[Scott] Up next on "Energy Switch," we'll look into energy justice, and programs that encourage it.

- I don't think we have been nearly as thoughtful about energy assistance as we have about some other basic needs that we have historically considered foundational.

- Like education, or healthcare.

- Like education and healthcare.

Food assistance.

- You really have to sit down and think, who's really facing a lot of environmental harm, who doesn't have access to the investments that have been made over decades, and have then resulted in kind of communities being left behind.

And then in this round, as we transform our energy system, we're gonna focus on making sure those communities receive these benefits.

- Interesting.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," we talk about energy justice.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by, The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

In America today, energy is so intertwined with the functioning of society, that it's a basic need.

As necessary as education, healthcare, even food and water.

Yet not all Americans have access to safe and reliable energy at a price they can afford.

Energy justice initiatives aim to spread the benefits of energy to more Americans, through energy projects and programs with community involvement and benefit as goals.

I'll discuss with Margo Weisz.

She's the executive director of the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute, or TEPRI, with 25 years of impact investing leadership at City Lights Group and PeopleFund.

Monisha Shah is the division director for the EPA's Solar for All program.

Formerly the deputy director of the Justice40 program, and a longtime energy analyst at the National Renewable Energy Lab.

Next on "Energy Switch," trying to bring more energy justice to more Americans.

Why should our viewers care about energy justice?

We're in the rich world.

Why should they care about that?

- There's a term that we've been using called energy burden.

But it basically says, "How much of your paycheck are you spending on energy expenses?"

Low-income households regularly spend a lot more on energy than average Americans do.

- We do a survey of almost 7,000 low and moderate-income households throughout Texas, really to get sort of their experience with energy and affordability.

And we find that over 50% of the respondents have trouble paying their energy bill on a monthly basis.

The reality is that a lot of people are making a lot of trade-offs, in order to not have their energy shut off.

So it may be just school supplies for their kids.

It may be entertainment, it may be food or medicine.

- Right.

- Depending on how poor they are, those trade-offs can be bigger and bigger.

They also tend to keep their house often at really unhealthy temperatures, for instance.

So when you say, what is justice?

Is it just for low-income people to have to be suffering?

- I mean, literally can become heat or eat, right?

- Yes.

[Scott] For some.

- Right.

- I think there are statistics that show between one in three households, or one in four households in the country face some form of energy insecurity.

- Right.

And it's just remarkable when you think about, arguably one of the most modern, large nations in the world, translate that globally, and it's way worse.

- But in this country, and while I will not downplay at all the suffering people have in countries who are a lot less economically secure than this country, there's no comparison.

But so much of our day-to-day lives in this country center around access to energy, we have to have, in some ways, more access in this country to be engaged in the society is the way that we live it.

- What kinds of energy are we talking about?

- People are using in their households natural gas for heating and cooking usually.

But they can also be using electricity for cooling.

There are parts of the Northeast where they're actually using fuel oil and propane, electricity access, especially, can be unaffordable, or that's where a lot of folks are facing a lot of insecurity.

- Yeah.

How about transportation?

We see it there too, fuels.

How does that affect?

- Right, I mean, I think that in major cities, it's a lot more expensive to live centrally, which means people with low and moderate incomes are the ones who are oftentimes, having to commute, and that's expensive, so.

- Gasoline.

- The gasoline.

- Yeah.

- And then how do you, and then there's not really good, public transportation is a mix.

So yeah, I think transportation is a huge challenge for people.

- And that introduces another injustice, if you will.

Your most precious resource of time.

Now I'm spending an hour and a half each way on public transport.

[Margo] Right.

- Whether you're in your car, or you're in public transportation.

- to get somewhere.

[Margo] It's time consuming.

- Not with my family, not working.

- And a lot of people who are low income also have more than one job.

It's a huge burden.

And the other thing is when there's an outage, people with more means have a lot more choices of how to deal with that.

[Scott] Right.

- In one community we work with in Houston, they estimate that 25% of the people don't have cars.

These are things we don't really think about when we think about justice.

It is affordability, it's access, it's reliability, it's clean, it's the whole relationship to energy, and how that affects our lives.

[Scott] So let's talk about some of the programs that have helped people practically, share in some of the benefits of energy.

- Well, I'll start by saying that I don't think we have been nearly as thoughtful about energy assistance as we have about some other basic needs that we have historically considered foundational.

- You mean other things like education, or healthcare?

- Like education and healthcare.

- Okay.

- Right.

- Food.

- I think that food, food assistance.

- Right.

- And I think it's kind of a new idea that energy fits into that as very foundational to how we live in the modern world.

So it's not that there are no programs, there is the Low-Income Housing Assistance program.

There's the Weatherization Assistance programs.

There's certain state programs.

