Ann Arbor, MI | April 1, 2024
Introduction
For more than a decade, Justin Schott has been fighting for energy equity in places like Detroit, but progress, in his words, was “slow to non-existent.” Schott, who directs the Energy Equity Project (EEP) at University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, had enough of spinning his wheels.
“We showed Public Utility Commissioners in several states that despite representing about 1/3 of the population, working class and poor households were receiving a disproportionately low share of the energy savings from efficiency programs, sometimes as little as 2%.” While this evidence led to some modest shifts in utility programming, Schott describes these incremental gains as “too little, too slow.”
He says that over time, utilities have racked up hundreds of millions in what he believes are debts to low-income customers, but these households are hardly seeing any of that come back to them. Instead, customers, especially from communities of color, are increasingly punished by investor-owned utility (IOU) shutoffs.
Shutoffs entail the physical disconnection from heat, hot water, air conditioning and electricity by the IOUs when people can’t afford their bills. EEP also presented several alternative rate and affordability program designs that Schott said would have ensured no one faced a shutoff, but these were not adopted. Utility regulation can amount to a thicket of oppressive rules that exclude people in dire need from clean energy benefits and having a meaningful voice in planning and decision-making.
“When I tell my family and friends that there have been more than 5,000,000 shutoffs across the country in just the last three years,” Schott lamented, “their eyes bulge. They cringe or dry heave (especially my cat).” Then they demand answers:
- What kind of country do we live in?
- They do this even when it’s frigid or during heat waves?
- Who is in charge of this atrocity? Is this really necessary?
- 5 million shutoffs? Like, 5,000 every single day?
- How barbaric! What about the kids? They had nothing to do with any of this!
- What about the elderly with medical conditions? How do people live without heat, refrigeration–do people die?“
- Wait, only 200 people in the country control our energy bills, our health, and the future of our climate? And no one even knows who they are?
For many, learning about the injustices of loosely regulated IOU monopolies involves reckoning with a degree of energy poverty they had relegated to their imaginations of the Global South.
So Schott and his team threw out the playbook they had been working from—EEP’s Energy Equity Framework—and decided to rethink how they could communicate the problem in simpler terms.
What could be a simpler approach to energy equity than seeing it through a child’s eyes?
Methodology
The team recruited 78 Commissioners from 23 states (response rate 49.1%, participation rate 38.1%) to present their child(ren) with a scenario and record how they responded. EEP mailed a kit that contained one group of 10 small dolls (“the have nots”) who shared 3 jellybeans shaped like electrons (“jellybean electrons”); each of these dolls had a small house-like structure, many of which appeared to be in disrepair. A second group in the kit had 10 dolls with 45 jellybean electrons between them (“the haves”) and were positioned in front of large homes covered in glitter. Some had three car garages, miniature electric vehicles with capital T logos and small mirrors on the rooftops representing solar panels.
Schott says the jellybean electron ratio of 15:1 between the haves and have nots represents the disparity between Americans with the lowest energy bills, which cost about 1% of their income, and those with the highest bills, which exceed 15% of income. These extreme energy burdens often result in shutoffs. Shutoffs, in turn, are 2-3 times more prevalent among Black, Latinx and Indigenous households and families with young children. They also double one’s risk of entering and remaining in poverty and were found to have increased the overall number of deaths during the pandemic by 15%.
After they set up the two kits, Commissioners were instructed to ask their children, “Here are two groups of people, what should we do?”
Results
Many of the children expressed moral outrage at the situation, with responses like:
- Make the people with so many jellybeans share more! Look at the fancy houses and cars they already have!
- That’s not fair! Why do some people have so many more than they can eat while others have almost none?
- What do they do with all the excess? Seems like it would just go to waste while their neighbors go hungry.
The Commissioners were then asked to reflect on how they felt as they observed their children’s responses. One Commissioner from Alabama (who wishes to remain anonymous) said with a twinkle in her eye, “It’s just jellybeans and dollhouses, but somehow it was chilling. Especially when my daughter asked, almost weeping, ‘Mom, who is in charge and can do something to help?’ Previously, I had only been concerned about my re-election and whether the IOUs earn sufficient profits to put food on their shareholders’ tables. But maybe I could learn to care about the people, too, like my daughter, who is a little more woke than I am.”
In all, 100% of the children (n=116), ages 4-14, redistributed some share of the jellybean electrons (p,0.000001). The median distribution was 1.3 jellybean electrons per “have not,” and 1.1 per “have,” demonstrating what the study authors have deemed a “reparative effect” that aligns with the principle of restorative justice.
For example, 23 children took all but 10 of the electrons from the haves and redistributed them to the have nots, leaving those formerly struggling with a 3.8:1 edge over the haves “to make up for the unfairness,” one explained.
18 children gave every doll two electrons, leaving 8 of the original 48 electrons to spare. 5 children specifically designated their remaining electrons as an emergency reserve “like in case a parent loses their job,” one child offered. 2 children asked for a knife to divide the 8 extra electrons evenly among the 20 dolls; 3 children asked for 12 more electrons so everyone could have 3. The 8 remaining children ate the remaining 8 electrons “so that it would be fair for everyone and no one would have too much,” one child surmised, licking their lips.
Discussion
EEP chose to run the study with children because “their moral compasses have not yet been warped by technocratic morasses, revolving doors or political contributions” Schott posits. The authors hypothesized that a majority of children would opt to redistribute the jellybean electrons to some extent, but the children’s universal instinct to spread the wealth was a profound finding.
EEP notes that there was some self-selection bias; non-participating Commissioners tended to represent states with a record of more aggressive shutoffs. It’s possible their children might feel more repressed about redistributing the jellybean electrons. Still, the effect size is sufficiently robust to uphold a widely generalizable result.
“We have plenty of electrons and plenty of dollars in the system as a whole. The children had no trouble redistributing them….nor should we, the adults in charge.”
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Contact: Justin Schott – Director, Energy Equity Project