On December 11, 2024, in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, 40 folks attended the first annual rural clean energy convening co-sponsored by the Center for Progressive Reform and the Center for Energy Education. Attendees included FEMA representatives, USDA and other government agency officials, local residents, county commissioners, and energy policy advocates.
The main topic of the day was the challenges and opportunities for an equitable and just clean energy transition for North Carolina’s rural communities. Across a diverse range of perspectives, there was one consistent theme: North Carolina’s rural communities need a strong rural agenda to adequately benefit from a clean energy transition.
Energy burden — or the high share of household income that goes to energy — is acute in North Carolina, which sits in the top half of states with the high energy burdens for low-wealth ratepayers. Nearly 1.5 million North Carolinians are “overburdened” by energy costs, meaning that they pay more than 6 percent of their income on energy. Some even pay more for energy than for housing. And many of those folks live in rural communities.
Across all income brackets, rural counties have the highest energy burden in the state due to energy inefficient housing, climate change, and structural disinvestment that has led to disparate rates of poverty and unemployment. North Carolina counties with the highest energy costs — also disproportionately rural — interestingly also tend to have a larger portion of renewable energy projects. While utility-scale renewable energy projects may produce benefits such as higher tax revenues, these projects can ignore structural issues of ownership, wages, and distribution of benefits and may even reinforce or exacerbate extractive practices in the production of electricity.
Participants at the convening highlighted some of the barriers to addressing these energy-related injustices. From lack of rural stakeholder engagement in the state’s carbon plan to what one participant described as “underbounding” — the practice of not only burdening environmental justice communities with disparate hazards but also neglecting to build tangible infrastructure with direct benefits — there are both current and historic injustices within the clean energy transition. High levels of distrust can lead local elected officials to misunderstand local ordinances/barriers to renewable energy development; this historic distrust can compound with lack of education and community engagement.
Still, there are significant natural strengths of rural North Carolina communities that can overcome these barriers: social capital, strong communities, growing diversity, and, namely, a growing rural population in North Carolina: of 100 total counties in the state, 80 of them are rural. Indeed, North Carolina’s rural population is the 2nd largest rural population (after Texas) in the country. There were 3,474,661 people living in rural North Carolina as of April 1, 2020, with a 2.9 percent increase from 2010 to 2020. With a growing population comes new opportunities to position rural communities as epicenters of wealth-building clean energy.
As convening participants identified, “every challenge is an opportunity.” Rural clean energy projects like solar arrays can bring immense direct benefit to rural communities if benefits are codified, legally binding, and material. Participants described community benefits agreements like significant workforce development, increased bill savings, and investment into aging housing stock. Communication highlighting success stories, strategic partnerships, model projects (i.e., a local church with solar panels and significant bill savings), and trusted messengers were all identified as critical pieces to ensure equity and justice are embedded in this transition.
Ultimately, a “rural coalition, force for change” is needed to address the multifaceted challenges to a clean energy transition. If we invest in and develop community buy-in and coalition- and trust-building, North Carolina rural communities can define clean energy success for themselves.
Read our policy brief to learn more about how state regulators can “rise to the challenge” of an equitable and just energy transition, and if you live in North Carolina, talk to your neighbors and your elected officials about the energy future you’d like to see.
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