Energy Poverty and Utility Disconnections in the United States, with Sanya Carley

Notable Quotes

• Energy poverty is widespread in the United States: “One in four households struggle to pay their energy bills or to keep their homes at comfortable temperatures. Approximately one in five households report foregoing expenses on food in order to pay their energy bills. So, I would argue that this is quite a pervasive and big problem within the United States.” (4:40)
• Certain groups experience utility disconnection at disproportionately high rates: “Households of color are far more likely to be disconnected than white households. Low-income households are more likely to struggle with energy and security. Those with inefficient or deficient living conditions are also more likely to be disconnected, as are those who have been disconnected previously … There’s a cyclical nature to disconnections. If you’re disconnected one time, you’re likely to enter this cycle of being disconnected over and over.” (19:02)
• Programs that help households pay utility bills don’t address the root of the problem: “We need to think more deeply about longer-term solutions: both preventative solutions—how to help households avoid becoming energy insecure and being disconnected—as well as these long-term solutions that help households lower their energy bills.” (26:12)

Top of the Stack

• “Behavioral and Financial Coping Strategies Among Energy-Insecure Households” by Sanya Carley, Michelle Graff, David M. Konisky, and Trevor Memmott
• “Assessing Demographic Vulnerability and Weather Impacts on Utility Disconnections in California” by Trevor Memmott, David M. Konisky, and Sanya Carley
• “Which Households are Energy Insecure? An Empirical Analysis of Race, Housing Conditions, and Energy Burdens in the United States” by Michelle Graff, Sanya Carley, David M. Konisky, and Trevor Memmott
• Utility Disconnections Dashboard
• “The Incidence of Extreme Economic Stress: Evidence from Utility Disconnections” by Steve Cicala
• “High Temperatures and Electricity Disconnections for Low-Income Homes in California” by Alan Barreca, R. Jisung Park, and Paul Stainier
• “Minnesota’s Energy Paradox: Household Energy Insecurity in the Face of Racial and Economic Disparities” by Bhavin Pradhan and Gabriel Chan
• The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. Sanya Carley, the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, all at the University of Pennsylvania. Sanya is also an RFF university fellow.

In today's episode, Sanya will describe the surprisingly widespread problem of energy affordability in the United States and the associated problem of utility disconnections when a household's power, water, or natural gas is turned off. She'll describe the often-risky strategies that households use to avoid disconnections; how disconnections vary across household types; and whether federal, state, and local programs are sufficiently addressing this issue. We'll also talk about the many information gaps that remain and how researchers can contribute to understanding and solving these problems. Stay with us.

Sanya Carley from the University of Pennsylvania. My friend, welcome back to Resources Radio.

Sanya Carley: Thank you, Daniel. It's so nice to be back.

Daniel Raimi: I was realizing, looking back through the archives, that the last time we had you on the show was more than five years ago, which is crazy. Since it's been such a long time, can you remind us how it is that you got interested in environmental topics?

Sanya Carley: Happy to. I grew up in Wisconsin, and I know I told you about that last time, but let me just give you a little bit more detail about my family. First, I grew up in the city of Milwaukee, but my family had a place in Door County, Wisconsin, which is the thumb of Wisconsin's “mitten.” I know, Daniel, you're a Michigander, and you think you have a mitten.

Daniel Raimi: Yes, we have the real mitten.

Sanya Carley: We have a mitten, too, and I would claim it's real, but Wisconsin's mitten has Door County, and my grandfather—fun fact—used to be involved in Wisconsin politics, and he ran for governor a few times, and he worked in state government, and he used to work very closely with Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), who essentially founded a whole bunch of the state parks within Wisconsin and expanded them over time.

At some point, when Gaylord Nelson was working on a specific park, my grandfather said, "Wow, that place is just phenomenal, and I need a property there." So, he bought a parcel of land and slowly, over time, started with tents and then built a cottage, essentially. And so, our family has this cottage that's nestled into a state park, and right next to the state park is a county park.

Basically, I spent all of my childhood—anytime we weren't in Milwaukee, we were in Door County—out playing in those woods. I think I climbed almost every tree in the park. I know every tree; I know all the patches of the wild blackberries, strawberries, thimbleberries, and raspberries. And I went sledding in those woods, which, of course, is super dangerous and only had minor infractions, but this was just a child just filled with the woods and filled with nature. I think that it was so impressionable for me.

