Extreme heat is turning electricity cutoffs into new political battle for power companies
A window air conditioner unit is seen on the side of an apartment building in Arlington, Virginia, July 10, 2023.
Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images
If you are in Virginia sweltering and falling behind on your utility bill, you will have additional options to keep the air conditioner humming, but not until July 1. That’s when Virginia joins the small but growing ranks of states protecting disconnects during extreme heat. Such protections have been around for cold weather for decades, but as the global rise in temperatures hits records, advocates say more must be done to shield customers from having utilities cut; often, existing legislation isn’t enough.
Virginia State Senator Lashrecse Aird, (D-Petersburg), a legislative sponsor of the state’s new utility bills law, said her support for the legislation was rooted in her own experience of having utilities disconnected when she was younger. “It was not a pleasant experience,” Aird said. “And I carry that with me.”
Now, she says, the stakes are higher.
“We have to account for extreme heat outside the normal months of the year that are increasingly hotter now,” Aird said. “As long as we continue to fail to address climate change and increased temperatures, we have to be deliberate and intentional,” she said, and she added that implies the need for protective laws. “Our country is on fire; the world is on fire. I predict we will see more places experiencing heat crises and heat emergencies. We need to have these policies in place; that is where we are heading from a pure weather standpoint.”
The Virginia law, which Aird said the utilities “fought tooth and nail,” forbids disconnections when the temperature exceeds 92 degrees. Regardless of temperature, the bill also prohibits power companies from performing utility shutoffs on Fridays, holidays, state holidays, or days immediately preceding a state holiday. Such shutoffs could leave someone without power for a prolonged period while the utility’s customer service office is closed.
“We had to write those in because we found that is what was happening,” Aird said. “They did not want to have the state spell out their process for reconnection. Everyone has a different administrative structure.”
A grim national outlook for power protections
Too many states have no protections from utility company disconnects for consumers, according to David Konisky, a professor in the environmental studies department at Indiana University and director of the Energy Justice Lab, and he says climate change is forcing a new conversation about the issue.
The Energy Justice Lab created a “Disconnect Dashboard” showing utility disconnect data in each state (not every state reports data) and existing shutoff-shielding legislation, if any, in place. Part of making the dashboard was overlaying forecast excessive heat days along with protections that exist or don’t exist and factoring in climate change. The outlook is grim, Konisky says. Nearly three million people have their electricity shut off annually because they cannot afford to pay monthly bills, according to the Energy Justice Lab.
“There are two ways to think about it: how hot is it going to get today, yes, but what is really dangerous is when it does not cool off at night, when you have a persistent period of warm nights, when people are unable to cool their bodies, that is when you have high incidents of heat exhaustion,” Konisky said, adding that lack of cooling like air conditioning exacerbates it.
Legislation like Virginia’s is welcome, but often, the laws don’t go far enough, according to Konisky. They are typically limited to state-regulated power companies (Virginia’s is more expansive than other states’) or have subjective or ambiguous disconnection criteria. Konisky says utility customers must work with them instead of being cut off.
Covid-19 led many states to issue temporary orders during stay-at-home mandates to require power to remain on, but most of these orders have been gradually eliminated. A majority of states (40) have statutory-based utility disconnection protections that cover specific times of year and vulnerable populations, according to the Energy Justice Lab.
As of 2021, 29 states had seasonal protections and 23 had temperature-based disconnection protections, but Konisky’s research shows that these do not fully prohibit disconnections, often putting the onus on customers to demonstrate eligibility for an exemption, such as medical need. Most states (46), plus Washington D.C., give customers the option to set up a payment plan as an alternative to disconnection, though interest may be steep and income-based repayment is not often an option.
Power transmission lines in Hyattsville, Maryland, US, on Monday, June 17, 2024. While summer doesn’t officially start until Thursday, across the US more than 120 daily high temperature records may be broken or tied, with the majority of them in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and New England, the US Weather Prediction Center said.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
“A lot could be done to make energy more affordable where a shut off is necessary,” Konisky said. “There is creative rate making, payment structures. They need to be more aggressive in offering payment plans, as opposed to shutting off, help customers access energy assistance. There are a lot of activities that would be advisable and preferable before we engage in the practice of shutoffs which can have terrible consequences for people.”