I think that energy efficiency programs can have a huge benefit to lowering people's energy bills and keeping their house either warmer or cooler when there's extreme weather.

So I'd probably say we've been most successful in thinking about energy efficiency.

But I think there's a lot of room for creativity.

- How about things that engage the people actually in the process more?

Are there things we're seeing there?

- Yeah, I think that's a great point.

Just that there are, especially as we think about public utility commissions, people don't know what they are.

Besides paying their energy bill, they don't know what those entities do.

And so I think the more we can get community members, community-based organizations involved with educated and up to speed on what those processes look like, the more opportunity that communities have to be a part of the decision-making process.

- Right.

- And that doesn't mean just parachuting in, and asking somebody, "What do you think about this?"

At the beginning of the project, and then just leaving.

[Scott] Right.

- It's just, are there ways to actually pay people for their knowledge and expertise about their lived experience, about the trust and relationships they built over many years in their communities, having them have real decision-making roles on advisory boards, participatory budgeting projects or even co-ownership of energy assets and projects, so, - Yeah, they live there.

They're gonna be there.

They probably have a lot of, as you said, lived experiences.

And they're all unique too.

A lot of these different challenges vary by community, by state.

- I think there's some interesting community-based strategies that are going on right now.

Like one of the initiatives that we are very involved with is sort of building networks of community-based resiliency hubs.

So rather than saying like, "Okay, we're gonna just leave it up to the city, or the state to create these huge convention centers that in the case of an outage, and there's an emergency."

It's like, how do you start thinking about engaging community members to provide safe spaces within communities?

So there's a place in northeast Houston that has created them as small as residences.

So there's certain residences that will, that, okay, we're gonna pay for all the infrastructure as a community, we're gonna go raise the money and put the infrastructure in, that you get to benefit from, but if there's an outage, the neighbors get to come over, charge our cell phones, cool off, or warm up.

- Yeah.

- And maybe it's just for the streets.

So that's like a really micro level.

But then on a macro level, I think one of the most interesting sort of policies, that's the Justice40 initiative, it requires that 40% of all the federal money for all of these sort of energy transition changes with the Inflation Reduction Act.

That 40% of the money that is used, you have to show how it is going to benefit low and moderate-income people.

It's really groundbreaking, 'cause a lot of this money's going to private companies, who've just never really thought about how this would help a low or moderate-income consumer.

It's forcing the whole industry at large, whether it's private, public, nonprofit, who's using this money, to rethink how their products or services will meet the needs.

And it's a lot of money.

So it's really a consequential.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

I would say, so the Justice40 initiative, which I had the honor to work on, there's almost $600 billion that are part of the initiative.

So that's over 500 federal programs across 19 agencies.

And so I've seen it sort of firsthand, where these program offices and the federal agency, we had to really change the way they think about how they run and implement their programs.

Because they had to start measuring where the benefits were gonna go for Justice40.

Some benefits can be wide-ranging.

It's like better air quality, better access to water, workforce, training, jobs.

Being a part of the economy and reaping those economic benefits could be a wide range of benefits.

But you really have to sit down and think, who's really facing a lot of environmental harm, who doesn't have access to the investments that have been made over decades and have then resulted in kind of communities being left behind?

And then in this round, as we transform our energy system, we're gonna focus on making sure those communities receive these benefits.

[Scott] Interesting.

- Yeah.

[Scott] Yeah, interesting.

- So it's a huge opportunity, and it hopefully, it's not just happening at the federal government, but it's reaching the organizations that [Margo] It's huge.

- Margo's working with.

- And people take these, they call them community benefits plans, very seriously.

And one of the things they ask is, "How are you including the interests, perspectives, involvement, engagement of the people in whatever area you're working in, in your planning, in your execution?"

So again, it's quite consequential.

- Yeah.

There are places in the country, typically often lower income, where a lot of our big energy infrastructure, big things get built because they can't really say no.

They don't have the same kind of capacity to fight things if they don't want it.

- They can't pay the attorneys.

[Scott] Is this, is this a justice issue?

- Absolutely a justice issue.

It's a real challenge because a lot of times, the reason that an area is low income is because it has a polluting industry right next to it.

- Yeah, is there a jobs piece too, though?

Like, I bring something here.

Well, maybe the community that's living with it gets the jobs there.

And then all of a sudden, we get onto a little bit more of a virtuous cycle.

- Yeah, especially if it's not something that's polluting the [Scott] Right, right.

- water and the air and the soil of the people that are living there.

Because I think you run into a real problem when people are very dependent on the jobs.

So they need those jobs, yet, their relatives are dying of cancer at a rate that's much higher than in other areas.

But they need those jobs.

I personally don't think it's ever okay to say like, "Oh, well there's jobs here, so it's okay if there's just a little bit of pollution in the-- [Scott] Yeah.

- You know, it's okay the water's not so good over there.

