Rising energy costs are a key component of inflation and can significantly burden a household's finances, especially households on the lower income categories. More money spent on energy means less money available for other household needs such as health and nutrition. High energy costs can lead to lower income households opting for less cooling in the summer and less heating in the winter to control costs, which can have health impacts though it may also reduce carbon emissions.

On average, Extremely Low Income households in our region experience energy burden levels that are above the range of affordability. The average energy burden for these households ranges from 9.8% in Ontario and Yates counties, to 15.2% in Genesee an Orleans counties. Very Low Income households in 6 out of the 9 counties in our region (Genesee, Livingston, Orleans, Seneca, Wayne, and Wyoming) are also experiencing higher than affordable average energy burden levels. They range from 6% in Livingston and Wyoming counties to 8% in Genesee and Orlean counties. The average energy burden for Low income households across our region is within the affordability level ranging from 3.6% in Monroe County to 4.8% in Genesee and Orleans counties.

It is important to note that to comply with generally accepted descriptive statistics procedures these results do not consider "outliers" or households whose results stand out for being very different than most of the remaining results. This means that there are households in our region with even higher values for energy burden especially on the lower income levels. Uncertainty and wide variation in energy rates and billings has recently been in the news in some communities, such as in and around the City of Rochester.

1) Household level data sample sourced from the 2017-2021 ACS PUMS 5YR - Weighted - Does not include households with zero or negative income.
2) Each household is classified based on its annual income as Extremely Low-Income (0-30% AMI) | Very Low-Income (31-50% AMI) | Low-Income (51-80% AMI) | Moderate-Income (81-120% AMI) | Middle-Income (121-165% AMI) | High-Income (166%-Inf AMI) based on the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) Income Band table. https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/area-median-income.page
2.a) The County's Median Annual Household Income (CMAHI) is used as the AMI and it's sourced from the 2017-2021 ACS PUMS 5YR Data Profile table variable DP03_0062.
3) Average Energy Burden is calculated by completing a weighted average of the households in the sample by County and Income Level.
4) Outliers are detected by County and Income Level using a single iteration of the boxplot methodology (Tukey, J. - "Exploratory Data Analysis" - 1977).
4.a) We define outliers as "data points that stand out because they are very different from other data points in a ranked series of numbers" (US Census Bureau - Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data What Journalists Need to Know - 2020).