PECAN STREET WEBINAR: RACE AND ENERGY

Click HERE to watch this webinar on the intersection of race and energy was hosted by Pecan Street Inc. on June 30, 2020. Pecan Street is a 501(c)(3) that specializes in producing, analyzing, and sharing data on energy and water consumption practices, verifying new “smart home” technologies, electricity pricing, electric vehicle infrastructure, solar energy tech, and solar storage tech. They have also been instrumental to the efforts of many of the advisory groups of the Austin Office of Sustainability ongoing efforts to update their Community Climate Plan with a new, explicit focus on racial equity.

In this webinar Pecan Street’s CEO, Suzanne Russo, moderates a panel of presentations from four energy experts who work at the intersection of race and energy.

Each presentation was tasked with reflecting on how the energy sector should come to terms with the fact that, in the words of the panelist John Hall, “Race is and has been the most dominant issue in American politics.” Presentations started off with Dr. Hernandez’s general overview of racial disparities in energy insecurity. According to the findings of the Energy Information Administration, one in three households are energy insecure. They further broke this data down into three dimensions of energy insecurity: making “trade offs” or forgoing basic necessities in order to pay an electric bill, receiving a disconnection notice, or keeping the home at an unhealthy temperature in order to lower their energy burdens.

In their research, Dr. Hernandez and Dana Harmon have found that African Americans are being charged higher rates for their energy consumption and are experiencing higher rates of energy insecurity than other races, even after controlling for income, household size, home-owner status, and city of residence. The two of them also explained how this racial disparity is resulting from a combination of factors. Dr. Hernandez showed how the legacy of segregation is still impacting black communities who live in older, less energy efficient homes. This energy infrastructure is not only often inefficient and/or ineffective, it can also be dangerous. One of Dr. Hernandez’s interlocutors described how her house’s power jumps and burning outlets leaves her in fear of a fire. Another interlocutor was struggling with health complications and depression because his heating infrastructure was so poor that he had to resort to leaving the oven on at night to stay warm.

Black communities also experience lower rates of homeownership and access to credit as well as higher rates of poverty and income volatility, all of which make it harder to afford the high-quality and energy-efficient living spaces that help reduce energy burdens. Though many states governments have issued a moratorium on disconnections to help soften the financial impact of the pandemic, historically, black residents across the nation have higher rates of disconnection and threats of disconnection. These disconnection notices not only threaten the household’s level of comfort and convenience, to many, energy access is a matter of life and death. For example, on July13, 2018, a black family in Newark, New Jersey was devastated when they found out their grandmother had died when her house was suddenly disconnected and she subsequently lost power to her oxygen machine. The family had recently gathered $500 to lower her debts to the utility company, but that effort didn’t prevent the utility from disconnecting the elderly woman’s house, at the expense of her life.

When asked about how these racial might be redressed, Dr. Hernandez responded suggesting that utilities should be tasked with collecting better data on the racial distributions and income levels of the customers they serve. She also suggested that these utilities be tasked with developing greater transparency on how they are taking poverty and energy insecurity into account in their rate plans and how they manage their operations.

Across the nation, economic hardships have been further exasperated by the COVID pandemic. According to Dana Harmon at the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute (TEPRI), about 1.5 million Texas households have been impacted by unemployment resulting from the pandemic. Up to 850,000 of those households are served by Texas’ retail energy market. TEPRI’s analysis showed that the collective electric-hardship bill that resulted from these income losses has reached $80 million dollars. Knowing what we know about racial distributions of poverty in Texas, if we do not take care to identify the hardest-hit communities, there is a high likelihood that the bulk of this hardship will fall on communities of color.

Dr. Hernandez connected the US’s dependence on fossil fuels to the disenfranchisement of black communities, having prevented them from accessing the lower-cost of energy, cleaner environments, and high paying jobs. Dr. John Hall’s presentation also focused on the fact that the clean energy sector has a high potential to benefit communities of color, both economically and also in terms of physical and mental well-being. However, like many other high-paying industries in the US, the clean energy industry is predominantly white and male, having not undertaken efforts to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion. This exclusion is particularly unjust within the energy sector, as the same communities of color that have been excluded from the benefits of energy development have been condemned to absorb to negative health impacts of their operations.

Hall emphasized the responsibility of energy experts to take the time and effort to communicate the economic and social benefits of developing clean energy industries to local elected officials. He also warned that clean energy enterprises, along with their advocates, need to make explicit commitments to equity, transparency, and the inclusion of people of color into their industries in order to refrain from recycling the unethical business models of the fossil fuel industry. Taking this responsibility further, Fisayo Fadelu called on her audience to acknowledge that the playing field is uneven, and therefore, our commitment to racial justice should not focus on equal investment in black and white communities but rather equitable investments that reflect the history of oppressing and underserving black communities. In redressing these historical injustices, she also emphasized the importance of community engagement, listening to affected communities and validating their needs in their own words. Black communities may not voice an interest in clean energy, “but if we can validate their stated need for affordable housing, then through that we know energy efficiency is one way to lower household living costs. If we can validate the community’s need for economic development, we know that the City can, by that, create opportunities for clean energy job trainings, create opportunities for small and minority business owners, contract opportunities for them, and also create opportunities for wealth creation.”