Through the years, I tried so hard to try a variety of different career paths and stray in different directions, but there was some kind of pull that always brought me back to working on topics of nature and environment and energy.

Daniel Raimi: That is so interesting. It sounds like an idyllic childhood in some ways. You were Calvin out there in the woods, sledding and getting into trouble.

Sanya Carley: Totally. That part of my childhood was idyllic, but it was also a vacation or a release away from some of the challenges that I faced also growing up in Center City, Milwaukee.

Daniel Raimi: I will ask you more about that another time when we're hanging out and having drinks, but I'd love to talk to you now about the main topic of our conversation, which is issues of energy affordability and utility disconnections in the United States. This is a really big issue—when households lose access to electricity or natural gas services. To get us started, can you give us a sense of how big of a deal this is in the United States, how many people are affected, where they might be affected, and any other details you want to share?

Sanya Carley: I'd be happy to. Maybe I'll start with government data. The US Energy Information Administration has the Residential Energy Consumption Survey that they put out every five years. And the Residential Energy Consumption Survey asks a pretty robust suite of questions that touch on themes of energy poverty and energy insecurity. Using those data in the most recent year available, we know that one in four households struggle to pay their energy bills or to keep their homes at comfortable temperatures. Approximately one in five households report forgoing expenses on food in order to pay their energy bills. So, I would argue that this is quite a pervasive and big problem within the United States.

Now, using a few other data sources—actually, I'll focus on one in particular, and that is data on utility disconnections. Our Energy Justice Lab has what we call the Utility Disconnections Dashboard. This is a dashboard where we've essentially gathered utility disconnection data and disconnection policy data from all across the United States using web-scraping techniques. We have it in map form, as well as trends-over-time form, where one can look at where disconnections are occurring. With these data, we know that approximately three million households in the last few years annually are disconnected, but I'll caveat that we think this number is a drastic underestimate of the total number of households that are disconnected, because we have only 10 percent of all utilities in the United States, and at best, in any given year, we have about 45–50 percent of the population of the United States covered. This means that disconnections could be as high as six million people—or households, rather—per year. Or more.

Daniel Raimi: It's clearly a huge issue. That disconnection dashboard that you mentioned—we'll have a link to that in the show notes, so people can go explore it as they're listening, assuming they're not driving in their car or doing something else dangerous.

Sanya Carley: That's right. Please don't do it if you're driving.

Daniel Raimi: I'm curious about how this issue varies over time. I remember when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there was a lot of concern about utility disconnections, because people weren't working. So, I'm curious about those shocks that might affect disconnections. And then, I'm also curious—just generally, over time—has this issue been getting better or worse? If we even have the data to know that.

Sanya Carley: It's such a good question. I will say we're just starting to get a sense of some of these trends using the dashboard data, but I think that we have so much more data to gather and more trends to investigate. But I'll tell you what I think we can see with the dashboard data—also noting that some states are infrequent about how often they actually publish their data, and some of them just don't publish data at all, as I noted before. Using the information that we have, I think we see some seasonal variations, and we see some variations when it's a time of moratoria or not. Let me hit on each of those.

Seasonally, we see a lot more disconnections during summer months and fewer in the winter, because the majority of states have disconnection protections during the winter months. These are protections, essentially, where the utility commission tells all of the utilities that are regulated by the utility commission, "You can't disconnect somebody during these certain months or if the weather is so cold." As a result of these protections, we see rates go very low in the winter, but then spike in the summer months, particularly over time as we see hotter and hotter summer months. That's one major trend that we see.

We also see spikes following moratorium periods. You can see that, following the winter months, for example, the disconnects spike. But something that's also quite interesting is huge spikes after the COVID pandemic. During the pandemic, the majority of states, at some point, had some kind of moratorium put in place, where they said, "No utility can disconnect their customers." In some places, it only lasted for a month or a few months. In other places, like California, it lasted for years. But what we see is that, once those moratoria are released and disappear, there are these huge spikes of households that become disconnected.

