Editor’s note: Miles Braxton’s company is Okovate Sustainable Energy. A previous version of this post misspelled the company’s name.

Agrivoltaics — co-locating solar arrays with farming operations — is generating enthusiasm among both farmers and clean energy advocates as a way to promote sustainability in agriculture. 

When implemented correctly, agrivoltaics provides a vital dual income stream for farmers — in solar energy generation, but also as a means of providing an optimal growing environment for compatible crops and herds. The added revenue may allow more farmers to retain their land for themselves and future generations. 

While pilot projects around the country are identifying best practices, not all have been successful, and practitioners say that advancing the technology will require an equitable approach that centers farmers’ needs first.

A discussion during the recent Solar Farm Summit in Rosemont, Illinois, directly addressed the issue, featuring a majority-Black panel of practitioners and service providers. Three major themes emerged during the discussion: maximizing compatibility of solar arrays with existing land use, demonstrating the financial benefits of agrivoltaics, and addressing how solar power can help BIPOC farmers hold on to their land.

“I think one thing that, through our work in this technical assistance, has become very, very clear [is] that people don’t just want to build an agrivoltaics project for the sake of building an agrivoltaics project,” said Jordan Macknick of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), who also served as moderator for the discussion. “How does agrivoltaics enable you to take that next step and focus on things like succession planning or farmer training?”

Benefits for farmers

Miles Braxton started his company, Okovate Sustainable Energy, to work exclusively on “farmer-focused” solar development.

Braxton said after several years of developing community solar projects, he “really saw the inefficiencies” of taking farmland out of production for solar projects. “That’s a problem that is just going to keep piling on top of itself until it gets to the point where we can’t develop anything.

“We target crop farmers who are growing a very specific suite of crops that we know works well with our design,” Braxton said.

Cetta Barnhart, owner of Seed Time Harvest Farms in Florida, also cultivates her own plot of fruits and vegetables, and cited her background in food and wellness in promoting the compatibility of solar and agriculture to benefit the bottom line for farmers.

“This is more hands-on of what a farmer can really do in their current practices. If they’re raising cattle, there’s a way that they implement solar with that. If they are having bare land, the pollinator is another way that they can benefit from that,” she said. “So how these solar projects are developed and created for real farmers is still a big conversation to be had.“ 

Ena Jones, owner of Roots & Vine Produce and Café, and president of Community Partners for Black Farmers, cited her dual role as a working farmer and an advocate as an advantage in promoting the potential compatibility of agrivoltaics and cultivation — especially for Black farmers.

“We advocate and we also lobby for farmers at the state level for the state of Illinois and the state of Georgia. And I’m here to kind of segue to help farmers understand … how different solar opportunities can help them with production on their farms, and be an asset to the production on their farms. And also, to help solar developers understand farm[ing],” Jones said.

Noting that solar projects can help cut energy costs, Jones said “Energy use is one of the farmer’s [major] expenses outside of diesel, and of course seed. So, if they can reduce that cost dramatically, even by a third, that would impact their bottom line in revenue extensively. It is very important, especially for BIPOC farmers, to be ushered into this technology so that they won’t be left behind in the process.”

Making connections

Agrivoltaics can be a valuable tool to reduce overall costs, expand potential revenue – or both – as a means of promoting optimal use of farmland. A both-and approach can work to address what is often an inherent tension between the best use of large, flat plots of land for large solar arrays – parcels that also frequently comprise some of the richest soil for cultivation. 

For example, the 180 MW Madison Fields project in Ohio represents a test ground for large-scale agrivoltaics – farming on 1,900 acres between the rows of a utility-scale solar array. One of the project’s focuses is determining which crops and herds are the best prospects to coexist with large-scale solar developments.

“People have a lot of questions with regard to energy development going forward in this state … Finding a balance where you can do a number of things on the same ground — in this case energy production as well as agricultural production — is obviously huge,” Dale Arnold, director of energy policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau told the Energy News Network in July.

Macknick highlighted another project where NREL and Clean Energy to Communities (C2C), along with the Black Farmers Collaborative, worked on a proof of concept project which incorporated solar panels on a demonstration farm cultivated by Barnhart that features citrus trees, leafy greens, and other produce.

