Low-income St. Louis residents pay more for electricity and gas than higher-income residents, according to a new report released Thursday.
The report examines the disparate ways people across Missouri experience energy costs and found inequities in what the authors call the energy burden, or the percentage of a household’s income spent on gas and electric utilities.
“Our most vulnerable populations are suffering from disproportionately high energy costs compared to luckier populations in the greater St. Louis region,” said Jenn DeRose, senior organizer for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign in Missouri.
The “St. Louis Energy Burden Report” was authored by local organizers with the Sierra Club and Renew Missouri, with review from utility affordability advocacy organizations such as the Consumers Council of Missouri.
The report is being released as Ameren Missouri is asking state regulators to approve a 15% increase in utility rates.
”The findings of this report clearly show that many are struggling to pay their utility bills at a time when area utilities are asking for additional rate increases,” said Sandra Padgett, executive director of the Consumers Council of Missouri.
It dives into census tracts across the state, using real data from Missouri utility bills to understand how costs overlap with factors like race, income and even rates of childhood asthma.
The report found residents of census tracts with high Black populations paid a high amount of their income on energy, while residents of census tracts with high concentrations of white residents experienced a low energy burden.
In the city, residents with an average income of about $35,000 pay $2,408 a year for utilities, while residents with an average income of about $85,000 pay $2,082 a year, according to the report.
“Having a high energy burden can have catastrophic, cascading impacts on residents,” DeRose said. “In 2024, over 90,000 households were disconnected by Ameren Missouri. Disconnections are highly disruptive at minimum and can lead to serious consequences, including evictions.”
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One reason for the higher costs for lower-income city residents is likely the aging housing stock, according to the report’s authors. Old homes are harder to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and there are more of them in historically red-lined neighborhoods.
“People who are lower-income live in poor housing stock, which means that their homes are less efficient, so that efficiency is very important when it comes to utility bills,” said report co-author Tori Cheatham, Renew Missouri’s St. Louis regional director. “And also lower-income people are more likely to be renters, so they have less autonomy when making those decisions about energy efficiency.”
Along with the report, the organizations are releasing a tool so people can explore the data and understand the issue at a more granular level.
In some city census tracts, you can actually see the ways residents ration power during the summer to try to keep costs down, said Ethan Goldman, who helped prepare the data and works with Power-D.City, a climate-focused data and software company.
“In some low-income areas, the energy use is actually lower than you might expect in the summertime,” Goldman said. “Because other research has shown us that when people have trouble with their energy bills, they forego the level of cooling that most of us are able to afford in the summertime.”
There is also a city-county divide in St. Louis’ data, said Cheatham. In St. Louis County and St. Louis, about 31,800 households experience a high energy burden, but nearly two-thirds of those households are in the city.
“Just the sheer number of households that are experiencing energy burden is so much higher in the city,” Cheatham said.
The report’s authors recommend multiple policy changes to address the disparities in energy burden in the St. Louis region. Those include more outreach about utility assistance that targets ZIP codes based on data, increased funding for that assistance and solar projects for communities with more renters and low-income households.
“This energy tool will help us identify the areas that we need to concentrate on,” said Jacqueline Hutchinson, director of advocacy at the Consumers Council of Missouri.
That work will be even more important as climate change leads to more extreme and more costly weather in the St. Louis region, DeRose said.
