US federal resource allocations are inconsistent with concentrations of energy poverty
Name
sciadv.adp8183.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.22 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
32a45b1080b94ca56ce5fdf900d6afa4
Author(s)
Batlle, Carlos
Heller, Peter
Knittel, Christopher
Schittekatte, Tim
Date Issued
October 11, 2024
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Citation
Carlos Batlle et al. ,US federal resource allocations are inconsistent with concentrations of energy poverty. Sci. Adv.10, eadp8183 (2024)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Recent data from the US Energy Information Administration reveals that nearly one in three households in the United States report experiencing energy poverty, and this number is only expected to rise. Federal assistance programs exist, but allocations across states have been nearly static since 1984, while the distribution of energy poverty is dynamic in location and time. We implement a LASSO-based machine learning approach using sociodemographic and geographical information to estimate energy burden in each US census tract for 2015 and 2020. We then compare the allocation to states from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to an optimized allocation. We allocate funds to the most burdened households, providing them with enough assistance to reduce their energy expenditures so that their household energy burden is equal to a new maximum allowable energy burden. This markedly shifts funds from the northern cold-weather states to the southern warm-weather states.
MIT Department
MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research
MIT Energy Initiative
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adp8183