His research shows that power companies disconnect plenty during warm weather. Using publicly available data, he found that Indiana customers, for instance, experienced 50,000 disconnects between June and August 2023. “So they are happening during the very warm months,” Konisky said. “This situation is likely to get worse, particularly in states where we would not have historically worried about it during the summer.”
Heat dome conditions hit more states
One of the states where, historically, one would have not had to worry as much about heat is Oregon. But don’t tell that to residents bracing for 90-degree days this week. When Brandi Tuck, executive director of Portland-based social services organization Path Home, moved to Oregon 20 years ago, the state was known for its temperate climate of mild winters and cool summers. Not anymore.
“We never heard the term ‘heat dome,’” Tuck said, referring to a once-obscure meteorological term that has morphed into a new term for a heat wave.
“As climate change occurs, we are getting hotter and hotter summers, and we get heat domes here. We had one last summer that resulted in deaths; it gets intense,” Tuck said. In 2021, Portland reached a searing 117 degrees during a fierce heatwave. On the other end of the spectrum, Tuck said Oregon is experiencing longer, colder winters. Oregon does have laws in place to protect utility customers during cold snaps, but not during heat waves. “The challenge is we have commodified life-sustaining requirements. We are a first-world development country, but we have commodified things like power, air-conditioning, and lighting,” Tuck said.
Path Home often helps those facing imminent power disconnects. Power cuts in rental properties, Tuck says, are often followed by evictions, and helping with utilities is one of the most cost-effective ways to prevent homelessness. As Oregon’s weather swings, Tuck says the power companies cannot be depended on to police themselves.
“We need legislation,” Tuck said.
Disconnects hit the lowest-income people disproportionately hard, and people already struggling to pay their utility bills are often charged a “reconnect fee,” or a deposit after a cutoff. In Ohio, for instance, the utility may require you to pay a deposit of up to one month’s estimated charges plus 30%.
These costs can be a problem for those who get disconnected. Felix Russo, pastor of the New Life Mission in Hamilton, Ohio, says that by the time needy people come to him to help with their utilities, they are usually days away from having their power disconnected. Russo then calls the power companies and tries to negotiate on behalf of the person or tries to match them with a social service agency that can provide funds. But it’s an uphill battle. “All of our systems are strained,” Russo said.
Utilities say electricity cutoffs ‘a last resort’
Power companies insist that disconnections are a last resort and that additional legislation and regulation aren’t needed.
“We understand our customers may face financial hardships throughout the year, so I want to be clear that disconnecting customers for non-payment is an absolute last resort,” said Aaron Ruby, manager of media relations for Dominion Energy, the main power supplier in Virginia. He said that Dominion has numerous bill payment assistance options to help customers avoid disconnections, including budget billing, extended payment plans, EnergyShare bill payment assistance, and home weatherization programs. The EnergyShare program, for example, Ruby said, offers up to $600 a year in heating assistance and $300 a year in cooling assistance for eligible customers.
Ruby said that Dominion Energy has already started complying with the new law, dispelling fears that they would initiate a rash of disconnections before July 1.
“Disconnects for nonpayment were suspended Tuesday and Wednesday in observation of Juneteenth, and we will continue monitoring the forecast for the upcoming heat wave,” Ruby said, adding that they will comply with the new law. “We will comply with the law and suspend nonpayment-related disconnects in parts of our service area where forecasted temperatures reach 92 degrees or higher.”
A spokesperson for Charlotte-based Duke Energy, the nation’s second-largest utility company, said it has “long-standing policies to temporarily suspend disconnecting a customer’s service for nonpayment to help protect our customers,” on days when the weather is expected to be extremely hot or extremely cold. Duke monitors extreme weather events such as hurricanes or winter storms, evaluates them case-by-case, and temporarily suspends disconnection for nonpayment.
From Virginia legislator Aird’s perspective, legislation is needed not just for the customer but also to protect the power companies from themselves, a point she made in the starkest terms. “Your goal at the end of the day is to have a customer and give someone the ability to pay; if they are dead, then the power company doesn’t have a customer.”
The new legislation doesn’t go far enough to ensure people’s safety in extreme weather, according to Aird, but it was a good first step. “We erred on the side of something is better than nothing,” Aird said.
Kempower just cut the ribbon on downtown Durham, North Carolina’s first public DC fast-charging station. The new charger is operated in partnership with National Car Charging.