“I had already looked into doing solar on my property and was just looking at it to have solar as the backup,” Barnhart said. “But when we started talking as a team and then we found out about the agrivoltaics portion [and] how that can be incorporated into farming, it really brought forth a bigger and better opportunity to not just benefit by having it but also sharing that with other farmers,” Barnhart told NREL in 2023.

Mike DellaGala of Solar Collective said taking a farmer-centered approach can also be beneficial to product and service providers.

“I think a lot of the conversation … has been the difference between farmers and developers, and how we are or [are] not communicating and getting projects over the finish line or not. And I think… if you’re farmer-first or farmer-centric, I think that’s the way to success for everybody… allowing [farmers] to dictate a lot of the project details has been really successful for us. And it makes our job easier, frankly,” DellaGala said.

A farmer-centric and collaborative approach is especially vital in ensuring equitable access to the benefits of agrivoltaics for BIPOC farmers, Barnhart said.

“I stand in the gap somewhat between having conversations with [BIPOC] farmers and having conversations with project developers because you need someone in the middle. I’m a community advocate. I hope there are more of us in the room than not. They have to be in place in order to bridge the conversation as to how this really works well in real-life time,” Barnhart said.

Braxton cited the need to rein in the power of utilities, which he says frequently raise roadblocks to community-level projects to protect their own interests. 

“Utilities have too much power. They have too much money to lobby. They don’t want you to sell power back to your community because [of the impact to] their own rates that they can control. So that’s a risk. The root of those problems is that here in the U.S. … we have 50 little countries [states] that make up their own policies and do their own thing… I think there needs to be a policy to incentivize solar to be developed innovatively. I don’t think policy makers at the state level understand the importance of that,” Braxton said.

Jones noted that policy change will likely be driven by farmer demand, which by extension benefits the larger community.

“In my opinion, once the farmers understand [how solar can] help them on their farms, I can’t say this enough, they will force politicians to comply. The money will be there; the funding will be there. But the engagement needs to happen. It desperately needs to happen,” she said.

Land retention for BIPOC farmers

Loss of land –through racism and other factors, has long been a contentious topic among BIPOC farmers – and Black farmers in particular. According to a 2022 study, discriminatory federal policies contributed to Black farmers losing roughly $326 billion worth of acreage during the 20th century. In July, the Biden-Harris administration announced a distribution of $2 billion to thousands of Black and other minority farmers, created through the Inflation Reduction Act as a means to begin to address this inequity.

Agrivoltaics may not intuitively track as a relevant strategy for land retention; but Barnhart touted its value, especially for Black farmers. 

“[Black farmers] have lost a lot of land because we just couldn’t afford to keep it… We didn’t just lose land because it was confiscated… What solar does is add an income stream or a reduction in your expenses so that there’s more you can do on your farm and create an opportunity for the next generation. 

“It gives us a reason to keep the land going, and it gives us, in our community, resiliency we are experiencing through our climate change storms. For the families that can have that piece of land, that builds a resiliency to protect them in their neighborhoods, protect their own backyard, and protect the future generations, give the future generations something they can look forward to that makes sense to them. Then we build into something that takes care of our wealth building opportunities, our succession planning, and our look into the future to make a change,” Barnhart said.

How a ‘farmer-first’ approach could lead to more successful agrivoltaics projects is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Darryl Moton is ready to “get on a roof.”

The 25-year-old Chicago resident is among the latest graduates of an intensive 13-week solar training course that’s helping to connect employers with job candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

Moton was referred by another job readiness program meant to keep youth away from gun violence. He “never knew about solar” before but now sees himself owning a solar company and using the proceeds to fund his music and clothing design endeavors.

He and others interviewed for jobs with a dozen employers assembled at a church on Chicago’s West Side on August 1 as part of the fourth training cohort for the 548 Foundation, which is partnering with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on a recently-announced $30 million initiative to create 1,000 solar jobs in Chicago’s South and West side neighborhoods.   

The 548 Foundation is part of 548 Enterprise, a suite of renewable energy and affordable housing development projects, launched in 2019 and named after the public housing unit where co-founder A.J. Patton grew up. 

The idea is to help keep housing affordable by using solar to lower energy bills, while training people left out of the traditional energy economy to supply that solar. 

