Pittsburgh, PA — April 8, 2026 — BlastPoint, a data analytics company that helps utilities predict customer behavior and identify financially vulnerable households, today launched PressurePoint — a free, interactive tool that ranks 600+ U.S. investor-owned and municipal utilities by the affordability pressure their residential customers face.

Available at pressurepoint.blastpoint.com, PressurePoint scores each utility by combining its residential electricity rate with the poverty rate in its service territory.

The result is a single number that quantifies how hard customers are being squeezed between rising energy costs and limited ability to pay.

WHY IT MATTERS

Utilities across the country are navigating a collision of forces: rate increases driven by grid modernization, clean energy mandates, and infrastructure costs — all landing on customers who are already financially stretched. Yet until now, there has been no standardized, public way to compare affordability pressure across utilities.

“Utilities know their rates. Regulators know poverty statistics. But nobody was putting them together in one place,” said Tomer Borenstein, CTO & Co-Founder of BlastPoint. “PressurePoint makes that math visible — so utilities, regulators, and advocates can have an honest conversation about where the pressure is highest and where intervention matters most.”

KEY FINDINGS

Analysis of the 600+ utilities in the PressurePoint index reveals:

• More than 25 million U.S. residential electricity customers — nearly one in four IOU and municipal customers in the dataset — are served by utilities flagged Most Exposed for affordability pressure within their peer group.
• 62% of Most Exposed utilities charge residential rates at or below the U.S average. Utilities like Fulton Electric System in Kentucky (rate 13.6¢/kWh, 32% poverty) and Albany Utility Board in Georgia (rate 12.9¢/kWh, 30% poverty) score in the Most Exposed tier despite below-average rates.
• Investor-owned utilities carry 18% higher affordability pressure on average than municipalities (PressurePoint score of 2.06 vs. 1.75), reflecting their meaningfully higher effective rate structures.
• 80+ utilities have seen rate increases exceeding 30% over the past five years, collectively serving more than 43 million customers. The steepest five-year increases are all in California: Liberty Utilities California (+93%), Moreno Valley Electric Utility (+88%), and Southern California Edison (+86%).
• Affordability pressure is not just a large-utility problem. Small municipal providers like City of Lumberton, NC and City of Hickman, KY score Critical (4.0), proving the squeeze hits communities of every size.

HOW PRESSUREPOINT WORKS

Each utility receives a PressurePoint score calculated as:

PressurePoint Score = Electricity Rate (¢/kWh) × Poverty Rate (%)

The tool draws on public data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). A full methodology is available at pressurepoint.blastpoint.com/methodology.html.

WHAT USERS CAN DO

Utility professionals, regulators, advocates, and journalists can visit PressurePoint to: 

• Search for any utility and see its affordability scorecard — including monthly bills, poverty rate, 5-year rate trajectory, and peer comparison. 
• Compare utilities within cohorts ranked by pressure.
• Share a direct link to any utility’s scorecard for internal review or public discussion.