Solar Energy Is Being Kept From Blacks By Big Energy Companies and the Politicians They Control

Photo by Ken Teegardin.

By Brentin Mock
Yesterday, I wrote about how African-American politicians are being directed by the fossil fuel industry and electric utilities to reject certain solar power options for the sake of low-income, black families. The argument from those utilities is that households that produce their own solar-based electricity, through net metering, will raise electricity costs for non-solar households, and chiefly those of low-income, because the solar producers aren’t paying their fair share to take care of the grid. (Grist’s own David Roberts wrote an excellent set of explainers on this solar beef last year.)

When the debate around solar net metering is presented that way, it’s not difficult to see why it could possibly become a net deficit for low-income households. This is how Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for utility shareholders, framed the issue for the National Policy Alliance, which consists of black elected officials large and small. The result was that NPA passed an unfavorable resolution on net metering that it says it will pass on to the White House.

I believe that the NPA members who voted against solar net metering policies probably did so out of a genuine desire to protect long-time disadvantaged African-American communities. But the simple math logic used to claim net metering will harm black households fails to figure in the calculus of the utility companies’ carbon pollution that is presently devastating black households. It also fails to calculate all of the utilities’ inflated costs for electricity production that already hike up electric bills.

First, to address the undergirding argument of the utility companies, it’s not entirely true that solar producers increase grid costs without contributing to it. Because of the energy that solar producers add to the system, utility companies get to produce and distribute that much less electricity throughout the grid. In essence, solar homes are bringing sand to the beach, and to paraphrase Jay Z, their “beach is better” — it’s sunnier, cleaner; they don’t need the sand of the old polluted beaches that have been charging visitors too much at the entranceway, anyway.

As Richard Robinson of DC Solar United Neighborhoods (DC SUN), a group of neighborhood solar co-ops, explained it to me: “We already know that there are over 20,000 people [in D.C.] who apply for electric bill assistance annually, not because money is being wasted on solar — it’s because the cost of electricity from fossil fuels is going up and this primarily affects low-income people.”

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