With roughly 1 in 6 U.S. households now behind on their energy bills (NEADA, 2026), U.S. utilities leave a measured $1.1 to $3.7 billion on the table every year by not acting on customer affordability. That dollar figure comes from BlastPoint, the customer intelligence company, which recently released the Customer Affordability Playbook, a free web tool built with utility program design firm Tierra that ranks major U.S. utilities on affordability pressure and gives each one a personalized plan to recover the money.
The number is the measured floor across the 546 utilities where public federal data supports the calculation, grounded in EIA Form 861 for electric and Form 176 for gas (EIA, 2024). The real figure is higher. BlastPoint is publishing the floor because the floor is what holds up in a rate case.
Utility executives get a one page assessment: where their customers rank against peers on affordability stress, the numbers behind that rank, an annual dollar range for what the problem is costing them, and a four-part plan to act on it. Every utility gets its own shareable link.
Affordability is moving from a social line item to a financial one
Utilities have long treated affordability as a customer-service and goodwill question. The economics say otherwise. Every household that falls behind shows up somewhere measurable - in call-center volume, in write-offs, in campaigns that miss the customers who need help most. Those costs are not new. What is new is that they can be counted, utility by utility, ahead of a rate case instead of after one.
Regulators are increasingly asking utilities to show real outcomes, not present intentions. A stated commitment to affordability is easy to make and hard to defend; a measured dollar figure, benchmarked against peers, is the kind of evidence that moves a proceeding. Utilities that quantify their exposure first will set the terms of the conversation. The ones that wait will answer to a number someone else produced.
Where the leakage concentrates
Two findings in BlastPoint's data paint a clear picture:
The first is that 54 large investor-owned utilities account for $509 million to $1.8 billion of the annual leakage, roughly half of the measured total. This means the affordability problem is concentrated in a small number of very large systems.
The second is less intuitive. The utilities the model rates as handling affordability best relative to their peers, the "Defensible" tier, collectively leak $372 million to $1.2 billion a year, more than the "Most Exposed" tier's $335 million to $1.1 billion. That is because there are simply more of them. Sitting at the top of a cohort does not mean the money stops leaking. Rather, it means it leaks quietly - and draws less regulatory attention while it does.
The three calculations behind the numbers
The Playbook sits on PressurePoint, BlastPoint's affordability-ranking engine, which scores 1,385 utilities and ranks each one only against its own peer cohort - large investor-owned utilities against their peers, small municipals against theirs, and so on across ten groupings.
The dollar figure runs on three levers with one formula for each. Reduced call volume: proactive assistance-program outreach cuts inbound calls from LIHEAP-eligible customers, priced at $11 per call (BlastPoint, 2024). Recovered bad debt: utilities carry a 2% to 3% write-off baseline (DEFG, 2021), and better collections recover 10% to 25% of it (CDFI field data, 2021). More efficient outreach: behavioral targeting saves an estimated $175,000 per campaign across the two to four campaigns a year utilities run on this problem.
Summed per utility and rolled up, that produces the $1.1 billion to $3.7 billion annual floor. Electric utilities account for roughly $880 million to $3.0 billion of that yearly total; gas accounts for the remaining $218 million to $677 million (BlastPoint analysis of EIA data, 2024).
A partnership between data and program design
The Playbook pairs two halves of one problem. BlastPoint supplies the customer intelligence: the segmentation, the affordability modeling, and the ranking engine. Tierra supplies the program design: the weatherization economics, the tariff structures, and the enrollment mechanics that turn a diagnosis into a fundable program. On the funding lever, that includes Inclusive Utility Investment tariffs, an on-bill financing model Tierra has helped deploy that is now approved in 13 states.
“The people who defend affordability spending in a rate case were walking in without a number. We built this so a CFO or a regulatory VP can pull up a measured dollar figure before the meeting, not months after it,” said Tomer Borenstein, CTO and Co-Founder of BlastPoint. “The goal was to move the conversation from ‘affordability matters’ to ‘here's what it's worth.’”
Where to find the Playbook
The Affordability Playbook is free and available now at: https://pressurepoint.blastpoint.com/playbook.
Look up any utility, and the tool pulls up its affordability tier, cohort rank, and dollar-impact range across all three levers.
Utilities not yet covered, including smaller cooperatives and water systems, can request to be added from the tool.
BlastPoint is a B2B provider of AI-powered customer intelligence software that companies across sectors rely on to target the right customers, at the right time, in the right way, with the right message. BlastPoint helps companies operationalize customer data, meet customer experience goals, and become customer-focused organizations.
BlastPoint partnered with Tierra Research Consultants - a utility program-design firm specializing in customer-assistance program strategy - to deploy the Customer Affordability Playbook.
