said. “There’s a higher intake of people needing these services than funds available, and as the economy worsens, we can see that happening.”

As the Trump administration targets and surveils undocumented immigrants with increasingly violent tactics, state programs can still provide vital resources to undocumented or mixed-status households. Federal programs require social security numbers and verification of immigration status. In Washington, additional information can be collected to ensure that payments and benefits aren’t duplicated for the same household. “We just have to make sure you’re a resident of Washington State, and that you have an active utility account,” Sarensen said. “Nobody’s going to freeze to death, and nobody’s going to have heatstroke if we can help it and we still have funds available.” 

Even so, in Yakima, where a large Latino community resides, undocumented and mixed-status families are hesitant to put themselves in any sort of spotlight, Zambrano said. “Sometimes, signing up for these programs is in-person,” he said. “We’ve seen a decrease in turnout for our events and activities because people are afraid to be out and about.”

The energy sector’s growing crisis

Historically, Washington state has benefited from low energy prices, thanks to abundant, cheap hydroelectric generation. According to the Energy Information Administration’s most recent data, the average cost per kilowatt hour of energy in the residential sector was 13.33 cents in Washington, compared to a national average of 17.24 cents. But between December 2024 and December 2025, the state’s average price per kilowatt hour had in fact climbed by 12 percent.

The causes of these rising costs, across the nation, are complex, said Elena Krieger, the senior director of research and policy at Just Solutions, an organization focused on equitable climate policy. “In the West, we’re dealing with issues related to wildfires, insurance costs and damages being paid out, and grid hardening investments,” she said. “In the Southeast, they’re dealing with hurricanes, and there are bill increases related to the damage and recovery from those.” Components of the nation’s power grid, for example, are aging and need to be replaced. For example, the Department of Energy estimated in 2023 that 70 percent of transmission lines are nearing the end of their 50 to 80-year lifespans.

Additionally, as the tech industry builds out massive, energy-intensive data centers to fuel the growth of artificial intelligence models, energy consumption is projected to further skyrocket. That will require new, costly infrastructure, if not new power plants as well. If the industry doesn’t shoulder those costs, which could exceed $1 trillion according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, they could be passed on to utility customers writ large.

“We’re also seeing that there are power plants that were going to retire are staying online, because of projected demand growth,” Krieger said. At the federal level, Trump and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claim the plants are necessary for reliability, a decision Krieger says keeps high-emissions and particularly expensive plants online. As costs rise for consumers, those closest to these dirty power plants will also continue to breathe polluted air and suffer the health impacts. As of January, Wright had intervened to block the planned closure of at least five coal plants in Indiana, Colorado, and Michigan, as well as one in Washington.  Research suggests that the move could increase utility customers’ costs — and the administration has announced it will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into financially struggling coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and North Carolina. 

The coal plant in Washington, the last in the region, is set to transition to natural gas in accordance with the Clean Energy Transformation Act, a state law passed in 2019 that bans utilities from providing coal power starting in 2026. In its efforts to keep the plant running, the Department of Energy cited emergency conditions from increased demand. The state’s attorney general fired back, calling the Department of Energy’s order illegal and clumsy; as lawsuits are pending, the state legislature passed a bill that will penalize the plant, owned by a Canadian company called TransAlta, if it continues to burn coal. 

Against this political backdrop, energy efficiency programs serve another dual benefit. “These efficiency measures can bring down household costs at each individual house, and collectively that can reduce peak demand, and reduce the need for peaking power plants and other expensive resources that are used to meet those needs,” Krieger said.

At the local level, advocates like Zambrano are also wary that utilities will use compliance with the Clean Energy Transformation Act as an excuse to pass off the cost of decarbonization to customers. PacifiCorp, which operates one of the three investor-owned utilities in Washington, is required to meet an 80 percent clean-energy goal by 2030, said Julian Santos, a climate and clean energy advocate with Washington Conservation Alliance.

“We are four years away from the first big milestone,” Santos said. “They have a long way to go.” The company’s implementation plan suggests it is currently below 40 percent clean energy and would need to double its renewable energy sources by the end of 2029. During a public comment period on the company’s clean energy plan, environmental advocates argued that attempting to ramp up major infrastructure upgrades in just a few years could make the process more costly than necessary. Last May, the state’s Utilities and Transportation Commission, which regulates power companies, rejected PacifiCorp’s plan, citing its lack of detail and measurable goals to achieve renewable energy targets.

Further complicating matters, in late February, PacifiCorp announced it will sell its Washington service area, which includes Yakima, to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion. It’s not immediately clear what comes next, Santos said.  “We’re concerned about what that could mean for people in Yakima who are already facing rising rates.”