“When you invest in a community, the biggest question is who benefits, who gets the jobs?” asked Patton, during the job fair. “This is as good as it gets,” he added, about the recent state investment. “We just have to keep advocating for quality policy.” 

Employers at the job fair said such training programs are crucial for them to find workers in Illinois, where robust solar incentives are attracting many out-of-state companies eager to hire and hit the ground. Mike Huneke, energy operations manager for Minnesota-based Knobelsdorff said he has hired 18 employees from previous 548 cohorts, and he expected to make about six job offers after the recent interviews. 

“Illinois is on fire,” said Huneke. “We’re not from Illinois, so finding this new talent pipeline is what we need. We have a ton of projects coming up.” 

Lisa Cotton, 30, has dreamed of being an electrician since she was a kid. She had received two job offers at the August 1 fair before the group even broke for lunch. 

“A lot of times you go through a training program, get a certificate, and that’s the end of it,” said Jacqueline Williams of the Restoring Sovereignty Project, a partner which administers the wraparound services for the training program. 

The 548 program makes sure to connect graduates with employers, and only companies with specific openings to fill are invited to the job fair. 548 and its partners also stay in contact with graduates and employers to make sure the placement is successful. 

“We have a post-grad program where they can call us any time, and an alumni fund. If an employer says, ‘This guy can’t come to work because his radiator is busted,’ we’ll take care of that,” said Williams. 

Achieving equity   

After Illinois passed an ambitious clean energy law in 2017, multiple solar training programs were launched in keeping with the law’s equity provisions. But employers and advocates were frustrated by a seeming disconnect in which many trainees never got solar jobs, and employers weren’t sure how to find the workers. 

Since then, the state has passed another clean energy law – the 2021 Climate & Equitable Jobs Act, with even more ambitious equity mandates; and non-profit organizations have developed and honed more advanced workforce training programs. To access incentives under the law, employers need to hire a percent of equity-eligible applicants that rises to 30% by 2030. The program prioritizes people impacted by the criminal justice system, alumni of the foster care system, and people who live in equity-designated communities. 

548 affiliates help employers navigate the paperwork and requirements involved in the equity incentives. Several employers at the job fair said this is a plus, but noted that regardless of equity, they are desperate for the type of highly-trained, enthusiastic candidates coming out of the 548 program. 

“This is a great way to bridge what the state is trying to do with its clean energy goals, and connecting under-represented people with these opportunities,” said Annette Poulimenos, talent acquisition manager of Terrasmart, a major utility-scale solar provider. “We came here ready to hire, and I think we’re going to walk away with some new talent.”   

Member organizations of the Chicago Coalition for Intercommunalism do outreach to recruit most of the training program participants. 

Nicholas Brock found out about the training thanks to a staffer at one of these organizations who noticed his professional attitude and punctuality as he walked by every morning to a different workforce program. 

“Whatever I do, nine times out of 10, I’m the first one to get there, before the managers,” said Brock, 20. “He noticed that and asked me, ‘Have you ever heard about solar panels?’” 

Brock knew little about solar at that point, but now he aims to be a solar project manager. 

“I’m so glad I came here,” he said. “They bring out the best in you.” 

Full service 

Wraparound, holistic services are key to the program’s success. During the training and for a year afterwards, trainees and alumni can apply for financial help or other types of assistance. 

“There are so many barriers, it might be child care or your car is impounded,” said Williams. “We might be writing a letter to a judge asking to ‘please take him off house arrest so he can work.’ It’s intensive case management, navigating the bureaucratic anomalies that arise when you’re system-impacted.”

Moises Vega III, 26 – who always wanted to work in renewables because “it’s literally the future” – noted that his car battery died during the training program, and he was provided funds to get his vehicle working again. 

While ample support is available, the program itself is rigorous and demanding. Classes meet from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, and trainees are required to check their phones at the door and be fully focused, notes instructor and 548 workforce strategies director Michael Thomas. During the hands-on boot camp week, the day starts at 6 a.m. 

“That’s when the trades start,” noted Thomas. “You need to figure out how that works, how will you get child care at 5:30 a.m.?” 

