OPA’s community engagement efforts revealed an engaged customer base that cares about their bills, their communities, and their environment. What holds many customers back is not a lack of interest or willingness to participate, but barriers that make it harder to understand bills, access support, benefit from programs, and participate in decisions that affect their water and power service. Understanding those barriers also requires looking beyond individual customer experiences to the broader conditions that have shaped who has historically been able to access utility benefits, information, investment, and decision-making power — and reckoning with the systemic challenges that have shaped customers’ experiences. In this sense, equity strategies are not only about improving individual programs or expanding outreach, but about systems change: identifying where existing structures create uneven access or uneven benefits, and ensuring LADWP’s policies, programs, investments, and engagement practices help more customers participate in and benefit from the utility’s transition.
The LA100 Equity Strategies study conducted by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) and UCLA examined such disparities across Los Angeles and provided recommendations to LADWP to ensure that communities are equitably brought along the clean energy transition. Part of this analysis sought to recognize how benefits were distributed across LADWP’s service territory. The study found that higher-income, homeowner, and White households benefitted the most. On the other hand, lower-income families, renters, and communities of color received fewer benefits while also experiencing higher energy burdens and the compounding effects of decades of underinvestment. Residents in disadvantaged communities (as defined by the California SB 535) also reported poor infrastructure maintenance, barriers to accessing programs, and a lack of useful information, contributing to lower trust in government agencies and services. The study treated these patterns as connected: who has been able to participate in decisions has shaped who ultimately benefits, which is why durable improvements in access and affordability depend as much on how LADWP engages communities as on the specific programs it offers.
Building a more affordable and accessible LADWP requires rebuilding trust by addressing one or more of these gaps. As one of Los Angeles’ major public institutions, LADWP has an important role in how Angelenos experience the clean energy and local water transition through its rates, infrastructure investments, customer programs, communications, and community partnerships. But allocating resources for the vulnerable is often perceived as a “zero-sum” game: a dollar spent in providing support for one group excludes another. This “zero-sum” framing misses the opportunity identified through OPA’s Listening Sessions and Solution Summits: many affordability strategies can support customers while also improving utility operations, reducing administrative burden, and strengthening long-term trust. These multi-benefit solutions can equitably support communities while helping the utility deliver affordable, reliable, and clean power and water over the long term (see the Eversource and Boston Medical Center case study).
Case Study: Eversource and Boston Medical Center (BMC)-Clean energy investments that benefit vulnerable households
Boston Medical Center’s (BMC) Clean Power Prescription program, developed with Eversource (an investor-owned electric utility operating in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire), offers a compelling example of a multi-benefit approach. The program allows BMC to identify patients experiencing energy insecurity and reduce their electric bills using solar credits generated by the hospital system’s rooftop solar arrays.
The Clean Power Prescription program began with a narrow but urgent need: helping 80 patients with a $50 per month utility bill credit who could not reliably afford the electricity required to stay healthy at home. For some households, electricity supports medically necessary cooling and heating during extreme weather, refrigeration for medication, and medically necessary equipment such as CPAP machines, nebulizers, hospital beds, mobility devices, and other life support equipment.
The program also created broader benefits for others involved. Boston Medical Center - a utility customer in its own right - was able to implement a more reliable and affordable energy source (a mission-critical strategy for hospitals) while also turning its clean-energy investment into direct benefits for households that are often least able to access rooftop solar or other clean-energy programs (BMC also provided an opportunity for others in the community to contribute and participate in its program). Eversource was able to continue to advance its clean energy goals while also helping: manage bills for medically vulnerable customers; lower arrears risk; and reduce the administrative burden of crisis-driven customer interactions.
The larger takeaway is that affordability tools can be more expansive than conventional rate discounts. When clean-energy investments are intentionally designed around the households most burdened by energy insecurity, they can also support decarbonization, improve trust, reduce financial stress, and produce benefits that extend well beyond the initial participants.
Source: The National Academies: Understanding & Addressing Energy Affordability in the United States Workshop: https://vimeo.com/1158558042 at 4 hours 50 minutes; https://www.bmc.org/clean-power-prescription-program)
This is especially important as the customer-utility relationship evolves from a one-way transactional relationship to one that is mutually beneficial and self-reinforcing. There is a greater need for customer participation in a variety of resources like time-of-use pricing, demand response and distributed energy programs, EV adoption, and water conservation programs that deliver value at two levels: they can potentially lower bills for the households they reach, and they reduce pressure on the overall system in ways that can translate into savings shared across all ratepayers.
But that value is only realized if these programs reach a broad range of customers. Programs that miss low-income, renter, and multilingual households leave significant benefits unrealized for those customers and for the system as a whole. Taken together, the feedback from the Listening Sessions and Solutions Summits points toward a broader idea: that not one part of the utility is responsible for equitable outcomes. Rather it is the way that the whole utility organizes to equitably support communities and to strengthen the conditions required for affordability: predictability, accessibility, trust and engagement, and clarity and control (see Long Island Power Authority & PSEG Long Island case study).
Case Study: Long Island Power Authority and PSEG Long Island-Coordinated utility functions that improve customer control while supporting operational efficiency and long-term cost management
The Long Island Power Authority and PSEG Long Island’s deployment of advanced metering infrastructure through the Utility 2.0 strategy offers a useful example of how different utility functions can contribute to affordability when their connection to the customer experience is understood and deliberately acted upon. Between 2019 and 2022, PSEG Long Island planned to deploy approximately 1.1 million smart meters and had completed 98 percent of the planned deployment by December 2022.
The infrastructure enabled customer-facing tools that made electricity use more visible and actionable. The Next Generation Insights pilot provided usage estimates by appliance category, monthly bill summaries and projections, and recommended actions to reduce electricity use. Planned budget alerts notified participating customers when they reached 75 percent and 100 percent of a self-defined billing-cycle budget. Similar functions were subsequently incorporated into PSEG Long Island’s digital channels, where customers can review near-real-time interval usage, compare patterns, download data, and receive energy-related alerts.
AMI also supported more sophisticated Time-of-Day rates. These rates give customers lower-priced off-peak periods and tools for understanding how shifting usage may affect their bills. Customers transitioning to the new rates received a one-year Bill Protection Guarantee and could compare rate options before deciding whether to remain on a Time-of-Day rate.
These capabilities show how affordability is a shared utility-wide outcome. Metering and information technology provide timely usage data; digital and customer-service teams translate that data into understandable tools and support; rate designers create options that give customers opportunities to manage costs; communications teams help customers understand and use those options; operations teams use AMI for remote service and outage management; and planners use interval data to inform demand-side resources, distributed energy integration, load forecasting, and future grid investments. No one function delivers affordability alone. Affordability is strengthened when the utility’s different responsibilities work together to give customers greater predictability, clarity, control, and confidence while also managing the long-term costs of the system.
Sources: https://www.lipower.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2018-06-29-PSEG-LI-Utility-2.0-2018-Annual-Update.pdf; https://www.lipower.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-01-PSEG-Long-Island-Utility-2.0-2021-Annual-Update.pdf; https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/; https://www.lipower.org/time-of-day