The new station at 111 W. Chapel Hill Street has two plugs (CCS1 and CHAdeMO) and is near restaurants and shops. The Durham area has plenty of Level 2 chargers, but this is its first DC fast charger downtown. Until now, the closest fast charger was three miles away from downtown.
Kempower, a Finnish company with its US office and factory in Durham, doesn’t mention the number of kilowatts its DC fast charger can deliver. However, PlugShare reports that a Ford F-150 Lightning managed 171 kW yesterday.
I asked the City of Durham’s spokesperson why it’s taken this long to install a DC fast charger downtown, and they replied that the “downtown core in Durham is densely developed and there are not many locations for chargers that have the right conditions and available power infrastructure for commercially viable fast chargers.”
Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams said the charger represents another step forward for the city’s clean energy goals: “With this locally built EV fast charger in the heart of downtown, we’re not only reducing our community’s carbon footprint – we’re supporting local jobs, clean energy, and a more connected future for everyone who calls Durham home.”
As of 2025, North Carolina had more than 306 DC fast-charging stations and 1,385 ports.
Electrek’s Take
The City of Durham’s explanation of why it’s taken this long to get a fast charger downtown is a bit of a head-scratcher for me. It must be more of an infrastructure issue, or perhaps a matter of politics or funding, because density hasn’t stopped other cities from installing fast chargers in urban areas. Kempower provided 10 fast chargers at Pier 36 in Lower Manhattan, in collaboration with Revel, in September 2024. At any rate, it’s progress for Durham worth celebrating.
Read more: PowerUp America is adding 100 new fast chargers in the Southeast
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Porsche unveiled its new Cayenne EV today, and it comes with an option for something we haven’t seen out of a factory-equipped car before: inductive charging.
Over the years, we’ve heard plenty of attempts by companies to trick consumers into thinking that it’s possible to make an electric car that doesn’t need to charge.
From Toyota’s dumb “self-charging hybrid” claim, to the new fad of “range extenders”/EREVs (aka plug-in hybrids with a bigger battery), to all manner of solar vehicles, people seem to think that convincing customers that they don’t need to plug in will get them to buy an EV (or, will help them greenwash their gas-guzzling hybrids).
And now the next entry into that group has arrived: the Porsche Cayenne electric, which can indeed be driven without ever plugging in, or gassing up, or even parking in the sun.
It does have to be parked somewhere specific though: over a pad in your garage. Because this car can be equipped to use inductive charging, right out of the factory.
Inductive charging uses magnetic fields to transfer electrical power, as opposed to conductive charging, which uses a plug. Inductive charging is how phone charging mats work, but in this case, it’s scaled up significantly in size and power.
We’ve seen a few inductive charging projects before, but they’ve always been aftermarket or experimental so far. Or, they’ve been targeted more at commercial or fleet buyers (buses, for example).
There is one mass-produced EV which is rumored to have inductive charging capability, the Tesla Cybertruck, and we know that Tesla is working on a charging pad, which will be helpful if autonomous vehicles ever roll out properly. But nothing has been announced as available yet.
Porsche, however, is ready to announce that the capability is coming to its upcoming Cayenne EV. Porsche has shown off its inductive tech before, but now we got to see it ourselves when we checked out the Cayenne in a studio preview.
Porsche says that its inductive charging system can push 11kW of power, which is plenty for overnight home charging (on the car’s 113kWh battery). It does this at 90% efficiency – not as much as the ~95% of conductive charging, but still quite good. It also requires an extra ~33lbs of coils and wiring onboard the car, which is a significant if not massive weight gain.
To activate the system, the charging pad makes contact with the car via wide-band wireless communication to determine location, then activates when you park in just the perfect spot. The car’s screen shows guide lines to help you find the way to where you need to be – or there’s always the tennis-ball-on-a-string trick if you want to go low tech.
When we tried it out in LA, once we got the system up and running (hot tip: don’t daisy chain two extension cords if you want your inductive charging pad to work), it quickly charged at 11kW, at least according to the in-car system.
The inductive charger includes a lot of safety features to ensure nothing weird happens. Even though it only uses magnetic fields, the mat includes sensors to detect any living or metal objects nearby, it will stop (yes, this includes your cat that likes to sleep under the car, and yes, Porsche gets asked this question often). We saw this happen once in the studio demo, but it quickly turned back on after deciding everything was okay.