There are some places where we've looked where we have pretty great utility-level data over time, where you can look at trends pre- and post-COVID, and in some cases, we're seeing that post-COVID rates generally are much higher than they were before COVID. But I don't have enough to say that this is, on average, the case. It's just with a few selected utilities that we've looked at.

Then, maybe, one other trend that I'll highlight is differences across utility types. We tend to see, if you look at the dashboard, much higher total disconnects for investor-owned utilities than for other utilities, such as municipal utilities. But I think what's really surprising—or was, frankly, quite surprising to me when we first gathered the data—is that some of the utilities with the highest disconnection rates (disconnections per customer) are many of the municipal utilities within the United States. Some munis have really high percentages of customer disconnects.

Daniel Raimi: That's interesting. Any idea what's going on with those disconnections for munis? And real quick, can you remind us what “munis” are?

Sanya Carley: A muni is a municipal utility, which essentially is a utility that's owned by the municipal government; it's a publicly owned utility.

What's happening? I think that this is part of the challenge with utility disconnections: We can descriptively identify some of these trends, but it is very difficult to understand what is happening within utilities and how they're making decisions about who to disconnect and who not to disconnect. This is something that we need to—collectively as a research field, but also in multidisciplinary partnerships—dig in with utilities on their practices and think deeply about how we can collectively work to improve those practices.

Daniel Raimi: That's super interesting, and tons of work to do.

I'd love to ask you now about some of the strategies that households take to avoid disconnection. You had a paper from a couple years ago with several colleagues that talks about coping strategies for households that struggle to pay their energy bills. Can you talk a little bit about the strategies that folks use to try to deal with the financial burden of paying for high energy costs?

Sanya Carley: I'd be happy to. I'll just note that the data for this paper were gathered during the pandemic, and essentially, it was a longitudinal study where we went back to approximately 2,000 households that were classified as low income—within 200 percent of the federal poverty line. We went back to them every season. We surveyed them in four different periods of time over the first year of the pandemic. What we learned is that the majority of these low-income households—and also I'll just pause to say this is a representative sample of low-income households, so we can infer these rates out to the broader population of low-income households—use some kind of coping strategy, and these are both financial strategies, as well as behavioral strategies.

Specifically, we found 55 percent of all low-income households use coping strategies. The majority of these households actually use multiple of these strategies at once, and the most common strategies that they use are also the riskiest.

Let me give you a few statistics, if you don't mind. The most common strategy is for households to accrue debt. We find that 27 percent of all low-income households accrue debt, and on a semi-frequent basis.

The second-most-common strategy, at 26 percent of all low-income households, is using some kind of risky temperature behavior. In most cases, it's to keep your body warm. This might include things like burning trash in your house, for example, or opening your oven for space heat or flaring your gas stove for space heat, or using a space heater for localized sources of heat, which we know is one of the leading causes of fire in the United States. In some cases, we heard of households essentially running their dryer but disconnecting the dryer vent and putting a child behind the dryer in order to warm their body and their skin. This is 26 percent of all households.

Now, a few other of the more risky strategies include bill balancing, at 18 percent—essentially, strategically paying down some bills one month and other bills the next month, or just paying them down to the point or a threshold where they can avoid more catastrophic damage such as eviction or disconnections. 17 percent of all low-income households engage in some kind of foregoing exercise, so they're foregoing food or medical care in order to pay their energy bills. Those are the riskiest.

The less risky are less common. 11 percent of households seek government assistance, such as through the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program—only 11 percent, which I think is quite small. 10 percent tap their personal networks for assistance. They might ask their neighbor or ask a family member for help. And only 6 percent call the utility company.

Now, I think this number is shocking, to be honest. The majority of utility companies across the United States have some kind of bill-payment program. They might have discount-payment programs, arrearage management–payment programs; there's a whole host of different programs, but one needs to know about them or to prove their eligibility for these programs, but only 6 percent actually call their utility company.

The last category is seeking out a loan, essentially, to pay your bill, including a payday loan as a possibility.

Daniel Raimi: That's super interesting. Some of those strategies are really scary. I'm curious about the first one you mentioned, which is accruing debt. When you say “accruing debt,” are you referring to debt that's specifically related to the energy bills, or are you talking about just accruing debt in general to cope with energy challenges and the other financial challenges that those households might be facing?

