Increased public engagement and other community-centered reforms can unlock the full potential of a just transition to a post-carbon economy
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A set of little-known but critical state agencies across the country are being underutilized as a site of potential community empowerment, according to new research by the Center for Progressive Reform.
Public utility (sometimes “service”) commissions oversee utility companies, making decisions involving everything from what kind of infrastructure they build to how much community members pay for their services. Consequently, they have enormous influence on multiple pressing social concerns, from economic insecurity to sources of water and air pollution.
“While every state has such an agency, many people don’t know who their commissioners are or what the commission does,” says James Goodwin, the Policy Director at the Center for Progressive Reform and the author of Advancing Energy Justice: Reimagining Community Power at Public Utility Commissions. “Because they play an enormously influential role in our economy — including our energy system — few other governing institutions hold the same potential for addressing such important policy challenges as the climate crisis and remedying economic inequality. But we must learn how to harness that potential effectively.”
While they are supposed to serve the public, these commissions are particularly vulnerable to being captured by industry representatives who put that sector’s interests above the public’s. Goodwin emphasized that this is precisely why he decided to research the benefits of public engagement and other community-centered reforms at public utility commissions (PUCs).
“It’s not naive to put PUCs front and center of any local efforts for energy justice,” he says. “It just so happens that the regulatory tools they have available create perverse incentives for the for-profit utilities they oversee to pollute and generally disregard the preferences of the communities they serve. With proper reforms, however, PUCs could create new incentive structures that encourage these companies to reduce their environmental impacts and be more publicly responsive.”
Drawing from these lessons, Goodwin’s recommendations include an innovative energy justice scoring program inspired in part by the Community Reinvestment Act, which has demonstrated considerable promise in expanding bank access to low-income communities. PUCs would use this program to:
- Rigorously evaluate energy utilities according to goals of racial, economic, and climate justice;
- Assign them public scores with clear explanations for the broader community; and
- Impose rewards or punishments based on those scores to influence future performance.
Importantly, Goodwin observes, this energy justice scoring program offers a way through current debates over the necessity of permitting reform for achieving a swift, clean energy transition.
“Setting aside the fact that permitting’s role in delaying clean energy infrastructure is completely overblown, this program would permit faster infrastructure buildout without unduly sacrificing community input,” says Goodwin. “The key is to invest in early meaningful engagement that avoids the unnecessary longer delays that tend to come up later in the process.”
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