Energy Insecurity & Energy Transitions: Takeaways from Our Recent Webinar
On May 15th, Policy Integrity hosted a webinar that brought together researchers focusing on energy insecurity and policymakers who may be able to use their findings. The researchers present included Dr. Destenie Nock of Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Laura Kuhl of Northeastern University, and Katrina Wyman of NYU School of Law. They were joined by Dr. Anjuli Jain Figueroa and Micheal Reiner from the US Department of Energy. These presenters focused on interesting, yet often-overlooked questions about how energy insecurity is often measured incorrectly, how insecurity-driven transitions can end up benefiting fossil fuels, and how some relevant actors in the energy system don’t actually receive transition incentives. The answers to these questions were often surprising and may prove useful in future government decisionmaking.
Uncovering How We Measure Energy Insecurity
Dr. Destenie Nock discussed how measures of energy insecurity often miss important details. At present, a household is usually designated as “energy burdened” when its energy costs rise above a certain percentage of household income. This measure may work as long as households have access to and utilize all the energy infrastructure they need (e.g. air conditioners, electric heat pumps, etc.). However, Dr. Nock noted that the metric fails to account for people who actively reduce their energy consumption in order to avoid high costs and whose homes lack key infrastructure in the first place. For example, Dr. Nock has already found that the lowest income groups endure colder temperatures before using their heaters: her research shows a nine-degree difference between when the lowest and highest income groups turn on their heat as the weather gets colder. These findings and others indicate that different groups experience the energy gap differently, and current measures of energy insecurity may be insufficient to understand the full picture.
Insecurity-Driven Transitions Are Not Always Green
Like Dr. Nock, Dr. Laura Kuhl acknowledged in her presentation that traditional measures of energy insecurity often fail to capture reality. She also explained that insecurity doesn’t tend to motivate clean energy transitions, even if measured properly. Focusing on Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Dr. Kuhl highlighted the shortcomings that the storm revealed. Even before Maria, energy insecurity — as captured by traditional energy burden measurements — was extremely high in Puerto Rico. The hurricane, and subsequent blackouts, showed that these metrics failed to capture just how unstable energy access was on the island. Once the federal government took note of the island’s troubled grid and made funding available for improvements, many hoped a rapid transition to a reliable, renewable energy system would follow. Dr. Kuhl and her collaborators discovered that, in fact, much of the funding aimed at increasing resilience and reliability ended up flowing to powerful, incumbent actors in the energy system. In other words, Hurricane Maria created a sense of urgency for improving the resilience and reliability of the Puerto Rican grid, but that pressure to act quickly allowed fossil-fuel interests to receive the lion’s share of investment.
Who Wins and Who Loses in Multi-Family Residential Electrification?
Katrina Wyman described the most important findings from a study on residential electrification in New York City (NYC). Originally, the study set out to understand whether electrifying multi-family buildings might increase the utility costs of low-income tenants. The study found that residents of market-rate rental housing are actually more vulnerable to higher utility costs if buildings are electrified, but these units are typically not affordable for low-income tenants. Because most low-income tenants in NYC live in public or rent-regulated units, they are less vulnerable to increased utility costs if there is electrification. However, Wyman noted that it is also unlikely that these public or rent-regulated units will be electrified. At least prior to the Inflation Reduction Act, most property owners in NYC did not see sufficient incentives to electrify their multi-family residential buildings.
New Legislation Creates New Opportunities
The final presenters of the webinar were Dr. Anjuli Jain Figueroa and Michael Reiner from the Department of Energy’s Office of Economic Impact and Diversity. They discussed how new legislation, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, provides unprecedented opportunities to invest in disadvantaged communities where energy insecurity is often high. Like the other presenters, they spoke about different methods that they are using to quantify and identify the populations that face disproportionate burdens, such as expensive and/or unreliable energy. They also mentioned how DOE plans to allocate funding among those areas in accordance with the Justice40 Initiative outlined in Executive Order 14008. However, in order to ensure that 40 percent of investments flow to marginalized communities (as required by the order), the department must employ and understand granular and accurate data. As DOE works to address this challenge, outside research such as the other studies mentioned in the webinar may prove useful.
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In addition to showcasing cutting-edge research on energy insecurity and energy transitions in the United States, the webinar also made it clear why such research is so crucial for ensuring a just transition to a clean energy future. Even when funding is available and the government has made explicit environmental justice commitments, decisionmakers — if they hope to combat energy insecurity — still have to understand how to properly identify, protect, and effectively direct resources towards the communities that need them most.
Click here to view a recording of this webinar and here to register for the next event in this series!
