One-size-fits-all? Top-down U.S. approach to equitable decarbonization does not fully address state and community-scale perspectives

Abstract

The U.S. government has made addressing energy equity a key objective of its decarbonization efforts. While energy equity has been studied for decades, equity research in the U.S. has only very recently focused on impacts specific to decarbonization. To guide the implementation of new federal funding for clean energy investments in disadvantaged communities, federal agencies are relying on national-scale socioeconomic and demographic tools to define disadvantaged communities and energy equity metrics. Through an analysis of U.S.-oriented energy equity literature and recently developed tools and frameworks for decarbonization, this paper provides the first comparison of U.S. national versus subnational perspectives on defining disadvantaged communities, their energy equity concerns, and relevant metrics in the context of decarbonization. We show that the U.S. top-down approach to an energy equity framework for decarbonization, while necessary for large-scale policymaking, does not identify all disadvantaged communities nor the diversity and complexity of their concerns and is insufficient to ensure equitable decarbonization.