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A new study found that majority Black neighborhoods faced higher solar costs.
Higher-income people are more likely to have solar panels on their roofs. This fact has underlined the nature of home solar adoption and is responsible for any number of state, local, and now federal programs to give lower-income people access to solar power, either through subsidizing their own solar panels or letting them “subscribe” to solar power generated elsewhere.
While this seems like an obviously sensible solution — the upfront cost of solar can be around $15,000 to $20,000, and you typically need to own a single family home to get it — it’s not quite as simple as those with more money are more likely to get solar. When the University of Texas economist Jackson Dorsey and Derek Wolfson looked at data provide by the solar marketplace EnergySage, they found that, yes, those with higher incomes are more likely to buy solar — but also that what solar installers offered them and what they paid for it varied depending on the demographics of the surrounding area.
“Econ 101, there’s usually two possible reasons why you might have lower quantities in a market. One would be demand is lower, and the other would be supply is lower,” Dorsey told me when I asked what had motivated his research. While the data about high-income demand for energy transition products like solar panels or electric vehicles is plentiful, there had been less attention paid to supply-side reasons for the disparities.
Dorsey and Wolfson looked at hundreds of thousands of bids for solar installation placed in EnergySage’s 15 largest markets, including much of urban California, New York City, Washington, D.C. and metro areas in Florida, where prospective solar buyers are able to pick among bids from installers. Unsurprisingly, lower-income buyers were less likely to purchase home solar, received fewer bids overall, and, because they were likely seeking smaller systems, paid more per watt than wealthier buyers. (The researchers were able to match data from EnergySage with census data to extract demographic information about potential customers along with their location.)
What did stand out, however, is that Black households in particular got fewer bids and paid notably higher prices, a disparity that could not be explained entirely by differences in income. Low-income households were more likely to be in an area with a lower cost of living, and therefore didn’t necessarily face higher overall project costs because prices for everything tended to be lower.
Black households, on the other hand, received fewer bids and then face higher prices. “If you look at Black vs. white households, Black households get about 8% higher prices,” Dorsey told me. “On a $20,000 system, that would be $1,600.”
The reason, he determined, is not so much that installers don’t want to serve people they know are Black. It’s that they don’t want to serve neighborhoods they know are majority Black.
Dorsey put the difference down to “some kind of perceived higher cost of doing business.” Part of it could be explained by installers setting up shop in areas where they think they’ll find higher demand for their services — high-income ones — and so Black neighborhoods, which are more likely to be low-income, may be literally farther away and more expensive to serve. According to the data Dorsey and Wolfson collected, there are three installers within 10 miles of white households on average, compared to two installers on average for Black households.
There could also, Dorsey said, “be some implicit preference that they don’t want to go to those neighborhoods.” In the paper, Dorsey and Wolfson write that “some sellers may prefer to serve certain households or neighborhoods either because of intolerant views, crime rates, or other variables correlated with household demographic characteristics.”
While the study didn’t get into remediation, fixing the income side of things should be fairly straightforward, Dorsey told me. “Just making prices lower or financing terms more comparable [to high income households] should be fairly effective,” he said.
The sociogeographic side of things will be trickier to address. “That might suggest a supply side policy might be effective,” Dorsey said, “like giving installers incentives to locate in or serve communities that are getting fewer bids and facing higher prices.”
Policymakers and solar advocates are very aware of the income and race disparities in solar adoptions and have come up with a slew of policies to try and narrow them. California, which has long been the epicenter of rooftop solar (with the most attendant controversy over how its incentives are designed), has a program that subsidizes low-income households that want to install solar and incentives for affordable multifamily buildings to install solar.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s $7 billion Solar For All program also supports states, tribes, and non-profits with programs to reach low-income households. “The program will help unlock new markets for residential solar in areas that have never seen this kind of investment before,” an EPA spokesperson told Heatmap in an emailed statement. “Much of the program will fund solar projects to benefit multi-family and affordable housing, as well as community solar projects, bringing the benefits of clean energy to households that may not have had access to it before.”
Another favored solution for getting solar access to those who wouldn’t otherwise have it is community solar, where households “subscribe” to small-scale solar installations and then get credits on their utility bill as if they had physically installed solar in their homes.
The share of community solar capacity that serves low-to-moderate income consumers has grown from 2% in 2022 to 12% this year, according to data from Wood Mackenzie and the Coalition for Community Solar Access, and they project it will continue to grow to 25% in 2025.
The Inflation Reduction Act also includes an “adder” for community solar projects that serve lower income consumers that boosts existing subsidies by 10 to 20 percentage points. These community solar projects are “already seeing impact and projects on the ground,” Molly Knoll, vice president of policy for CCSA, told me.
EnergySage’s chief executive, Charlie Hadlow, said in a statement that the company is “working diligently to ensure every eligible shopper gets three to seven quotes on our platform,” and that “we welcome more installers to sign up on our platform and are actively seeking them out, with a deliberate focus on underserved areas.” He said consumers typically save 20% using EnergySage compared to what they might get on their own, and that the company also has a marketplace for community solar.
All that said, Dorsey is skeptical that “installing panels at individual rooftop” is even the best way to decarbonize. "If you want to cost-effectively reduce emissions, it’s not clear to me rooftop solar is the way to do it as opposed to utility-scale or community solar,” he said.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.