Scoring Justice in Clean Energy Standards — Episode 185 of Local Energy Rules

I reached back out to Shalanda and was like, hey, I’m having a really difficult time finding curriculum that’s really seeing renewable energy through this justice lens that is talking with youth about why we need this and not just using it to fulfill criteria for, you know, how photons work. As I got deeper down this realm, I really started to shed some of that work that I had been focusing on and really realizing that there’s a lot of work to be done here. And yeah, I found my way back to the Initiative for Energy Justice and I’ve been really enjoying my time here because here we focus on research in concert with communities and designing solutions that can be used to promote energy justice.

However, in large part, they don’t adequately consider the justice implications. And so what started to happen in the decades following is primarily black indigenous people of color, low wealth, low income communities were starting to realize that some of these protections codified in these laws, there were loopholes that were allowing them to still be living in polluted communities. To this day, these communities are disproportionately living in neighborhoods that host hazardous waste facilities that are exposed to heavy pollution that is produced through our energy system and as a result, they’re disproportionately carrying the burdens of the system that we all benefit from.

So our goal with producing this scorecard is articulating energy justice specifically in the context of these 100% laws. And so how we define energy justice is a goal of achieving equity in both the social and economic participation of the energy system, while also remediating the social, economic, and health burdens on those who’ve been historically harmed. So you’ll probably hear a bunch of different words for that – this group of people, you’ll hear frontline community, fence line community, the federal government uses disadvantaged community, Minnesota uses environmental justice community. These are all similar terms. And so an important way to move this forward is by centering the concerns of these communities. With our scorecard, we are recognizing that renewable energy and energy justice form a Venn diagram and we’re interested in finding that middle part where renewable energy can be promoted in ways that advance energy justice. And so we created this framework that can be used by policy makers and advocates to both create laws that comprehensively approach multiple dimensions of justice. And so we produced a matrix of policy criteria and they’re organized into five main categories.

They’re organized into process, restoration, decision making, benefits, and access. And so through this process of analyzing this law, you ask yourself, have marginalized communities participated meaningfully in the policymaking process with sufficient support? That’s one aspect. Another aspect is restoration. Does the policy aim to remedy prior and present harms faced by communities that are negatively impacted by this system? The third criteria we’re looking for is decision making. Does the policy center the decision making of marginalized communities in implementation of the law? The fourth is benefits. Does the policy center economic, social, and health benefits for marginalized communities? And access, does the policy make energy more accessible and affordable throughout this process, particularly for marginalized communities? So that’s our framework.

And I can think along all these frameworks that you just mentioned, right, process, right where, were the folks in this Indian community consulted in the development of this clean energy law. Restoration: Are there things that were done to their community in the building of this power plant for example, that we might have addressed. Decision making: Were they involved in the decision making. Benefits: Are they gonna, is the Prairie Island Indian Community going to benefit from our clean energy law and specifically will they have access to more affordable energy or clean energy resources or whatnot? So I think it’s helpful to me at least in thinking about these five frameworks about some specific communities that I know of in Minnesota that have kind of fallen into that category of frontline or environmental justice to imagine that that’s one of the ways that we can evaluate then how Minnesota’s law was adopted, which I realize I’m getting ahead of myself here.

So Minnesota did just adopt a hundred percent carbon free standard. It joined this cadre of states that have 100% policies. Could you maybe give us an overview of like where, where have we seen a hundred percent laws passed, how many states already have them and how does Minnesota fit into that mix in terms of like how recent it was or maybe just at a high level kind of how comprehensive was Minnesota’s legislation?

Fast forward to a couple of the other laws, right? Hawai`i set this precedent and we have laws building on this now. So now we see places like New York, Illinois, Oregon, Washington that are really taking this a bit further are having allocated funding in various programs, are addressing multiple tiers of equity that we talk about on our scorecard, and are really thinking about the larger implications of the transition beyond just flipping a switch on renewable energy. Minnesota is the newest of these laws and overall I’d say it’s pretty middle of the road law, which is a little bit of something to note considering that it’s not surpassing the bar that has been set by laws in the previous couple of years. And that’s a big deal because we see these laws building on each other, learning things and applying those and there are a lot of best practices that other laws have used that Minnesota just kind of didn’t incorporate into their law.

