The strategy of using a household’s T&TEC electricity bill as a way of targeting support to the neediest households, is an interesting and innovative policy development. This is something that the Energy Chamber recommended to the Roadmap to Recovery policy development process in 2020, in the midst of the first wave of the COVID pandemic. There is a strong correlation between household income and electricity use. This means that it makes good sense to use electricity bills as a method to overcome the vexing issue of means testing and to avoid the moral hazard often associated with cash transfer or food card programmes, where better off households with the right political or social contacts access the support, rather than the households most in need.
There may be some parsimonious but wealthy households with low electricity bills, but rewarding those households for not wasting electricity (and hence natural gas) does not necessarily seem a bad public policy outcome. There are of course, also a few indigent households with no electricity connections, but this is where local councillors are supposed to come in, to target the needed social support to these few highly impoverished households.
The existing T&TEC web interface giving people rich data about their electricity usage is a very useful tool for households and businesses trying to manage their electricity costs. The welldeveloped T&TEC geographical information system, coupled with their household billing database, could also be an excellent physical planning tool. With the right analysis it could help identify pockets of poverty or areas undergoing significant social and economic change. T&TEC’s data is a valuable tool and it is good to see it being used in a public policy setting, but this is just the first step.