Energy Democracy and Its Discontents feat. Edgardo Sepulveda

Edgardo Sepulveda, a telecoms regulatory economist, returns to the Decouple podcast to discuss energy equity and how it relates to discussions of energy poverty and energy democracy with a deep dive of the June 2 Public Power Resolution tabled by Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. Electricity is considered a “necessity good” in economics. For a variety of reasons in the industrialized world people will use about the same amount regardless of income. Given, however, that income is not evenly distributed this means that lower-income households will spend between 5% to 10% of their income on electricity, compared to just 1% by high-income households. This results in energy poverty. Edgardo describes the types of programs established to mitigate its depth and incidence. There is broad consensus that such programs have not been sufficient, and together with the climate crisis this has resulted in calls for “energy democracy”, a term first introduced by US activists in the 2000s that has gained traction in Canada and Europe.

Edgardo reviewed a sample of the literature and noted that while there is no accepted definition, it tends to mean greater “energy citizenship” – broader participation in decision-making processes – and also greater individual and community control of energy infrastructure, with a strong preference for localism and renewables. A good conceptual review article is: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629620303431

Nevertheless, the empirical evidence is that energy democracy’s gains have been modest, and many of the policies to promote greater individual and community control of energy have been regressive – that is, have resulted in greater income inequality. Figure 7 of this ex-post review shows that 29 of 37 studies looking at feed-in tariffs or NEM were regressive and 7 neutral; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abc11f Chris and Edgardo close off the episode discussing the June 2 “Public Power” Resolution tabled in the US House of Representatives (HR) by Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) & Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), two members of the “Squad.” The Resolution calls for the Federal government to acquire all private electricity assets and transfer them to lower jurisdictional levels and communities, while requiring 100% renewable generation. In @Dr_Keefer's words the @CoriBush & @JamaalBowmanNY resolution advocates for an "occupy Wall Street grid."

Its ideological commitment to small is beautiful localism, 100% renewables & magical thinking about the grid makes a public power bill a danger to the public. As such, the resolution appears to be a good example of how energy democracy is seen by progressives in the US and provided Chris and Edgardo with a concrete proposal to discuss. https://bush.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/bush.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Bush%20Public%20Power%20Resolution%20FINAL.pdf Edgardo’s Twitter handle is @E_R_Sepulveda