Sixty-one trainees started in the first three cohorts, and 46 graduated, the first group in July 2023. The fourth cohort started with 25, and as of the job fair, 18 were on track to graduate. Eighty-five percent of graduates from the first three cohorts are currently working in the field, according to 548. 

“Even though I wish the graduation rate were higher, the people who commit to it, stay with it,” said Kynnée Golder, CEO of Global HR Business Solutions, which has an oversight role for the 548 Foundation. “It’s monumental, it’s life-changing for a lot of people.” 

Comprehensive curriculum 

The curriculum starts with life skills, including interpersonal relationships, resume-building, financial planning and more. Each day begins with a spiritual reflection. 

The students learn about electricity and energy, and soon move into specific instruction on solar installation and operation. Rooms at St. Agatha’s church served as labs, where students connected wires, built converters and eventually mounted solar panels on a demonstration pitched, shingled roof. 

Terrance Hanson, 40, credited Thomas as “the best instructor ever.” 

“I’m not a young kid, my brain is no longer a sponge,” Hanson said. “He made sure I got it all. Now I feel like I know so much, I’m confident and prepared to get out and show what I can do.” 

He added that people in disinvested neighborhoods have ample untapped potential to be part of the clean energy workforce.  

“You see a lot of basketball players in my community because there are a lot of basketball hoops,” he said. “If there were golf courses in the hood, you would see more golfers. It’s about opportunities. And this was the most amazing and empowering thing I’ve ever been through.” 

Jack Ailey co-founded Ailey Solar in 2012, making it the oldest still-operating residential installer in Illinois, by his calculations. He noted that there can be high turnover among installers, and intensive training and preparation is key. 

“You’re out there in the sun, the cold, it’s heavy physical labor, wrestling 40-pound panels up to the roof,” he said. “You have to know what you’re getting into.” 

“Some training programs vary in quality,” Ailey added, but he was impressed by the candidates at the 548 job fair. 

Trainees test for and receive multiple certifications, including the OSHA 30 for quality assurance, and the NCCER and NABCEP for construction and solar professionals, respectively. The program is also a pre-apprenticeship qualifier, allowing graduates to move on to paid, long-term apprenticeships with unions representing carpenters, electricians, plumbers and laborers – the gateway to a lucrative and stable career in the trades. 

Thomas noted that most trade unions still don’t have a major focus on solar. 

“We’re ahead of the unions, and our graduates bring real value to them, and to the companies,” he said. “The students might know more than a company’s foreman knows. It’s a win-win situation. Solar is a nascent industry, there’s so much opportunity in this space.” 

When Tredgett Page, 38, connected with 548, his auto detailing work and other odd jobs were not going well. He had always loved science and been curious about photosynthesis and the sun’s power. 

“I had been in the streets before, and I was leaning back toward that, but God brought me here,” he said. “Now I have the confidence, I know what I’m talking about, I know about megawatts and kilowatts, net metering, grid-connected, pretty much anything about solar.” 

He sees metaphorical significance in his new trade: “Energy is life, and it teaches you balance, it’s all about negative and positive ions.” He feels like “the sky is the limit” after the training. 

“I have so much skill that they gave me, now I’m hungry to use it,” he said. “I’m a little nervous, but optimistic, excited, very exuberant!”  

‘The sky is the limit’: Solar program opens new opportunities for Chicago trainees is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Growing up in Southern California, Saxon Metzger and his brother Ayda Donne — now 29 and 26 — didn’t think much about their Indigenous heritage in Oklahoma. Their great-grandmother’s family fled the reservation after her aunt saw her mother murdered during the Osage Reign of Terror, when locals brutally attacked tribal members over oil resources, as the brothers learned while researching the family history.

In the past decade, the brothers began exploring this history, including the fossil-fuel linked violence and exploitation recently showcased in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Today, the Osage Nation is home to the country’s highest concentration of abandoned, uncapped oil and gas wells, which continue to leak methane and other dangerous pollutants. 

Now, Metzger and Donne are seeking to connect with and give back to the Osage Nation and other tribal communities by making sure clean energy does not leave its own legacy of abandonment or disinvestment. 

Eighth Generation Consulting, an organization Metzger founded, aims to provide solar decommissioning workforce training and project management, as well as promote solar installation. 