A second part that we’re looking at is you can discern from the law is are there structures that ensure that the rulemaking is going to be improving that access? Minnesota’s law doesn’t really go into detail on this rulemaking structure as much other laws such as New York’s law and Maine’s law establish clear working groups that are gonna cover certain topics. So they might identify something in the law like here’s our definition of marginalized communities and here’s the working group that is gonna take this initial consideration and they’re going to further develop targets and standards and a whole methodology to make sure that this is going to be followed through on. They also might include criteria for who needs to be in those working groups, how they might be compensated, where they’re located in the state, how many sessions, how much time between each to ensure that there’s adequate feedback periods and requirements that the feedback that is being shared is going to be publicly accessible online. So Minnesota doesn’t do any of this.

Secondarily, going on to decision making, overall this category was the lowest performing across all of the first 10 laws that we considered in our justice in 100 analysis. This really kind of gets at challenging the existing structures for how our energy system works, right? It considers how this law will advance equity and respect tribal sovereignty, how it’s going to increase community governments and energy ownership over community power resources. Minnesota’s law doesn’t meaningfully consider any of this, which is significant considering that there’s seven Anishinaabe reservations and four Dakota communities in Minnesota and that there’s not the existing energy legislation that will ensure that these communities have free prior and informed consent and are going to be involved in this because as we’re building these massive energy resources, as you said, they’re going to be highly impacted and so it’s very important to have protections in here.

So the law, I will add, does have a solar standard of 1.5% and I believe a 10th of that is making way for distributed energy, but there’s no indication that any of that will be community owned or governed and is 1.5% really meaningful? I heard you in another podcast mention something around like if I told my kids they could watch, you know, 1.5% of a movie, are they gonna feel satisfied? So the answer is no. This meaningfully is not increasing community power or access in ownership over these resources.

But some of the things that you just talked about like with the Washington or the bill assistance, Minnesota did expand its utility bill assistance program this session in separate legislation after it had already passed a hundred percent bill (EDITORS NOTE: a bill was introduced to expand utility bill assistance, but did not pass). So I do wanna give credit to lawmakers for coming back after the fact and improving on some of these things. Similarly with the amendments to the community solar program, which I could talk about it, what what we, I’ll bring up later if it feels relevant, but at any rate I do, I did wanna at least give some credit where credit is due that this bill was not the only energy policy that passed. But I think it’s noteworthy because of the process and one of the reasons I wanted you to come talk about it was because it was passed as a standalone and there was no guarantee when it was passed that these other things might happen. Although they ultimately did.

Another best practice for talking about identifying benefits is involving communities who are impacted in the identification of those benefits so that you’re really getting to the core of designing solutions that are producing things that are actually wanted and can remediate those past harms. Sort of a lens that I’m bringing here when I’m gonna look at Minnesota’s subdivision on benefits is thinking about like the chrome finish versus the nuts and bolts, right? The chrome finish might say here we want, these are the benefits that Minnesota’s hoping to achieve with this renewable standard, but I wanna know like do you have the structures to actually make this work? Because if you’re gonna give me a car, there better be a steering wheel inside.

And so if we jump to this subdivision on local benefits, first of all, it’s unclear whether this is gonna apply to municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives or only actions by investor-owned utilities because it’s stated as saying the commission, which only oversees the investor-owned utilities, all reasonable actions within its statutory authority in a manner that maximizes net benefits to all Minnesotans end quote. Then it introduces what these benefits are. So a plus one for Minnesota that the benefits are specific, it wants to improve the quality of jobs and wages, workers’ rights to organize and unionize, resources to help workers transition, the reduction of emissions, particularly in environmental justice communities, providing affordable electric service, and prioritizing local ownership of renewable energy resources. So if we apply our scorecard lens to this, we see that they’ve talked about multiple economic goals, only one health benefit and there aren’t any environmental benefits. So while the benefits are specific, they are a bit narrow in their scope.

And then secondarily jumping into the nuts and bolts, the commission is supposed to take reasonable actions, but it doesn’t actually establish specific targets for help for what benefits need to be created or any sort of tracking or reporting that ensures that these benefits are actually gonna be produced. Let’s jump into jobs as an example, because jobs actually does the best at producing some of these nuts and bolts. So for jobs, the legislation includes definitions for local worker and local job impacts and it requires that utilities report on local job impacts in the resource plans that they’re filing every two years. As well as that they should be giving preference in project bids and citing in order to be optimizing jobs for local workers.