Sanya Carley: I'm talking specifically about utility debt. You're essentially carrying debt on your gas bills or your electricity bills.

Daniel Raimi: That's really helpful. I imagine folks are thinking about certain households that are particularly vulnerable to these challenges. For example, if you rely on a medical device for a family member to maintain their health, these issues are really existential in some cases. I'm curious what you find when you look at these most vulnerable households and whether they differ in any way from the other households that you look at in the way that they manage energy costs.

Sanya Carley: Such a good question. To build on your question, when we're talking about vulnerable households, what we—as well as others in really excellent research—have found is that the vulnerable households tend to be those with young children under the age of five; those that rely on electronic medical devices, as you noted; those that have preexisting medical conditions; or those who are older. We find that all of these populations, essentially, are more likely to be energy insecure and are more likely to be disconnected from their service provider, which is quite dire in some cases.

Take the first two categories. Young children in the home—if a house is disconnected, a young child might actually be removed from the home by child services, because the house is deemed uninhabitable. And with one who relies on an electronic medical device … If you can't charge that device, then if you lose your electricity, you can't use that device. But it's such a catch-22, because once you're using a device, if you're prescribed that device by your doctor, your energy bills are likely to go up, which will likely compromise you for disconnection. Sorry for the preamble, but this is just to reiterate how important it is for these vulnerable populations.

Daniel Raimi: I was just thinking about that in particular, because, random story, I have a neighbor who relies on a medical device for his heart, and they recently installed solar panels and batteries, because we have a lot of power outages in Ann Arbor. But the thing is, not everybody can afford thousands of dollars of batteries and solar panels to go on their roofs. It just reminded me how important this issue was for a lot of people.

Sanya Carley: Thank you for that story. That's exactly right. We've actually been working on conducting some estimates of how much it costs for electricity when one is prescribed one of these durable medical equipment devices. It could be quite extreme. It can be on the order of hundreds of dollars per year, which can, essentially, more than double one's expenditures on electricity. You're exactly right that, if we can offset that with some kind of clean energy source such as solar and storage combined, this could be a really effective way to help these households. But oftentimes, they don't have the means to provide these.

Daniel Raimi: Before I interrupted you, you were going to say a little bit more about the strategies that these most vulnerable households take and how they might differ from others.

Sanya Carley: Yes. The truth is they use more strategies, and they use them more often, and they also are more likely to combine strategies. When they're particularly vulnerable, and it is truly dire that they must avoid disconnection, then they will use a variety of both financial and behavioral strategies in order to cope.

Daniel Raimi: Let's shift a little bit now and talk about another paper that you just recently published with colleagues on utility disconnections in California, and I should say we'll have links to both of these papers in the show notes, along with the utility dashboard, so that people can dig into all of these excellent studies and really understand the details of them. But I'm curious if you can say a little bit about this most recent paper in California, how it built on existing evidence on this topic, and what you learned through the analysis.

Sanya Carley: I'd be happy to. Maybe I'll start with the previous scholarship and what we know. I'll say most of the previous scholarship is using survey data; either the residential energy consumption survey data that I mentioned before or individual survey analyses.

What this literature has largely found is that there are several very strong correlates with utility disconnections, some of which we've already talked about, such as those with vulnerable populations that reside in the home. Other major correlates include … Households of color are far more likely to be disconnected than white households. Low-income households are more likely to struggle with energy and security. Those with inefficient or deficient living conditions are also more likely to be disconnected, as are those who have been disconnected previously. Something that I find quite fascinating is the evidence that there's a cyclical nature to disconnections. If you're disconnected one time, you're likely to enter this cycle of being disconnected over and over.

Now, this literature I noted is largely based on survey data, but there are two notable exceptions of studies that have really dug into actual utility data and tracked where disconnections are happening. One is Steve Cicala's work, where he analyzes two Illinois utilities, and he finds quite significant racial disparities for both energy-assistance uptake and disconnections. Another is a more recent study. Barreca and his colleagues analyze Southern California Edison's data, and they consider the impact of temperature on shutoffs, and they find that higher temperatures raise rates, which then contribute to shutoffs.