“Tribal nations, along with many other historically disenfranchised communities, are justifiably skeptical of development that doesn’t fully acknowledge its potential shortcomings, having been bearing the brunt of fossil fuels,” Metzger said. 

Osage Nation Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear has officially pledged support for the brothers’ vision. In March, Eighth Generation won a U.S. Department of Energy Community Energy Innovation concept phase prize, meaning a $100,000 grant, mentorship and the chance for more DOE funding. Metzger was also recently awarded a Grid Alternatives Tribal Energy Innovators Fellowship, which comes with $50,000 and mentorship, and he is a finalist for MIT’s Solve Global Challenges Indigenous Communities Fellowship program. 

Family roots 

Metzger studied economics at Southern Illinois University and the University of Utah, then returned to Southern Illinois to help facilitate the deployment of solar in the largely rural, lower-income region. 

He was program director for the nonprofit Solarize Southern Illinois, then worked as a project developer for StraightUp Solar, a residential and commercial solar installer focused on underserved areas in Illinois and Missouri. Metzger got an MBA with an emphasis in sustainability from Wilmington University, then worked for a decommissioning company in California. 

Striking out on his own, he co-founded a company called Polaris Ecosystems that does solar decommissioning project management and consulting. Polaris is under contract to support commercial and utility-scale repowering in California and Texas, Metzger said, declining to give more details because of confidentiality clauses in the contracts. 

The company collaborated with a Georgia solar waste management company called Green Clean Solar, whose founder, Emilie Oxel O’Leary, said she plans to partner with Polaris on more contracts. Her company has found ways to reuse solar packaging and components – for example, using thousands of cardboard boxes from solar delivery as mulch for a tree nursery in Hawaii, where landfill space is especially scarce. 

“Saxon and I find these solutions together. We find sustainability. We bring circularity to our conversations,” she said. “Very few [companies] do what we do. These billion-dollar companies have never stopped and thought about this.” 

Metzger now leads Eighth Generation and Polaris from Chicago, while also teaching a sustainable business class at Wilmington University. 

Donne is in charge of grant-writing for Eighth Generation, while pursuing his doctorate in English literature at New York University, with a focus on Indigenous literature and environmental justice. Donne also collaborates with NYU professor and toxicologist Judith Zelikoff, doing blood and urine testing and health workshops with the Ramapough Lenape Nation in New Jersey, who face serious health threats from a former Ford Motor Company illegal dump that is now a Superfund site. Donne hopes to further intertwine the humanities and STEM sides of academia in pursuit of environmental and energy justice for tribes.  

“My family is very scarred by what happened during the reign of terror. They tried to run” from that legacy, said Donne, who also works as chief librarian at the International Center for MultiGenerational Legacies of Trauma. “But repressing things like that rarely works, rarely protects you for very long. I like to think that Saxon and my work is kind of a departure from that history of denying our identity and running from the pain that’s in our family.” 

On visits to the Osage Nation, the brothers say they’ve recognized the cultural as well as economic importance that fossil fuels still hold for the tribe. They strive to acknowledge and respect this dynamic while promoting clean energy. The tribe currently has no large-scale solar on its land, and this year a federal judge ruled that a controversial wind farm must be removed because it failed to get proper permits a decade ago. The tribe has long opposed the wind farm, which was built on sacred land.    

“We’re trying to plug into the existing things that they’re doing, and not show up and say, ‘Hey, we know what the solution is,’” said Metzger. “This is my tribe, these are my folks, my culture, my people. But I am approaching it with the understanding that to a certain degree, I’m also an outsider from a market that they don’t have access to.” 

Metzger added that when he first visited the Osage Nation, “I didn’t see a single solar panel, on the entirety of the reservation. I looked for it. I was shocked. It was one of the few places I’ve ever seen that there were no Trump flags, and there were no solar panels.” 

Metzger said that it is still likely a long road to installing solar on the reservation, but he’s been encouraged by tribal leaders, and received a letter of support in July from Osage Chief Standing Bear. 