So those are examples of some of the nuts and bolts that can be done to ensure that that benefit is being created. However, if you step back a little bit, there is no funding at all or dedicated programs whereas other laws might be taking funding, maybe it comes from penalties the utilities have to pay for not meeting requirements, and they put those into funds that can be creating programs for like training workers, which is important because if you have a coal facility shut down and you don’t actually have any retraining programs to help the folks in that community get the skills that are maybe needed to transition into this renewable energy area, it becomes really easy for a utility to say hey, we really want to improve job opportunities for local workers, but we don’t have any workers who have these skills so we can’t do that.

And then a step beyond that, there’s not really any focus on broader social net for displaced workers, right? It recognizes that jobs are important because that’s where you get your income, that’s where you get your healthcare. But if workers are gonna be affected in this transition, there isn’t any protections for those workers while they’re transitioning. So stepping back to look at all of the benefits, one thing that the law could do to really improve is make a better effort at integrating these elements of design into all the parts of the law between A to Z. So you have those of requirements that need to be considered when utilities are looking at proposed projects and when you’re thinking about citing and when you’re thinking about where funding can go to create these programs.

I did actually wanna say one thing though that I think is funny that you caught in your analysis here when you asked about like whether this will apply to municipal municipally owned utilities or to rural electric cooperatives, which is this funny habit we have in Minnesota of calling private monopoly companies in state statute “public utilities.” And it is a very confusing thing for people who are coming and working on energy policy in Minnesota to be like, oh, a public utility and they immediately think that means that it’s government owned or it’s city owned or whatever and it’s like, no, no, no in our backwards law, public utility means the privately owned ones and then the municipal and the co-op utilities are called something else entirely.

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So defining environmental justice communities is a strategy that 100% laws use but can also be used outside of 100% laws to hone in on which group of people have been most marginalized by the energy system and tie that to protections at minimum to mitigate the disproportionately negative impacts. But ideally these definitions would be tied to also increasing benefits for these groups. And so my coworker at the Initiative for Energy Justice, Marisa Sotolongo ran this analysis for us in our justice in 100 report, which will be coming out later this summer. I can share links to about that. And she identified that the first ten one hundred percent laws use three different approaches to defining environmental justice communities. The first is a business as usual, there’s no definition, no recognition. The second is an income or economic based approach. This is a little bit old school. We see this across a lot of government programs where you use a single indicator of income to determine whether someone is eligible for a bill assistance program and it’s usually applied in a relatedly narrow manner like for a single program to the third one. Now we’re looking at a cumulative impact or index approach and this is actually what Minnesota uses. So that’s like already a plus one for Minnesota. A cumulative impact approach considers multiple indicators that are often related to environmental burdens, climate change risk, population characteristics such as race, income, English language fluency, as well as health vulnerabilities and jurisdictions that have developed these cumulative indices generally do so after extensive community engagement sessions with advocacy organizations and environmental justice communities, this is generally a best practice for developing these definitions. And the same process can be bundled in order to prioritize program funding and identify which benefits these communities want to see as a result of these policies.

So in terms of Minnesota’s definition, I’m not sure what the process was for how this definition came together. Some of the other laws, what they do in their legislation will propose a definition and then assign a working group. I think it was New York that had the working group was gonna take that definition. And then there were gonna be six like public opportunities and hearings, particularly trying to reach folks who are identified in this analysis as a disadvantaged community to come speak on their methodology around that.

Minnesota’s definition, it does take the cumulative impacts approach and it does include race, which is important for addressing the legacy of racist government policies that have led to the disproportionate environmental impacts that we’re witnessing. However, it doesn’t include anything relating to health or environmental vulnerabilities. So there are potential gaps where if you’re not meeting some of the other criteria, but you’re sited near a polluting facility, it’s not necessarily fully comprehensive. I should have said this a little earlier, but the definition that Minnesota uses is, it defines environmental justice areas based on four criteria and in order to be qualified as an environmental justice area, you just have to meet at least one of those. That is 40% or more of the area’s total population is non-white, 35% or more of households in the area are below a certain income level, 40% or more of the area’s residents over the age of five have limited English proficiency, and the area is located in quote unquote Indian country. So that’s the conclusion of our first look at. So that’s for Minnesota’s law stance in terms of how it’s defining environmental justice communities.

Now let’s turn to look at how it’s tied to goals or objectives. So Minnesota does actually tie the definition to some goals and objectives, which is great because sometimes laws will just throw out a definition and then just leave it there and you’re like, but why is this useful? And Minnesota does attempt to reduce harms through this definition. In their investor owned utility reports to the commission every two years, they need to report on the impacts to environmental justice communities that are might occur from new facilities that they’re building. And the commission can use this information to delay implementation of the standard if they think it is important in order to reduce adverse impacts on these communities while they pivot and think about different solution options. The utility also has to report on efforts made to increase diversity of both the utility’s workforce and its vendors. So that’s our goal. Now let’s take a look at how meaningful that goal is.