Our work essentially picked up both of these two studies and tried to combine them, in a sense. We're looking at state-level and zip code–level data on disconnections, but we're also incorporating weather patterns, utility business-model variations, and housing characteristics. We focus on California specifically. I'll just note there's only a handful of states that have really detailed zip code–level data. Our Utility Disconnection Dashboard 2.0 will soon have these data available so people can use them for these more granular studies.

What we find in this study is, first, that there's significant racial disparities that we find in California for disconnections, even controlling for income, energy burden, and housing conditions.

The second is that temperature matters, but it depends on the region and the utility. In more northern and central California, colder temperatures correlate with higher disconnections. In southern California, where it's warmer, we observe the opposite. Hotter temperatures correlate with more disconnections.

Then, the third and final finding is about the difference in utility business models. We find higher rates of disconnections for the investor-owned utilities and more disconnections among ZIP codes of color for the investor-owned utilities than we do for the municipal utilities.

Daniel Raimi: Interesting. That's the reverse of what you found at a national level through the surveys?

Sanya Carley: That's exactly right. At the national level, just looking at the disconnection data themselves, we just see that the leading utilities in terms of disconnection rates are many of the munis, but here, in this very specific California state, we find this variation across investor-owned utilities and munis, and it turns out that the investor-owned utilities are disconnecting far more, both in aggregate and by rate.

Daniel Raimi: Interesting. I'm curious to follow up on that first finding you mentioned about racial disparities. Do you have any sense of what's going on there? You said you controlled for several factors that might be correlated with racial characteristics of a household. Any hypotheses about what's going on?

Sanya Carley: This is a really tough one. I am not going to lie. Our paper really doesn't touch on the why. It's more descriptive that it is. I think what's alarming is that it persists. This trend persists even after controlling for things like income, housing burden, and housing conditions.

In fact, this aligns very strongly with another paper that our team published several years ago in Energy Research and Social Science, where we ask the very direct question of, Why do we see racial disparities when it comes to disconnections, and can we explain those disparities by using energy burden, housing conditions, and housing age? In that study, we find that we can only explain a little bit of the racial-disparities story—up to 10 percent of the story—using energy burden and housing conditions. But so much still remains unknown as to why we see these disparities.

It's tough to speculate as to what's happening here, but I think it's probably a pretty complicated story that involves redlining; trust between customers and utility companies; utility-company practices, as to how they choose to disconnect certain regions, certain ZIP codes, or even certain households; and whether they're relying on risk profiles—for example, based on previous incidents of disconnection—or if they're relying on some kind of speculation or understanding of how well the house could pay in the future. I don't know, but again, as I flagged earlier, I think that this is an area that's really ripe and important for investigation, and I really hope that the research community picks this up, as well as the broader community—forming partnerships, essentially, to address this question.

Daniel Raimi: I just thought of one other follow-up question as you were answering that. When you mentioned disconnecting neighborhoods … My hunch is that the disconnections we're talking about are not related to the public-safety power shutoffs that happen sometimes in California to prevent wildfires. Am I right in thinking that this is just at the household level we're talking about?

Sanya Carley: You're spot on. We are distinguishing here between disconnection due to nonpayment, which is the focus of the study, versus some kind of disconnection due to some kind of preventative disconnection for wildfire, other reasons, or blackouts. All of those are distinctly separate. I will note, though—it might be interesting—Gabe Chan has some fabulous work with colleagues on Minnesota and disconnections in Minnesota, and he finds some pretty significant overlap in, again, racial disparities between being disconnected for nonpayment and having a blackout or being disconnected for other reasons.

Daniel Raimi: That is really interesting. Maybe we should have Gabe on the show. We're going to talk about that.

Sanya Carley: For sure.

Daniel Raimi: You mentioned a few minutes ago that there are federal programs—one in particular, the Low-Income Housing Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP—that are designed to help people pay their energy bills. But you mentioned that there's really low uptake on those programs. Could you say a little more about that and how the effectiveness of the Low-Income Housing Energy Assistance Program or other programs like it might be designed more effectively to really get people engaged and make them aware of the opportunities that are out there?

Sanya Carley: As an aside, I think studying LIHEAP is so important right now, and I think it's profoundly understudied in the literature. But what we do know descriptively is that LIHEAP is this emergency relief for households that can't pay their energy bill, and it essentially goes directly to the utility to pay off the bill. And we know it's highly effective, and we know that it is a very popular program.

