Streeter: BGE can once again turn your power off. But they shouldn’t.

Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. resumed being able to terminate customers’ power for lack of payment last week, just in time for the return of oppressive heat.

I think that’s terrible.

I know, I know. In a perfect world, you should pay your bills on time, all the time. And BGE isn’t a charity. But this world is so ragingly imperfect, it’s not even funny. While temperatures are soaring, every single thing from power to gasoline to food is more expensive — not to mention that Maryland lost more federal jobs since 2025 than any other state.

People are broke, unemployed and scared, and now you wanna cut their power off at the worst time? What if, say, you didn’t?

“We all need to recognize the human face of this,” said Nicole Zeichner, senior assistant at the Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, who is their lead attorney on cases pertaining to utility cutoffs. “I agree that energy bills are becoming increasingly untenable.”

So what if there was some was some sort of forgiveness, where the people most financially vulnerable simply had their bills wiped out and could start over? I know this is unlikely. But I still asked BGE/Exelon about it. You can probably guess what they said.

“The Maryland Public Service Commission order reflects the Commission’s expectation that utilities actively manage customer arrearages rather than simply allow them to accumulate,” spokesperson Lydia Parker wrote in an emailed statement. “Therefore, BGE has a responsibility to prudently manage overdue bills.”

As much as this all sucks, Maryland “is kind of a leader in having reasonable protections for customers,” energy advocate Laurel Peltier told me. That’s because the commission and the Office of People’s Counsel are very active.

Protections for customers include the EmPOWER Maryland program, which offers incentives to homeowners to change to more energy-efficient systems, even providing some installation services and equipment for free to income-eligible customers. And next January, income-eligible customers will be able to get discounted gas and electric rates through a different program.

Still, “just being able to keep your power and lights is 100% a crisis state,” Peltier said. “It’s not just numbers on a BGE spreadsheet. There are families.”

And those families, if BGE gets its way, are going to be paying even more starting next year — an average of $8 monthly, according to a soothingly apologetic email message customers like me received last week from CEO Tamla Olivier. It basically said, “We know some of y’all just recovered from storms and you can’t afford food and childcare, but we gotta fix this infrastructure.” I get that.

But are you familiar with the expression “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip?” The turnip is dry.

Because what if there’s little money left for the customer to manage, prudently or otherwise? “A functional utility service is such an essential service that so many of us take for granted,” Zeichner said. “It’s one of the drivers of homelessness. It’s a big problem, trying to keep people’s service on, with a combination of things, like the heat wave. We want to protect the most vulnerable.”

Which is why her office advocated for the six-month moratorium on disconnections earlier this year after complaints of long customer wait times and callbacks that took days to be returned or never came. Terminations were only able to resume because BGE argued that they’d improved their return call times, from an average of two days to 14 hours. That’s still way too long.

Emily Scarr, the senior advisor for nonprofit consumer advocacy groups Maryland PIRG and Maryland PIRG Foundation, doesn’t work directly on terminations but focuses on addressing the root causes of why bills are so high in the first place. Some people may argue, she said, that the humanitarian view is “Don’t terminate people, ever.”

That’s not gonna happen, and I of course am not advocating for no one ever having to pay their bills again. But why can’t they just push the termination date back again?

People are literally dying in this heat — 19 so far this year in Maryland. It’s an “underlying problem of affordability,” Zeichner said. “You can extend due dates of bills for the unforeseeable future, but they will struggle just as much the next month. Poverty is expensive and time-consuming.”

I understand. Fifteen or so years ago, my husband and I had a brief time of financial hinkiness when the company he worked for went under. We were late on our energy bill in the small Florida town we lived in that ran its own utility.

I put the check in the drop box 15 minutes after the office closed on the final date, and found out the next day that they received it but were still going to cut our utilities off if we didn’t also pay the next month — right then and there. The office workers kept saying, “They’re out for cuts, I don’t know what to tell you,” as if at that moment there was a dude with cartoonishly large garden shears behind my condo just waiting for the word.

Was it any easier to pay two months in a row, on the same day? Of course not. Any delay is helpful, but it still compounds in a much larger bill. “It’s kicking the can down the road,” Scarr said. “It snowballs, and the snowball gets bigger and bigger. The costs going forward are still too high.”

But there’s only so much road, Peltier said, because after the heat of the summer, the winter comes with its own restrictions on weather-related cutoffs.

I don’t think anyone from BGE is running around maliciously with those shears or tying late payers to railroad tracks while twirling a mustache. BGE’s Parker said that customers are only eligible for disconnection if the bill is still outstanding after a detailed 14-day termination notice, which includes “available customer rights, responsibilities, and remedies including an opportunity to pay the outstanding balance.”

But it’s the middle of summer. What a terrible time for that notice to come due. There are still protections for families right now, like termination restrictions related to extreme heat that apply when the temperature is 95 degrees or higher or heat indices are 95 degrees or higher for a 72-hour period. Zeichner said the moratorium on cutoffs used to only pertain to the actual temperature.

At this point it’s so terribly and unhealthily blistering that the ticks on the thermometer don’t matter — it’s like it should just say “HOT” in thick black letters.

We don’t know for sure what the next few weeks are going to be like weatherwise or when the cooldown will start for good.

All we know is that people can’t live in this mess without air and electricity. If only there was some way to help them.

Hint, hint.