Statements like impacts to and efforts made without accompanying targets or a methodology for defining terms that they’re using, such as impacts and diverse, as well as provisions for including community leaders in these decision making, makes the outcome a little bit questionable because there isn’t a specific target where the utility can look at and say hey, this hasn’t been met, there is this harm that is happening to these communities, let’s actually pivot. So it’s, it leaves it a little bit ambiguous and vague.

The second thing that the definition does is it attempts to increase benefit to these environmental justice communities. But this also is tied to that benefit section I talked about earlier where it’s, it’s all voluntary, there’s no follow through, there’s no targets and for instance it might say our goal to reduce emissions in environmental justice areas, but there’s no enforceable targets and there’s not even a discussion of what emissions are. Are they only talking about carbon dioxide emissions, which would then be satisfied by this law, or are we talking about other harmful pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and particulate matter that are really causing the asthma, chronic lung issues and cancer risk that we’re seeing in these communities.

I’m not gonna issue a statement here on whether benefits or money is a better tracking to do, but the real takeaway is that Minnesota doesn’t do either and really just ties it to a couple of piecemeal goals throughout the law instead of really taking this opportunity to tie it to the law in a more comprehensive way.

Cuz as I mentioned before, there are some interesting things around community solar. There was a separate cumulative impacts bill, although it notably only includes three metropolitan areas and not the entire state, which is rather interesting. But there were, like I said, a number of other things. But the second thing might be to look at this question of implementation. So as I alluded to earlier, maybe lawmakers were looking here and saying okay, we’re not going to get too much into the weeds here cuz that’s not our specialty. We’ll let the public Utilities commission figure out implementation. Does it feel like there’s an opening here for people to go to the Public Utilities Commission and say hey you know you’re gonna have these reports from the utilities, this is what we want you to ask for in those reports or even stronger maybe we want you to set some goals for what it means to provide benefits or to avoid harms or to reduce emissions.

And so what I would lean on is this sort of idea of maybe we don’t include it now and it’ll come down the pipeline later is not an outcome that we often see and that it is important to have these structures or at least have, you know, you don’t necessarily have to have the whole plan but to say hey there’s this group over here and they’re gonna work on it and here’s the funding for it and here’s how we’re gonna follow up on that note. That’s how we run a project at my job. You know if we say, hey we wanna get a blog post out, we’re not just gonna say let’s get a blog post out and then just hope that someone writes one, right? We’re gonna like say, hey you team over here, why don’t you set up a meeting next week and talk about what next steps we need to do to get this blog post.

I do think that you bring up a good point of how this definition will be useful in these other laws that have come down later in the session laws that I haven’t myself looked at.

But I think there’s something here too that this law hasn’t really grappled with and it’s how this relates to the definition of renewable energy. Because at the end of the day, the core reason for this law existing is for defining renewable energy and setting targets for how that transitions. While it’s important to consider how this law in its totality promotes energy justice, it’s really important to look at that core reason for this law existing the definition and see if structurally it is sound to promote justice. When we looked at the first 10 laws for their definition of renewable energy, we found that none of the laws actually define renewable based on principles of what the goal is you’re trying to achieve.

So without some sort of standard of reducing health, compromising pollutants, thinking about impacts on water resources, impacts on the nearby communities, you’re not creating a standard that you can hold technologies to decide if they meet the cut or not. So the definition of renewable energy is basically just throwing out here’s all the technologies that are renewable, which leads us to look at what do these technologies have in common? And what we found for the first time laws is that 60% of the technologies defined as renewable in one jurisdiction are defined as non-renewable in another jurisdiction, which is pretty significant when you think about the fact that all of these technologies have really different impacts. And so you might be experiencing something based on where you live that someone else might be protected from.

