Staring down the barrel of a smokestack

This is Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about how clean energy is taking on the world, and winning. I’m Julian Spector—by day, I report on clean energy at Greentech Media; for fun, well, I also think and write about clean energy. It’s quarantine, what else is there to do?

If this is your first time here, please subscribe to keep in touch. If you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear them! Reply to the email, or send your thoughts to brightideas@substack.com. My goal is to shed some light on the surprisingly rapid uptake of clean energy, so your feedback is valuable to know how well I’m doing.

Fossil fuels are a racial justice problem, and the clean energy industry could do a lot more for racial justice if it wanted to.

The ongoing protests against the killing of black Americans have already forced changes to the rules governing how police officers treat people. They’re pushing other sectors to examine themselves, and ask what they do to promote racial equality, or perpetuate inequality.

Clean energy is a odd industry in that regard, because it has great potential to help black and brown Americans, by eliminating the pollutants that disproportionately affect those communities. But the industry has not been in a rush to make environmental justice a priority. It shows up in the rhetoric, sometimes, but not so much in the business strategy.

I’m reminded of the city of Oxnard, a majority-Latino community up the coast from L.A., that shocked the energy world by stopping a new fossil fuel plant dead in its tracks. The utility had already awarded the contract; it was going to lock up the beach for decades to come, decades in which sea level rise would cleave that shore away. But the people of Oxnard got together and protested, passed city laws, and, when that failed to stop the proposed plant, appealed to state authorities.

Oxnard’s local resistance halted that gas plant, (read the full story here), and pushed California authorities to examine whether clean energy could do the job instead. The outcome was a massive boon for clean energy developers; one of the world’s biggest lithium-ion batteries is starting construction next month there thanks to that outcome.

The gas plant surely would have gotten built if there weren’t clean alternatives; the experts had determined that California needed it. But clean energy companies didn’t jump in until the grassroots activists had already won.

I keep wondering what it would look like if, more often, the people who know how to build clean energy worked side by side with the people whose lives depend on it.

Power plants reflect political power.

If you wield it, you probably don’t have large industrial facilities burning coal or oil or gas in your backyard. The particulate matter and other pollutants cause asthma, lung disease, heart disease right now, and climate impacts for the long haul. In many parts of the country, that burden falls disproportionately on black and brown residents.

That’s not to say that utilities seek to pollute minority neighborhoods; they labor to keep the lights on. That involves building power plants to meet projected demand, which requires finding adequate sites to build. Places with exorbitant property values and savvy legal representation are harder to build polluting plants in than cheap neighborhoods with limited advocacy resources.

Clean energy offers a win-win here: you can get the power you need, with zero emissions (throw in cheaper price and it’s a triple win).

A few cases set hopeful examples. Oakland is replacing a jet-fuel burning plant in its Jack London Square neighborhood with batteries, some of which will go to low-income housing. A startup called Navajo Power is developing massive solar plants on Navajo land, and channeling some of the proceeds to provide solar systems for homes there that still lack electricity. New York State is enacting a rule to replace the dirtiest power plants with cleaner options.

Other things held equal, nicer not to live here. (Photo courtesy of Creative Commons)

Most of the time, though, the business of energy happens divorced from whatever communities may be rallying for cleaner air to breathe. The expert conversation often misses the lived experience on the ground.

Part of this is profit based. As I’ve noted, markets are great for clean energy now, because it’s become highly cost-competitive. But markets are not great mechanisms for distributing the benefits of clean energy to the people whose lives depend on it; that’s not how we wrote the rules. Some states supplement electricity markets with dedicated funding for low income solar, but that’s different from integrating equity into an energy strategy.

There’s also a personnel problem. My colleague Emma Foehringer Merchant covered the promises clean energy industry groups made following the protests, and how efforts to diversify the mostly white clean energy workforce have fallen short, despite much discussion.

The traits that make a good electrical engineer, battery developer, or solar salesperson don’t ensure awareness or contact with environmental justice movements, even if those movements could help get more clean energy built, like it did in Oxnard. It takes conscious choices by clean energy workers to reach out to communities and see how they can work together.

The same network limitation applies to clean energy journalism. When I reach out to familiar sources at the head of major energy companies, I interview and quote an almost entirely white, elite population. My own writing fails to reflect the populations who have the most at stake in a transition to clean energy.

Sticking within a closed network constrains the stories I can tell, the investments a venture capitalist can make, the deals clean energy companies can sign. Professional self-interest has failed to push us off the path of least resistance. Perhaps the current protests provide the kind of shock that breaks through easy habits. There’s a lot of polluting plants out there, and not enough Oxnards.

The Energy Stream

Each week, I share something I’ve experienced in the midst of quarantine. For this installment, I had enough screen time. My streaming suggestion is an actual fluid: the Pacific Ocean.

As far as state treasures go, the California coastline edges out even the California burrito. It offers ample room to spread out, stretch your toes in the sand and contemplate the vastness of the horizon, instead of the encircling walls of an apartment.

The southern coast also hosts an extended chain of gas plants—L.A., Oxnard, Morro Bay—their smokestacks shooting skyward from the sand and blinking red as the sun slips away. And the domes of two nuclear plants, tucking in for a long retirement with a beautiful view. The waves themselves produce no electricity just yet, because hydrokinetic energy has failed to prove itself economical, and the steep drop of the coastal topography defies easy offshore wind.

Exercise, relaxation, generation, regeneration, this shore has it all. And, unlike so much else in coastal California, it’s free—if you know where to park.