A growing need 

More than half of states have decommissioning policies that require financial assurances be put up in advance, according to a 2023 year-end report by the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center and DSIRE. Nineteen states have no state-level decommissioning policies at all, the report shows, including Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

“When it comes to assurance policies, you want to make sure landowners won’t be stuck with the bill at the end of the day, a dine-and-dash situation,” said Justin Lindemann, a co-author of the report and policy analyst at North Carolina State University’s Clean Energy Technology Center. “In most states, you have to have these finances in place well before the project decommissions.” 

Solar project contracts and permits typically include a decommissioning estimate. In states with financial assurance requirements, developers are usually required to put up incremental amounts of financing over time for decommissioning, so that there is not a major financial burden tacked on to the project’s startup cost. 

Metzger said that in his experience, estimates can be unrealistically low, a situation that in the near-term can benefit everyone, as the project cost appears lower. 

“The reality is that our industry doesn’t really want to have that conversation” about decommissioning costs and logistics, “because a developer, if they included the full cost of decommissioning, would not sell as many projects,” Metzger said. “No one really wants to hear that the project is going to cost more.” 

Lindemann said he hasn’t seen major problems with low-balled estimates, but there still have been relatively few large-scale decommissions. State laws and policies can try to ensure that estimates are accurate and large enough financial assurances are available. For example, Ohio requires that estimates be revised periodically, and if the estimate has increased, the required bond must be increased too.  

Ideological opponents of solar have stoked fears about solar panels filling up landfills and presenting hazardous waste. Those concerns are often exaggerated, as solar panels are made up primarily of steel and glass and the toxic compounds in the cells present relatively little risk, experts say. Even as solar farms expand exponentially, solar waste will still be much smaller than other waste streams, like construction debris and municipal garbage. 

Nonetheless, responsible and smooth decommissioning is crucial for the industry to thrive, experts agree. 

“We live in a social media environment where bad stories, singular bad examples do spread,” said Lindemann. “We need to make sure that relationships don’t get strained because of a lack of direction regarding deconstruction and decommission. Do people involved in or impacted by a project understand what’s in front of them 20 to 25 years down the line? That level of trust and transparency can be built, and comprehensive directives from states and other entities provide the first step.” 

In 2023, almost 33 GW of solar were installed nationwide, and solar deployment is only expected to keep growing. 

“In order to handle that, it’s important to make sure state and local governments have the right rules in place to handle mass decommissioning,” said Lindemann.  

Many challenges 

Metzger notes there are many costs and logistics to decommissioning that can be easy to overlook: the need to remove fences and drive over fields to haul panels off, lodging for workers, renting equipment like pile drivers, dealing with buried electrical conduit or other hazards. 

“If you look at a site, there isn’t one solution,” Metzger said. “Say you have 20,000 panels, that’s a bunch of metal. How heavy is that? What kind of tractor trailers are you going to need to pull it? What about the labor, how many 40-pound panels can someone lift in an hour?” 

Metzger and Donne are developing a decommissioning workforce training curriculum, and hope to eventually train Osage tribal members and others in various aspects of decommissioning work and project management.  

“We’re thinking about what this is going to look like for our tribe in 100 years,” said Donne. “Are these structural resources available when Saxon and I are long gone?”

That perspective is what inspired the name Eighth Generation, Metzger explains. 

“It’s often cited as an indigenous principle to think of an action through seven generations of impact, and that phrase always reminded me that some problems just won’t show up until the eighth generation,” he said. 

“And it feels like that is what’s happening here, as we’re staring down millions of panels annually needing decommissioning. It’s all solvable problems to an industry that genuinely is making the world a better place. We need to follow through on the promise we made as an industry to be meaningfully different than previous energy systems, and taking care of our legacy assets is a necessary component of that.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story described Eighth Generation Consulting as a nonprofit; it is a for-profit entity that is exploring nonprofit status.

Indigenous solar consultant works to ensure responsible development in communities scarred by fossil fuels is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This country’s heaviest polluters also rely on a workforce that disproportionately fails to fill good-paying jobs with people of color who are more likely to be affected by their emissions, according to a new study.

The research, from Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic — currently under peer review — finds that people of color are underrepresented in high-paying jobs in both the chemical manufacturing and petroleum/coal industry.

And Louisiana, with one of the largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities in the United States, is the only state where minorities were underrepresented in low-paying and high-paying jobs in both industries.

