A neighbour of mine sold up and moved to the Gulf Coast a few years back. He talked about the taxes and the winters, and he was right about both.
He mentioned the electricity for the first time in July.
Run the arithmetic on a single unit. Three tons, eight hours a day, four months a year, which is roughly 2,880 kilowatt hours. At the national average price this March it comes to about $535 a season.
$535, for one appliance. Hold that one.
Nearly nine in ten American households cool with air conditioning. Heating and cooling together take 42 to 52 percent of all the electricity a home uses. In the South, cooling alone runs 30 to 40 percent of the summer bill.
The tax comparisons leave out one thing. On Monday I wrote about the card the fuel company puts in your door each September, offering to lock your winter price.
The Gulf Coast has no such card. Nobody sells you next August at today’s price.
The bill with a September window
Delivered fuel. Oil, propane, a tank in the yard. A truck brings it, so somebody quotes a price in advance, and that quote is negotiable.
The bill with no window at all
Electricity. It arrives on a wire, priced by a regulated utility on a meter you cannot pre-fill. The only lever left is using less, and in August that hurts.
And the number of households making that swap is set the way everything in this letter is set. Two point one million Americans over sixty-five moved house last year. Nearly one in five crossed a state line.
The heat needs no advertising. The customer list grows by birthday.
My neighbour ran that on the taxes and the winters. He never ran it on the meter.
The strain shows in the arrears data. Household energy debt is on track for about $23 billion by year end, the highest since 2021. The biggest increases are expected in the states this cohort keeps moving to.
A five-month season, read down the list.
The utility gets the bill. Somebody smaller gets the part that goes unwatched.
The catch turns up in every need-based service in this letter. A plan like that is labour, and labour cannot be shipped. And $23 billion of arrears is the honest ceiling on all of it. A household that switches the unit off at four has nothing left to give.
The arithmetic
The $535 is a worked example, not a survey result. A three-ton, 14-SEER central unit running eight hours a day across four months uses roughly 2,880 kilowatt hours, at the Energy Information Administration’s March 2026 national average rate of $0.1856 per kilowatt hour. Your own unit and rate will differ. Nearly 90% of US households cool with air conditioning, per EIA. The 42 to 52 percent share is from the EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey, and the 30 to 40 percent summer-bill share in the South from analysis of the same data. Arrears of about $23 billion by the end of 2026, the highest since 2021, and the largest expected cooling-cost increases landing in southern states, come from the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. The 17.5 million households reporting an unhealthy indoor temperature in 2024 is an EIA figure. The 2.1 million Americans over sixty-five who moved last year, and the share crossing state lines, are from the HireAHelper New Retirement Map, 2026. The read on who profits is Boomers Trade’s own.
Watch the arrears number rather than the rate. Rates get argued in front of a commission and move slowly, while arrears show what households actually did. In 2024, 17.5 million reported sitting in a house at an unhealthy temperature. My neighbour has a maintenance plan now. He signed it in April and never shopped it.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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