It might've been misleading when I gave you the number previously about how many people tap into this program. I said it was 11 percent of low-income households. It turns out LIHEAP funds are exhausted every year, so it is very much an attractive program, but they're exhausted, and they're only serving approximately 18 to 20 percent of the population. I would argue it’s a program that's significantly underfunded for the need.

How do we improve the program? There's so many opportunities. One: Let's expand appropriations for LIHEAP if it's meeting such a small fraction of the population that actually needs it. Second, I think that we need to expand LIHEAP and the conceptualization of LIHEAP to more fully account for hot-weather states.

A little bit of background here. LIHEAP was adopted in the early 1980s, and its predecessor, essentially, was just like LIHEAP, but it didn't involve the heat aspects. Take the H out of the acronym, and it was a program that was focused on cold-weather states. Then, LIHEAP came around, because government policymakers were like, "Whoa, actually, heat might matter too. Let's add it." As a result of LIHEAP being a transformation of a previous program, there was this degree of grandfathering, I would argue, built in, where the money still disproportionately flows to the cold-weather states. So, the allocation process essentially takes all states, but then there's a series of provisions that Congress goes through where the money is then reallocated to the cold-weather states. In this day and age, where we have such extreme hot weather, I would argue it's very important that we better account for hot-weather states.

Third, I think that we need to reconsider the allocation formula to better capture energy insecurity and poverty. I think that the measures that are used when thinking about allocation are pretty outdated and don't necessarily capture our modern understanding of the severity and the range of energy insecurity as a problem.

Finally, I would argue that we should think more deeply about how to allocate the money across the year. To give a little bit more detail, LIHEAP is dispersed in the fiscal year. The money usually comes out in the early fall, and about 70 percent (our best estimate) is exhausted before the summer months, on average. A lot of the money is going to cold-weather times, and very little is left for hot-weather times. In this day and age of extreme heat and extreme-heat events, I think it's really important that more money is allocated towards the hot times.

A final note is it's really important for us to think deeply about LIHEAP and how to improve LIHEAP, but I think that we also need to recognize that this is still a Band-Aid mechanism. It's just bill assistance, and we need to think more deeply about longer-term solutions: both preventative solutions—how to help households avoid becoming energy insecure and being disconnected—as well as these long-term solutions that help households lower their energy bills.

Daniel Raimi: Right. That's where things like the Weatherization Assistance Program and other programs like that come in.

Sanya Carley: Exactly. Weatherization—and even residential solar, as another example you pointed out before. Solar and storage.

Daniel Raimi: Sanya, this has been a fascinating conversation. You've shared so much information really concisely. I've learned a ton, and I'm sure our audience has, too.

I'd love to ask you now the same question we ask all of our guests at the end of each episode, which is to recommend something that you think is great that you think our audience would enjoy. It can be a book or a movie or a podcast or whatever. So what's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Sanya Carley: I love it. I went for something that involves nature and environment. Mine is The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, and this is a book that I read this summer at our family's cottage in Door County, Wisconsin—the thumb. This is a stunning novel about Louise Erdrich's grandfather, who worked as a night watchman at a jewelry plant in Turtle Mountain Reservation, North Dakota, in the 1950s. Her grandfather is a Chippewa council member who organizes his community to fight an emancipation bill that was being considered in Congress at the time, and really, it was to fight to preserve his community's rights to their land.

I thought it was beautiful, beautifully written, and I just really appreciated this work of historical fiction and its ability to portray Indigenous communities' connections to their land and their efforts to preserve their land and their own rights despite such extreme incidents of disempowerment and disenfranchisement.

Daniel Raimi: That's a great recommendation. I had seen that book in the bookstore recently and was curious about it, so now I have an excuse to go pick it up.

Sanya Carley: That's exactly right. It's so beautiful.

Daniel Raimi: Excellent.

Well, Sanya Carley, one more time—thank you so much for coming onto the show. Thank you for all the great work that you do, for being a RFF university fellow, and for being a great person. Great to have you on the show. Thanks so much.

Sanya Carley: Thank you. Such a pleasure. I really appreciate it.

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