For advocates there, this new report is proof that the good jobs are going to white people while much of the toxic emissions and health risks are being endured by people living in the surrounding communities, which tend to be low-income or predominantly minority.

“The pollution versus jobs narrative is really oversimplified because the trade off affects different groups unevenly,” said Kimberly Terrell, director of community engagement and a staff scientist with the Tulane law clinic who led the research team. “Petrochemical jobs that mostly go to white workers can’t offset the harm of petrochemical pollution that mostly occurs in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.”

The research showed that people of color were generally underrepresented in high-paying jobs in both the chemical manufacturing sector and petroleum/coal industry and often were over-represented in low-paying jobs in the chemical industry, with results “mixed” for the same category on the petroleum side.

In another recently released report, researchers described a situation in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish in which local residents of color were unable to take advantage of construction jobs at a terminal that exports methane, also known as liquefied natural gas.

The Mississippi River ferry connecting the plant to the community did not run early enough to get the employees to work by 5 a.m., as required. And prospective workers — many without reliable transportation — had to attend weeks of training in New Orleans 55 miles away, according to researchers from Texas Southern University and the University of Montana.

Nationally, higher paying jobs in the chemical manufacturing industry disproportionately went to more white people in Texas, Louisiana and Georgia, where minorities represent 59%, 41% and 49% of their respective states’ populations but held 38%, 21% and 28% of the better-paid jobs within the industry.

In the petroleum/coal industry, people of color were underrepresented in higher-paying jobs in at least 14 states — including Texas, California, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Ashley Shelton, founder and chief executive officer of statewide lobbying nonprofit The Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, praised the study for proving what she and most Louisiana advocates have known for quite some time. Shelton said state leaders, and others across the country, are “selling out” fenceline communities to the petrochemical industry.

“We have to stop pretending oil and gas, which in Louisiana we are great defenders of, is gonna save us because they’re not and they never were and aren’t trying to,” Shelton said, noting that Louisiana is last in many quality-of-life indicators. “We are winning the race to the bottom.”

Study: Minorities ‘systematically’ underrepresented in US petrochemical workforce is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A coalition of energy equity and justice advocates says Minnesota regulators should consider reinstating a utility shutoff moratorium after a recent academic study revealed racial disparities in disconnections by the state’s largest utility.

Xcel Energy customers in communities of color were more than three times as likely to have their electricity involuntarily disconnected between 2017 and 2021 compared to those in predominantly White neighborhoods, according to the analysis by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Science, Technology and Environmental Policy.

Those racial disparities persisted even after researchers controlled for other factors such as income, ownership status and housing age. 

“We still find consistently that homes that are disconnected are predominantly” in communities of color, said Bhavin Pradhan, a postdoctoral associate and study co-author.

The study’s findings are at at the center of recent comments filed by advocacy groups including the Cooperative Energy Futures, Environmental Law & Policy Center, Sierra Club, and Vote Solar, which asked the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission last month to order a study of the costs and benefits of reinstating the state’s pandemic-era moratorium on utility shutoffs.

“(We) recommend that the Commission order this study now and then rely on it to inform Commission action to consider a moratorium on disconnections until Xcel can develop a more robust set of measures to eliminate racial disparities in disconnections,” the groups wrote in April 12 reply comments (MN 23-452).

Xcel Energy, which had already hired a consultant to review the issues raised in the study, in a March 22 response attributed the racial disparities to “deeply entrenched economic and social reasons that are not driven by the energy system,” including the age of housing stock. It suggested targeting energy efficiency programs at low-income neighborhoods as part of the solution.

The study

The study by Pradhan and Associate Professor Gabriel Chan looked at utility shutoffs, power outages, and the grid’s capacity for distributed energy by Census block across Xcel Energy’s Minnesota service territory. It also relied on data from the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, which maps disadvantaged communities as defined by federal law.

Xcel’s interactive service quality map allowed researchers to overlay various data at a granular level. “We could link this (data) with a lot of other variables,” Chan said.

In addition to utility shutoffs, the researchers found disparities in reliability, with communities of color almost 50% more likely to experience prolonged power outages than predominantly White areas.

