As energy costs have risen, so too has the demand for energy assistance through programs like Operation Fuel.
“There’s not enough money there, point blank, to actually cover the amount of need that’s out there,” Hartford’s Russell Williams said.
This month, Operation Fuel, which provided over $6.5 million in energy assistance last year, announced it would no longer accept new applications for their summer/fall period.
‘The federal funding that was associated with the pandemic relief has dried up, and so those levels were bigger than they usually are in the past couple of years and they’ve come back down to earth. We’ve also seen rising energy costs, the war in Ukraine as well as other global events,” said Gannon Long of Operation Fuel.
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Long called it a perfect storm of rising demand, rising costs and a relatively fixed amount of funding.
“Not increasing funding every year as the demand increases is going to mean that people have less and less,” Long said.
In 2022, she said the program served roughly 4,000 individuals from July to October. This summer/fall period, Long said they’ve received about the same number of applications in half the time.
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“We’re seeing that increase where it’s a similar number to the total people served because our resources are fairly flat, they change a little bit but they’re mostly flat, but the time that it took us to spend that money was much less this year,” Long said.
This past spring, the program also had to freeze applications for its winter/spring period.
“We ended up serving more people in a five-month period than we had the entire previous year,” Long said.
That trend raises concerns over their current system.
“The era of the four and five-month program season for Operation Fuel, at least right now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to be able to continue,” she said.
According to Operation Fuel, there are over 400,000 people in Connecticut who cannot afford to pay their energy bills.
The program announced it would begin accepting applications for the winter/spring season on Jan. 2.
