PITTSBURGH — When Destenie Nock was in graduate school, earning her doctorate in industrial engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, her electricity was shut off for nonpayment.

She and her roommates prioritized paying for fuel deliveries to their oil-heated home and had trouble catching up on other utility bills.

It wasn't because she was helpless or destitute. And, like many utility customers that she tries to help through her social justice startup Peoples Energy Analytics, Nock may have been reluctant to seek out assistance, even though the house she lived in was so cold she could see her breath.

Now, Nock calls this her "immersion research."

In the past six years, as assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, she's become a frequent explainer of how energy systems work (and don't work) for different users. Her data modeling research informs how utilities, their regulators and policy makers define and tackle energy affordability.

And in her spare time, she writes fantasy novels about kids in foster care — the kind she wishes she had at the ready as a foster mom.

This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

Question: I want to get into your data, the things that you see, and how you present them to utilities.

Answer: There are households that limit their energy consumption to dangerously low levels. And what that looks like is people waiting really long into the summer to start cooling their home — until the average temperature outside is above 78 degrees.

That's average. So, 78 outside corresponds to 90, high, inside. If you live on the top floor of an apartment, your house can be very, very hot. If your house doesn't have good ventilation, and it has retained a lot of heat, it could be extremely hot — to the point where you might faint — especially if you have sun-facing windows.

And then in the winter, there are some houses that wait until the average temperature is below 50 degrees inside, which actually can correspond to below freezing (less than 32 degrees). That's a pipe freeze risk.

I also find that some people aren't using cooling during a heat wave and not using heating during a deep freeze. So if you're not using heating during a deep freeze, that means you're probably trying to heat your home with your stove or a space heater or something else.

And then, if you're not using air conditioning during a heat wave, that means you probably don't have centralized air in your home, and you might be trying to do it with just fans.

Q: Does that make sense sometimes to just heat one room, if that's the room you're in?

A: I think from a cost perspective, it does. From a pipe freeze perspective — if it's a deep freeze — it doesn't.

(Nock came by that realization through experience, when a tenant at her Pittsburgh duplex set the thermostat too low to prevent water pipes from freezing during the 2022 Christmas cold snap, which caused $32,000 dollars in damage.)

I was sharing this story with Peoples Gas and their customer advocate. She said we should be thinking about not only the customers that have very high bills — which is, traditionally, who's been targeted for energy assistance — but those people that are trying to be very savvy, trying to be very smart (about reducing their bills). They might be only heating one room of their home, but that could be coming at the expense of their pipes.

So, we got a partnership with (Peoples), and they were our first customer.

Q: So, how did you address that?

A: We started off just by looking at Allegheny County (Pennsylvania). They gave us 62,000 homes to analyze and we found 2,000 that we identified as the most critical need. These are the ones that are limiting (energy use) really low, but also those that have high bills.

Then we said, "Let us work with you to design a marketing strategy to talk to these homes in a way that maintains their dignity."

Q: What did that look like?

A: When I first was working with Peoples Gas, the marketing messaging was like, "Hey, we all need help sometimes. Check out our customer assistance program."

And as a person who got our lights cut off, I know my gut reaction is, "I don't need your help. I'm just going through a rough month."

So, we changed (the messaging) to, "Do you wish you could turn up the thermostat without worry? 65 of your neighbors are using more heat than you while paying less. Would you like to learn about this program?"

Q: I feel like "Your neighbors are using more and paying less" is a really compelling comparison. Like, what are they getting that I'm not getting?

A: Yeah, so what we saw was that in that group of 2,000, the applications (for assistance) rose by 80%. Then we actually more than doubled the number of people who were enrolled (for those the company was able to track). What we really showed is that the messaging matters.

I work with utilities because I am a social justice startup company. I label myself as an energy justice scholar.

Q: Didn't you lose some grants for that?

A: Yes. Under this federal government in 2025 I lost about $2 million. In a week! It was very fast. And I'd just come out of surgery. When it rains it pours, doesn't it? Hence, to keep myself sane, I write fantasy books about grim reapers.

Q: What is energy poverty?

A: In the 1990s Brenda Boardman created a fuel poverty metric that came out of Britain. She said, "You are energy poor if you spend more than 10% of your income on your bills to keep your house warmer than something like 65 degrees." And in the U.S., we kind of adopted some of that where we say, "You're energy poor if you spend more than 6% of your income on your bills." But we never asked if you were warm or cool.

The goal of the energy system is not to pay it low. The goal is to be safe and comfortable in your home, to live a productive, high-quality life. And yes, it would be great if you could do all those things while still paying very low bills.

But if you're paying very low bills and you are freezing to death in your home, it doesn't make any sense.

©2025 PG Publishing Co. Visit at post-gazette.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.