“Across a battery of regression models, we find that living in poorer neighborhoods with a greater concentration of people of color is associated with a statistically and practically significant difference in the likelihood of disconnection from service due to nonpayment and the experience of extended power outages,” the report concludes.

Chan said the research does not necessarily suggest grid planners were intentionally racist. “But we do think that there’s a real opportunity here to think about how to affirmatively plan the distribution grid to address racial disparities that are caused by many other racialized systems.”

The research echoes inequities that have been found for everything from air quality and bike lanes to infant mortality and drownings, in which gaps similarly persist even after controlling for poverty. 

“It would be almost surprising if there weren’t racial disparities” in utility service, Chan said.

Will Kenworthy, Midwest regulatory director for Vote Solar, said the type of racial disparities identified in the study are not unique to Minnesota. 

“What we’re finding in Xcel service territory for reliability is consistent with what we’re seeing in Michigan and Illinois to varying degrees,” Kenworthy said. 

The paper’s conclusion says the findings don’t necessarily imply deliberate racial bias but do highlight an “urgent need for policy interventions to protect low-income customers from disconnections, invest in marginalized communities, and equitably expand distributed energy resources such as solar and batteries.”

How to address disparities

The energy equity and justice advocates, intervening as Grid Equity Commenters, attached the study with comments submitted in March as part of an Xcel Energy integrated resource planning docket. They argued that the disparities, and equity in general, needs to be part of any discussion about the utility’s system planning.

“Racial disparities in shutoffs have been repeatedly shown and the commission needs to do something about it,” said Erica S. McConnell, staff attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center. 

Minnesota had a moratorium on utility shutoffs during the Covid-19 pandemic from early 2020 through August 2021. In addition to a study looking at the implications of reinstating that moratorium until racial disparities have been eliminated, the groups’ recommendations include proactive investments in grid reliability and distributed energy in disadvantaged areas.

Fresh Energy, a nonprofit policy advocacy group that also publishes the Energy News Network, separately filed comments on April 12 recommending that the commission require Xcel to track and report additional data regarding shutoffs and reliability in disadvantaged areas. 

Fresh Energy staff, board members and funders do not have access to or oversight of the Energy News Network’s editorial process. More about our relationship with Fresh Energy can be found in our code of ethics.

Utility shutoffs and outages can be scary, costly and “dramatic” for lower-income customers, said George Shardlow, executive director of the Energy CENTs Coalition, which works with Xcel Energy to help connect customers with energy assistance and conservation programs. Energy CENTs is not among the groups intervening in the Xcel planning docket.

Shardlow said targeting all customers in areas of high poverty with assistance programs, even for a limited time, could help reduce disconnections and energy burdens. That approach is in line with a proposed Xcel pilot program to offer automatic bill credits to all customers living within targeted, low-income areas where energy burdens exceed 4% of household incomes.

Xcel’s response

Xcel Energy’s comments framed the disconnection disparities as an issue of poverty. It says it has improved its efforts to avoid disconnections, contacting customers via phone and email for nine weeks to help connect them with assistance programs and offer long-term payment plans before shutting off service.

The company said its own analysis did not find a strong relationship between long-duration outages and the racial composition of the neighborhood. The frequency of long outages is so small, affecting less than 5% of households, and largely reflect the random paths of storms, it said.

“We recognize that even if the likelihood of extended or multiple outages remains small, the impacts of an electrical outage could be greater in disadvantaged neighborhoods that are disproportionately vulnerable to such emergencies,” the company said.

While equity and environmental justice are priorities for the company, Xcel said, it also pushed back on the discussions’ inclusion in the integrated resource planning docket, arguing that would duplicate conversations already happening elsewhere.

A silver lining in the study

One surprising finding in the study could also point to potential solutions. In parts of Xcel’s territory, interconnecting distributed energy resources such as solar or batteries has become challenging due to congestion.

“This doesn’t look like an issue for low-income” areas, Pradhan said. “That’s a good point for energy poverty and energy equity” as solar installations could help reduce utility bills and stabilize the grid to reduce outages.

Minnesota Public Utilities Commission staff has tentatively scheduled a meeting to discuss Xcel Energy’s equity analysis with stakeholders in July.

Minnesota advocates push for pause on utility shutoffs after study reveals racial disparities is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.