Measuring Electricity Affordability: A Data-Driven Approach to Household Energy Burden
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What does it really mean for electricity to be affordable? Is it the total cost of a bill, the rate at which electricity prices increase, or the share of household income needed to cover essential expenses?
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are developing a more granular, data-driven approach to measuring affordability across the United States. Through the Decision Support for Large Loads (DSLL) project, the team has developed a spatial and temporal modeling tool that examines 15 years of affordability data across all 50 states, 3,144 counties and approximately 242,000 census block groups.
The analysis evaluates household costs across seven categories: electricity, natural gas, water, rent, internet, gasoline and combined household expenses. By examining how these costs affect households across different income levels, the tool provides a more detailed picture of affordability pressures and how they vary geographically over time.
Join researchers from ORNL to explore how this approach can help state energy offices, government agencies and economic development organizations better understand household affordability, assess the effects of rising costs and inform data-driven decisions. The discussion will also consider opportunities to expand the analysis to additional household expenses, including groceries, taxes and debt.
Speakers
Giri Iyer
Senior Program Manager, Critical Infrastructure Resilience Group
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Giri Iyer is a 30 year industry veteran having worked with GE Healthcare, GE Energy, Compaq(HP Enterprise), Sentient Energy (Koch Industries), Siemens and Philips. His experience includes product management, commercial marketing, go-to-market operations, mergers and acquisitions and strategic alliances in medical imaging and informatics, Information technology hardware and software/analytic platforms as well as the Smart Grid/Energy business globally. He has lead large investment projects including the investment of $65M among the top ten companies selected from 4000+ companies as part of GE Ecomagination Breakthrough program. His have delivered over $2B of economic value for GE Healthcare, GE Energy and Koch Industries.He is a GE Six Sigma Green Belt and has taken other leadership courses from GE Crotonville including Leadership in Growth.
Supriya Chinthavali
Group Leader, Critical Infrastructure Resilience Group
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
With over 17 years of experience in data analytics and visualization, her work focuses on understanding and protecting critical energy systems. She currently leads multiple Department of Energy initiatives related to grid situational awareness, policy analysis, and technical assistance for states and utilities. Her project portfolio includes serving as a principal investigator and co-lead for prominent grid resilience tools, including EDGAR, TASTI-GRID, Energy sector Data Strategy and the Outage Data Initiative nationwide (ODIN) helping utilities build more resilient infrastructures.
Annetta Burger
R&D Scientist, Locational Intelligence Group, Geospatial Science and Human Security Division
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Annetta Burger is an R&D Scientist in the Locational Intelligence Group of the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in foreign affairs and completed her doctorate in Computational Social Science at George Mason University in 2020. As a computational anthropologist she conducts research on culture and human behavior in complex social systems with a focus on human mobility, migration patterns, community resilience, and human behavior in crisis and disasters. She uses a diverse set of scientific methods that includes generative AI, agent-based modeling, social network analysis, text mining, geospatial data as well as traditional cultural anthropology data from surveys and ethnographies. Currently, her work is focused on the question of where and why people.