So these laws in totality are not creating a clear vision that is moving all of us towards the same place. Minnesota is keeping with this trend in that overall it defines a goal of achieving 100% carbon-free energy by 2040. Carbon-free is defined as any technology that doesn’t produce carbon dioxide emissions. However, because the law didn’t explicitly phase out methane gas or coal, potentially these facilities could continue running as long as they have carbon and capture storage. This lays the law for nuclear to continue and at the end of the day, only 55% of that total 100% needs to be met by renewable energy. And if we even look at the definition of renewable energy, which includes solar, wind, hydroelectric, renewable hydrogen, and biomass, and let’s just say Minnesota’s definition of biomass is really broad and includes technologies that other laws consider as renewable natural gas and waste incineration. So it’s kind of even hiding behind this term of biomass and it’s including a lot of really harmful things that I’m not gonna go into all of these specific technologies, but I’d like to use one as a case study for some of the harms that we’re seeing. And so I’m gonna hone in on hydrogen because hydrogen is being promoted as this fuel that can replace methane gas could also be used in fuel cells to power vehicles.

But what we’re seeing is that first of all, hydrogen is very much in a research and development phase and New York initiated several pilot projects. The Brentwood pilot project found that as they increased the fraction of hydrogen when they were burning methane gas, the nitrogen oxide emissions, these are emissions that cause significant impacts to lung health, was increasing by 24% with every fraction of hydrogen that was blended in. And so what we’re finding is that this fuel that we’re considering as a replacement for methane gas actually increases some of the localized pollutants in an area and in order to reduce those pollutants, they’re using large amounts of water to dilute this. So it’s also a really water intensive energy resource. On top of that, generating hydrogen takes a lot of energy. So you sort of have this cyclical thing where in order to get energy, you need to use energy to get this fuel source. So at the end of the day, if you look at this specific energy resource, the communities that are living by it are gonna be continuing to experience a lot of the harmful local effects that they’re already experiencing by living near natural gas methane plants. And so you have these goals of reducing impacts to environmental justice communities, but then you’re selecting renewable technologies that are continuing the same harmful impacts that they’ve been living under.

And I think to broaden this up, it’s really important that we need to start by recognizing that no energy technology is impact free, right? Every single technology is gonna have some sort of a negative impact. But if we get real on that, then we’re able to broaden our scope to think about what real problems we’re facing and design solutions that actually can mitigate some of those problems. So I’m gonna use battery technologies as an example. Battery technologies are really important in this renewable energy transition, right? This is what’s gonna hold a lot of our solar power that comes in intermittently, but they themselves have a lot of issues.

So I’m gonna refer y’all to achieving zero emissions with more mobility and less mining, is this report that came out from Climate and Community project and they ran a couple examples and found that under the status quo, right, if we just take this whole system that we’re currently living in and just flip it to renewable energy, the U.S. alone is gonna require three times the current global production of lithium just to develop our battery resources. This is significant cuz this is just the U.S., we’re not talking about the rest of the world. And on top of this, 78% of these known deposits sit within 35 miles of an indigenous community and the majority of them are in the Global South. So this isn’t in the future, this is already happening. You’re already seeing indigenous communities in the Atacama Desert in South America resisting these projects coming in to extract lithium that is largely being exported to the global north for us to meet our renewable energy goals.

And so what I’m sharing is to say is not that we shouldn’t use battery technologies, but that this report ran a couple different scenarios, right? So they ran that business as usual scenario, but they ran a couple other scenarios where we are changing what we’re doing, we’re prioritizing public transportation. So we’re not just designing policies that encourage everyone to go out and buy an electric vehicle. They’re talking about changing the way that we’re thinking about recycling manufactured materials and they found that if we make some larger structural changes, we can limit the lithium that we are using by up to 92% in 2050 in comparison to the most lithium intensive scenarios. So I bring this forward today to say that like renewable energy is really important, but what this lot doesn’t get at is it’s not really thinking about the larger system changes, it’s just trying to flip a switch and change where our power’s coming from. And this will reduce carbon emissions potentially, but it is not going to be limiting all of the other problems that we’re gonna continue to have to face if we wanna live on this earth. Namely where our water is coming from and where our other minerals are coming from and just how to be in community with people.

So I just, I really think those examples are amazing in terms of the way that they help us frame whether or not a hundred percent policies are actually doing their job of addressing these harms. And I just love this idea that we should be writing them in such a way, not so narrowly focused on like a hundred percent renewable energy and here’s six things that are renewable, but about here are the things that we want to happen in this transition and this bill is intended to do that and to maximize those benefits on our way to a hundred percent renewable. That would give us a lot of context about, well what should we pick? Do we wanna do solar and wind or do we wanna do hydrogen or do we wanna do batteries? And what should we be doing? What choices should we be making there, in a much more comprehensive way? So thank you so much for joining me to talk about Minnesota’s a hundred percent law, but also giving a much broader context about how we think about the renewable energy transition.