In a statement, the company said it is “actively engaged” in acquiring additional clean energy sources and does not anticipate service disruptions during the acquisition process. “PacifiCorp is conscious of affordability concerns and will do what it can to mitigate customer cost pressures driven by Washington’s policies,” a spokesperson said

Trump’s Energy Assistance Takedown

After taking office for his second term, President Trump proposed eliminating LIHEAP entirely. In a 2025 budget document, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget called LIHEAP "unnecessary,” and pointed to a government audit from 2010, which found possible evidence of fraud valued at roughly two percent of the program’s budget, in just seven states. The 2025 proposal seeks to instead support low-income individuals through “energy dominance, lower prices, and an America First economic platform.” The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s a move that Trump repeatedly tried to make in his first term, as well. “We’ve managed to overcome it every time,” said Shaylee Stokes, who directs The Energy Project at the Washington State Community Action Partnership. Advocates worked to convince their congressional representatives that the funding was, and still is, vital. Community action agencies work with local clients and contractors to distribute federal energy assistance funding. In Washington, these organizations collectively serve 100,000 households annually.

The White House’s position doesn’t reflect the fact that LIHEAP, in particular, has typically enjoyed broad, bipartisan support from lawmakers as a long-running, cost-effective, successful program. WAP also has a proven track record of keeping people safer in their own homes when their bills are paid, and of reducing costs and energy-related climate emissions. For every dollar spent on WAP, which has operated since the Ford administration, communities receive numerous health and safety benefits. That could include better health outcomes from reduced exposure to heat and indoor air pollution as windows are sealed up, as well as the removal of mold and mildew when homes are weatherized.

Over the past decade, LIHEAP has typically received over $3 billion annually. Under the Biden administration, LIHEAP received major funding boosts, jumping to $8 billion in 2021. WAP received an additional $3.5 billion dollars as well. In February, Trump signed off on a spending bill renewing the program with a $4 billion budget, a $20 million increase from the previous year.

However, federal programs have never met the true need. According to a 2021 report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 16 states have their own state-funded bill assistance and weatherization programs. These programs allow states to expand the benefits of weatherization and bill assistance to more residents.

RMI, an energy and climate policy think tank, estimates that it would take $9.3 billion in annual assistance to end energy poverty and ensure that households never pay more than 4 percent of their income on energy bills — less than 0.25 percent of the federal government’s spending in 2024.

Stokes said that the administration’s rhetoric is far from the reality that community action agencies see every day. Money from LIHEAP and other assistance programs runs out quickly because of the high level of need, she said. “We (did) extra advocacy last year, and we’re expecting to have to do that every year of the Trump administration to make sure that our legislators are hearing about how important (this funding) is,” she said. Ultimately, Stokes said she doesn’t expect the Trump administration to fund LIHEAP in the 2027 budget without pressure.

Without federal funds, the state would fall further short of meeting the full needs of residents facing energy burdens, at an estimated annual cost of $275,000,000 as of May 2025. Washington received $55 million in federal LIHEAP funds in the current fiscal year. Meanwhile, the state is facing its own budget crisis and may need to cut billions of dollars in spending over the next few years.

The Trump administration also attempted to freeze or terminate energy-efficiency grants announced in Biden’s signature bills, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Sullivan, King County’s climate and energy programs manager, said that departments are still waiting to see if the programs for home energy retrofits and customer rebates for energy-efficiency appliances will be funded at about $80 million each.

The government shutdown in 2025, along with mass layoffs of federal employees, created uncertainty about the status of funds that local programs were banking on. “It created a lot of chaos and uncertainty in our networks,” Stokes said. “You would hear one thing at 10 AM and the exact opposite at 4 PM.” The entire LIHEAP staff was fired in April 2025; at least one staff member was rehired when no one else in the government knew how to disburse the correct amount of remaining funds already appropriated to states.

“It’s a wreck. The loss of institutional knowledge and the increase in administrative burden due to these shake ups has not made things more efficient or saved anybody money,” Stokes said. Instead, local program administrators have had to spend more of their own time and resources to fight budget cuts and keep programs running, and provide vital assistance to families. After the 2025 shutdown ended, Washington received 90 percent of its annual LIHEAP funding, said Jeff DeLuca, the executive director of Washington State Community Action Partnership.

Moorer’s Peace of Mind

Energy assistance programs are also vital because they enable lower-income households to access resources and benefits that would otherwise be concentrated at the top. A 2024 study found that between 2006 and 2021, Americans collectively received over $47 billion in tax credits for energy-efficiency and clean energy upgrades, including rooftop solar, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. About 60 percent of those benefits went to households in the top 20 percent of income.

“This is sort of what you see with capitalism in general — the rich get richer, and that happens in the energy system, too,” said Justin Schott, the director of the Energy Equity Project. He pointed to a case study in the Detroit area, which found that LED lightbulbs, a simple efficiency upgrade, were harder to come by at stores in lower-income neighborhoods. Switching to these bulbs from incandescent bulbs cuts energy usage by 90 percent, but requires an upfront investment.