The Cayenne will still have its regular conductive charging ports, capable of 11kW AC or 400kW DC charge. But for those who want to forgo the plug, at least at home, the mat is an available option.
That said – pricing and availability are still TBD. The system costs €7k in Europe, plus an electrician, but we don’t know what it will cost in the US yet.
So, there’s still a chance that someone else beats Porsche to the “first” moniker – possibly Tesla, given that it seems to be close to offering an inductive charging system. But there are a lot of hurdles to ensure that the system is reliable in every type of weather and real world situation, and lots of electrical codes to follow. So, it looks like the race is on.
Electrek’s Take
I was quite interested in talking to the engineers about this system, because I hadn’t actually experienced inductive charging in an EV before.
People have been talking about this for a long time, and I used to be excited about the concept of electrified roads where cars could just drive on them and get a charge and never have to plug in.
However, after conversations over the years and experience with how easy driving and charging an EV is, I came to think that inductive charging is mostly a gimmick, and that we will likely rely on conductive charging in the long term (and especially that in-highway charging is a boondoggle that’s never going to be a good option, especially when catenary/pantograph systems exist).
That said, there are still niches and benefits to be had. In a potential fully autonomous future, we’ll need to figure out autonomous charging, and inductive charging could be a good answer for that.
In addition, some drivers do have difficulty with cables. While the NACS cable is much easier to handle than the old CCS cable, an older driver or one with mobility issues might have a hard time plugging in a car. Inductive charging could be good for them.
Or, heck, maybe someone is just lazy. Or doesn’t like cords. And doesn’t mind spending money for these marginal improvements. We can imagine there are Porsche buyers who could fit that description.
I still think the take rate will be relatively low, but it will be interesting to see real world tests of this, how buyers get along with it, and what sort of problems they manage to solve. As much as I’m a skeptic of inductive charging’s usefulness and acknowledger of its limitations, it’s nice to see new things get tried sometimes.
What do you think about Porsche’s inductive charging system? Would you prefer it to conductive charging? How much would you pay to add this option to your EV? Let us know in the comments.
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The Inster, Hyundai’s most affordable EV, is Germany’s best-selling small electric car and top overall vehicle priced under €25,000.
The Hyundai Inster is Germany’s best-selling small EV
After launching the Inster in Europe in late 2024, Hyundai’s smallest and most affordable EV quickly became one of the most popular electric cars in the region.
According to JATO Dynamics, the Hyundai Inster was the 19th most popular EV across Europe in June, outselling the Dacia Spring, Hyundai Kona, and Toyota bZ4X.
In Germany, the heart of Europe, Hyundai’s most affordable EV is making an even bigger impression. Since this summer, the Hyundai Inster is Germany’s best-selling small EV so far in 2025 and just won the Golden Steering Wheel award for best car under €25,000 ($28,900) by AUTO BILD & BILD am SONNTAG.
Hyundai said the recognition is proof that its vehicles are resonating with buyers across Europe. The Korean automaker will continue expanding its EV lineup, from the small Inster to the three-row IONIQ 9.
The award comes after the Inster was crowned the 2025 World Electric Vehicle at the World Car Awards ceremony in the spring, held during the New York International Auto Show.
Hyundai’s electric city car starts at just €25,000 ($28,900) in Germany. Despite its small size, the Inster delivers up to 370 km (230 miles) WLTP driving range, fast charging (10% to 80%) in 30 minutes, and a surprisingly spacious and feature-rich interior.
The Inster features dual 10.3″ driver display and infotainment screens with wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay as part of Hyundai’s digital cockpit.
By 2027, Hyundai plans to electrify all vehicles sold in Europe. The Inster and IONIQ 9 are now rolling out across the region, and Hyundai plans to build momentum with new EVs, including the IONIQ 3, which will go into production in Hungary in the first half of 2026.
In South Korea, Hyundai’s home market, the Inster is sold as the Casper Electric. The compact EV is sold in Japan, Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia.
Although those in the US won’t get to see the Inster or IONIQ 3, Hyundai still has one of the most affordable EVs you can get your hands on. With leases starting at just $189 per month, the Hyundai IONIQ 5 is still America’s best deal for an electric vehicle.
Interested in a test drive? We can help you get started. You can use our link to find available Hyundai IONIQ 5 models near you.
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