I mean, that's just not okay.

And that is definitely a justice issue.

- Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I've heard the word sacrifice zones.

Is that something or, is that what this is?

- I think, yeah, that's exactly what you're talking about.

And it's not just limited to energy projects.

It's industrial projects overall, that, as Margo was mentioning, have those environmental justice issues where again, low-income communities, communities of color have been residing near industrial sites, and they're not always receiving the benefits of those sites.

[Scott] Right, right.

What are some of the, how do we start to change that?

- When you're siting new energy infrastructure, which we have an opportunity right now, we have a huge opportunity.

There's all these new investments going in, is to engage local communities, and also ask them like, "Is this where you want to have this new project sited?

If it is sited here, how do you want to be involved with this?"

How do we make sure that we're holding ourselves accountable?

- It's not just a sort of performative, "Hey, give us your input.

I know you know nothing about this, but give us your input.

What do you, oh, you want some jobs?

Okay, you know about jobs."

I think it has to go deeper than that.

- Yeah, sure, absolutely.

A lot of energies have subsidies of some kind, whether they're federal or state kinds of things, or incentives and various kinds.

How do we get those better spread to everyone?

- What do you mean by?

Do you mean the companies being subsidized?

- Oh, community programs.

Like community solar programs, things like that.

- Mostly the early adopters that could afford to adopt solar, were wealthier households.

[Scott] Right.

- And then a lot of low-income households were getting left behind.

- Yeah.

- And community solar can be really helpful because there's a lot of households that don't have a good roof where they could deploy rooftop solar, or they might be a renter, and they can't, the building owner is not gonna get involved with putting solar on the building.

So this allows them a way to get access to clean energy through a subscription.

And there's some interesting subscription models too for renters who are moving a lot, and can't commit to more than a year's worth of an agreement that they've got kind of a little bit more of a shorter term way to get involved.

- Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the well-intended subsidies programs to kick things off, whether be it solar, or EVs, wealthy people bought those things and got those things.

And then regressively, it impacted lower income communities because they didn't get 'em.

Everybody's paying for that.

And it had this effect, this regressive economic effect on exactly the wrong population.

- There is a really interesting program in San Antonio, it's a community solar program, where it's a ownership program.

So you buy your panels of the community solar, and for the low-income participants, it's financed.

But they make sure they even out the payments.

So the payments are always less than the savings.

Which means, sometimes the loan payment's a little less, and sometimes the loan payment's a little bit more.

I mean, during the summer, you're generating a lot of solar, so you might be getting more savings benefits, and maybe your loan payments are a little higher when you're, you know, able to generate a little bit more.

[Scott] And where was that done?

[Margo] That's in San Antonio, Texas.

- Is that a state program?

- No, it's a municipally-owned utility.

Which is a city-owned utility.

And I think sometimes municipally-owned utilities, because they're vertically integrated, have the ability to be a little bit more creative.

- There are though, a number of states though, that have created low-income solar programs, both for rooftop and community solar, that have been, I think, fairly successful.

[Scott] Right.

- And kind of based on that success, now we have a federal program called Solar for All [Scott] Oh, good.

- which is a, it's a seven billion dollar program, specifically and only for low-income and disadvantaged communities.

[Scott] Right, yeah.

So learning goes on.

- So these community solar programs offer a way for people to enter into the solar sort of market without having to maintain and pay for a system.

[Scott] Right, and a lot don't have homes.

They're more, [Margo] Right, and they don't have homes.

[Scott] community housing.

- We're looking at a lot of housing authorities because the housing authorities already have maintenance crews.

So you really kind of, it's the trifecta of affordable, reliable, and clean energy.

And you're hitting the very lowest income residents in our country.

And if we could roll something big out to housing authorities, it's our hope that we can be testing these kinds of things and some smaller projects, evaluating them, and then really rolling out some case studies to housing authorities.

- Right, nice.

So the IRA has been mentioned several times.

What are the opportunities from that to make energy?

Just more just.

What are some of the best things that'll come outta that?

- Well, it is broad, it is comprehensive.

It hits generation, it hits transmission, it hits sort of retail relationships.

It hits all the different kinds of energy.

So, but again, I think that the Justice40 initiative that requires that money consider the needs of low and moderate-income communities.

And to receive that money, you actually have to lay out a plan, and a case for over the duration of your project, which is often three to five year.

I mean, there's one-year money, there's three-year money, there's five-year money.

But this money coming outta the federal government for the Inflation Reduction Act is varied.

But no matter what kind of project you have, you have to be showing that what are gonna be the benefits for low and moderate-income communities?

- Who administers those things?

- Some of the big players in Justice40 are Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Interior, Department of Agriculture, - USDA, yep.

- And also, - Housing, HUD.

- I think they have some IRA money, but I'm not sure.

