The Energy Poverty Policy Simulator (EPPS)
EPPS is a tool designed to estimate the costs and bill impacts of a suite of energy poverty policies that states can leverage to tackle the most critical harms of the affordability crisis.
The Energy Poverty Policy Simulator (EPPS) is a state-specific tool built to support policymakers, regulatory staff, consumer advocates, and researchers to better understand the costs and impacts attributable to policies designed to limit energy poverty and reduce energy system costs. Low-income customers in the United States spend nearly a fifth of their income on energy alone and one in three households nationwide struggle to pay their energy bills. This tool can support state regulators in enacting energy poverty and cost control policies that reduce their customer’s energy bills and ease their energy burden (the percentage of a customer’s income that is used to pay their energy bill). With the EPPS, state-level decision makers, advocates, and researchers alike can estimate the energy cost and energy burden impact of enacting a set of policies to households within any given state.
EPPS allows users to set specific policy parameters for five energy poverty policies: Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, Flat Discount Rate, Tiered Discount Rate, Low-Income Energy Efficiency, and Percentage of Income Payment Plans to simulate how those policies lead to income-group specific electricity bill and burden reductions. The tool then calculates the cost to enact the portfolio of programs and allows the user to see how costs can be recovered under a variety of funding models. Currently, EPPS only accounts for electricity expenditures. The methodology and user guide available on the EPPS landing page contain more detailed information on the tool’s methodology and functionality.
The EPPS team plans to periodically update this tool to expand and refresh the collection of included policies, available policy parameters, funding models, and historical baseline values.
Key Authors: Maria Castillo, David Valdes, Carina Rosenbach, and Joe Daniel
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