Larger, systemic inequities are baked into the system, down to the bills that consumers receive. “Everybody pays the same surcharge per kilowatt hour,” Schott said. That means, effectively, energy inefficient households are penalized for using more energy. If those households are energy burdened, that also means they can’t afford thousands of dollars in upfront investments to reap the benefits of a tax credit. “The fact is, low-income households have been subsidizing the wealthy’s access to energy efficiency and clean energy for a very long time.”

Moorer’s high bills from Puget Sound Energy, for example, were affected by a 12 percent rate hike that the utility implemented in January. The utility will use most of the new revenue for clean energy and reliability investments, according to filings with the state’s Utility and Transportation Committee. About one percent of the increased revenue will be diverted to bill assistance programs. Because Moorer used so much extra energy to run space heaters when her furnace broke, she’s paying more into those investments than a household that could have afforded to fix the problem immediately. 

Krieger of Just Solutions calls the disparity a regressive tax, like sales taxes. “(Low-income households) pay much more of their income, compared to wealthier households, because their incomes are lower and because they often don’t have access to efficiency measures that would enable them to use less energy for the same set of services.”

A 2024 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that nationally, communities of color that would have benefited the most from lower energy bills were the least likely to use heat pumps. Further, a 2025 study from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that nearly 1 in 5 homes that qualify for weatherization assistance are deferred from the program because significant, costly repairs are needed first. That could include replacing leaking roofs, damaged floorboards, or hazardous, outdated electrical panels.

At the state legislature this year, advocates successfully pushed for legislation to enact a dedicated fund for bill assistance. (The bill, passed on March 12, still needs to be signed by the governor.) “One of our goals is that a state-run program will provide sustained and predictable assistance, not just one-time bill credits,” said Aqsa Mengal, the climate and clean energy policy lead at Front and Centered, an environmental justice advocacy group. It could also reduce burdensome applications for people who need help, for example, allowing Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program recipients to automatically enroll, and the agencies that serve them, by creating one umbrella of funding instead of a patchwork of grants and programs, she said. 

“This has been a multi-year effort on behalf of energy and low-income advocates,” Mengal said. “We are hopeful that the governor will sign the bill.” 

While Washington already mandates that electric utility companies provide bill assistance programs to low-income households, the state Department of Commerce’s 2025 report found that participation rates varied widely. Across Washington’s 39 counties, 32 had enrollment rates below 25 percent. The report also found that nearly all programs failed to align with the state’s mandate, as different electric utilities, some investor-owned, some consumer-owned, doled out different amounts of assistance to households in similar financial situations. Some utilities, for example, required proof of a disability or senior status, in addition to income.

In Yakima, Santos said that means many residents who need assistance fall by the wayside. Utilities are required to provide assistance to customers who meet the state’s definition of low-income, at 80 percent of the area median income. The Department of Commerce estimates nearly 12,000 low-income households in Yakima County are energy burdened, yet PacifiCorp reported providing bill assistance to just over 7,500 customers in the 2025 fiscal year across its service area, which includes portions of two other counties. 

This is despite the state requiring utilities to develop “customer benefit indicators” that track the needs of vulnerable communities in their service area. “What we want now is to see those numbers move in the right direction, to set goals to reduce energy burdens and improve weatherization,” Santos said. “If they just continue tracking these numbers, that’s not going to accomplish anything.” In a statement, the company said that it “follows all state requirements to provide assistance to customers who need it.” The company also provided internal data showing that as of March 2026, it had enrolled more than 9,500 customers in bill assistance. 

In the meantime, advocates are also uneasy that the Climate Commitment Act’s funds could be siphoned off to address other affordability issues. At the start of the legislative session, Gov. Bob Ferguson proposed using $569 million from Climate Commitment Act revenue to maintain the state’s working families’ tax credit. The governor’s proposal was not included in the final budget that passed, according to the Washington State Budget and Policy Center. For now, that marks another victory for environmental justice advocates. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s a slippery slope, [the tax credit] isn’t directly related to climate mitigation by any means,” Stokes said. “There are plenty of initiatives that the CCA can fund that are approaching environmental justice and energy equity.”

In Renton, once the dust settles from all the contractors working on her house, Moorer looks forward to finally getting rid of the bulky space heaters and the AC window unit in her living room. A stain on her carpet from the AC leak will serve as a reminder of how uncomfortable her house could get before the county installed her new heat pump. But she’s thinking of fixing that up on her own.  “Now I’m sitting nice and cozy, not all bundled up,” she said. “The peace of mind that I get, I can’t thank [the county] enough.

***

Your donation supports in-depth reporting, data analysis, data visualizations, and original photography. Join us in the fight for environmental justice by contributing today — every dollar helps us tell the stories of the people and communities who have been and are currently experiencing injustice.