Additionally, there's also the tax credits.

And the tax credits are not covered under Justice40.

And there's some innovative things that they did with the tax credits, including direct pay.

Before, we had the investment tax credit for wind and solar, but you had to have taxable income.

So if you were a nonprofit, or a faith-based organization, or a local government, and you wanted to take advantage, I mean, it was 30% right there for the renewable energy projects.

You'd have to partner with somebody, and create a special financial mechanism to get access to that incentive.

And there's also a low-income bonus as well.

There's a lot more access to those, - Interesting.

- tax credits as well.

- What direct pay means is that they'll just give you the cash.

You don't have to, it's not a tax credit anymore.

So for non-taxable entities like us, like we just purchased like a $20,000 solar array in South Texas for a project, and we'll get that money directly back in cash, because we don't have any tax liability.

[Scott] Yeah, that's the ultimate subsidy.

- Yeah, that's the ultimate subsidy.

It really can expand a project significantly.

And then as Monisha said, there's sort of add-ons.

So if you're in a low-income community, just basically a high energy burden community, you get like an extra 10%, so, you can get up to 50 or 60% of a rebate based on different-- where you are, and what your project is.

[Scott] Is there a requirement by law, what percentage of that money is spent on all the federal employees to administer it?

- I think some of the - It varies.

- political strife that kind of comes with these things is, wow, it's just more government.

Especially federal government.

One side.

It'd be nice to know if there's some transparency around how much actually went out to do the work.

If there's a way to kind of make people aware of that.

- I think there's some really good efforts right now to try to track where the money is going.

[Scott] Yeah.

- From bipartisan infrastructure law, from the Inflation Reduction Act.

There's one website, Invest.gov, where the federal government has been as transparent as they possibly can about where awards have been made.

[Scott] Right.

- For those different programs, there's also USASpending.gov, which tracks all of the dollars for the federal government.

And then, I know at least for the greenhouse gas reduction fund, we're being very intentional about the reporting systems that we're gonna build.

[Scott] Yeah.

- Because we do wanna be as transparent as we can, but then also just demonstrating that these benefits, the real benefits, the jobs, the economic development opportunities, the cleaner air, are gonna be... realized.

[Scott] Yeah.

I mean, so much of what we talked about is almost irrespective of climate.

That these people are breathing particulates, their water, their air, their land.

It really is a program that should happen, [Margo] I think it's a [Scott] regardless, right?

- Right, I think, yeah, I think there is a real focus on how are we gonna do this better and more creatively to reach those corners of the population that don't necessarily always get their needs met first.

- It is really important that we have this type of program, where we're being extremely intentional about how we can change the models of how we deploy clean energy and make sure that they're reaching the folks that really need it.

[Scott] Yeah.

- Because it's a misnomer that there's only part of the population that cares.

So in our surveying, over 70% of people felt very strongly about having access to clean energy, [Scott] And we're talking low emissions, when we say clean?

- We didn't specify, and I don't think the, I think with the average person wants is energy that's not causing a problem for themselves, or for the planet.

[Scott] Yeah.

- And I think that crosses political lines.

I think that politics don't necessarily reflect the desires of the people.

[Scott] Yeah, for sure.

Well, final thoughts, Margo, that, a couple points you'd just like viewers to remember?

- Well, I guess I'd say one is that this is an incredibly dynamic industry right now.

And there's changes in the works that we can't imagine, which is a very exciting place to be.

The second thing I would say is that energy is really foundational to the way we live in the modern world, and therefore, energy justice is really foundational to a whole lot of equity outcomes that we as a society consider imperative.

- Well said.

- Thank you.

[laughing] - Monisha, same question.

- I mean, I would, I totally agree with what Margo said.

This isn't a really neat opportunity for us to not just be innovating on the technology side, but innovating on what are the business models that are really gonna create wealth in communities.

It's just a awesome time in this energy transition to be creative and look for those opportunities and just wanna challenge everybody to think about that.

Be inspired to look for those ideas and solutions.

[Scott] Yeah, we're a nation of invention.

Let's keep doing it, right?

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

Appreciate you being on.

Enjoyed your thoughts and experiences and wisdom.

Margo, you too, so.

Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

For millions of low-income Americans, energy costs so much of their paycheck, they must make trade-offs with other basic needs.

Many communities also bear the cost of energy production, lower property values, and environmental problems, without enjoying the benefits.

Energy justice programs try to remedy these issues.

We talked about community solar, which allows lower-income neighborhoods to own distributed power generation.

But we talked more about the Justice40 program, which has been retired since this filming.

It specified that 40% of the benefits of subsidized energy projects go to low- and medium-income citizens.

The benefits were broadly defined from cleaner air, to jobs, to more reliable energy.

The idea was, as we build new energy infrastructure, we could also create better energy access and affordability.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by The University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.