Energy Equity and Justice: How to Distribute Energy System Benefits More Equitably

Tenets of energy justice include procedural justice, recognition justice and distributive justice. The last justice tenet asks whether the benefits and costs of the energy system are equitably distributed. New thinking, objectives, and approaches are needed to evaluate how the electric grid can be structured to provide more or less equitable distribution of benefits. The challenge has many parts: identifying measurable benefits and costs, recognizing which communities are underserved, evaluating their relationship to the energy system (spanning affordability, vulnerability, and reliability), and linking operation and investment decisions to futures where these conditions are changed. This panel will bring together decision makers from government and national labs to discuss the opportunities to enhance the energy justice and equity as we transition towards cleaner and sustainable energy resources. The panel will include ongoing work in the Department of Energy to develop more technical robustness to analyzing equitable grids within grid planning and multi-objective modeling.