The OurEnergyLibrary aggregates and indexes publicly available fact sheets, journal articles, reports, studies, and other publications on U.S. energy topics. It is updated every week to include the most recent energy resources from academia, government, industry, non-profits, think tanks, and trade associations. Suggest a resource by emailing us at info@ourenergypolicy.org.
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We employ infrastructuring as a verb to highlight contested processes of infrastructure expansion to extract, store, transport, and transform natural gas (into liquefied natural gas, LNG). As faculty members and students embedded in mid-Atlantic universities in the United States (US), we conducted participatory action research to record nearby infrastructuring for Dominion Energy’s Cove Point LNG Export Terminal and Atlantic Coast Pipeline. We documented how frontline and impacted populations seized opportunities when infrastructuring was visible to challenge and erode the excessive economic and political power of Dominion, one of the US’s largest energy providers, who sought to maintain regulatory privilege through …
View Full ResourceIn a trilogy of recent cases, the Supreme Court has launched a quiet revolution in energy federalism. With little fanfare, it has abandoned its decades-long effort to divide electricity regulation into mutually exclusive spheres of federal and state authority. Instead, it has embraced a more sophisticated concurrent jurisdiction model—against the wishes of Justice Scalia, who opposed this transformation in his final published dissent.
This Article explores the ramifications of this revolution, particularly for state energy regulators. The shift to concurrent jurisdiction is long overdue. The historic model of the local vertically integrated utility has long been
replaced by regional, complex, …
It is well-known from the mental accounting literature that consumers would rather pay up-front for a luxury good like a vacation, but pay later for a durable good like a dishwasher. This occurs because the hedonic benefits and monetary costs enter differently in the mental accounts. But how does the mental accounting process change if the durable good saves money over time, as with an energy efficiency upgrade, or signals wealth and “green status”, like a rooftop solar panel or an electric car? In this paper, we derive a mental accounting model of energy efficient and green durable investment that …
View Full ResourcePoverty, climate change and energy security demand awareness about the interlinkages between energy systems and social justice. Amidst these challenges, energy justice has emerged to conceptualize a world where all individuals, across all areas, have safe, affordable and sustainable energy that is, essentially, socially just. Simultaneously, new social and technological solutions to energy problems continually evolve, and interest in the concept of sociotechnical transitions has grown. However, an element often missing from such transitions frameworks is explicit engagement with energy justice frameworks. Despite the development of an embryonic set of literature around these themes, an obvious research gap has emerged: …
View Full ResourceThis paper briefly identifies project structures making low-income community solar projects more scalable, replicable, and cost-effective for electric cooperative and municipal utilities. The report explores the tradeoffs between utility project returns and providing energy bill savings for low-income subscribers, as well as some of the key lessons learned from previously successful solar pilot projects in low-income communities. …
View Full ResourceThis paper introduces the concept of spatializing energy justice and inequality to understandings of energy poverty and vulnerability.…
View Full ResourceWhen it comes to enforcing environmental law, the Trump Administration is off to a very
slow start. So far, the Justice Department has collected 60 percent less in civil penalties than
polluters had paid on average by this time in the first year of Presidents Barack Obama,
George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The cases this year are smaller, requiring much less
spending on cleanup, and resulting in fewer measurable reductions in pollutants that end up
in our air or water. While the early news is neither encouraging nor surprising, enforcement
results may vary over the short term. The actions …
This research explores the role and value of the energy justice concept across the disciplines. It provides the first critical account of the emergence of the energy justice concept in both research and practice.…
View Full ResourceThis report provides a comprehensive overview of common utility shut-off policies employed by utilities nationwide, explores critical issues that should be considered in the development of disconnection policies, and calls for concrete action toward establishing policies that protect the well-being of all utility customers and the eventual elimination of utility disconnections.…
View Full ResourceThrough campaign contributions and support for pre-emption laws, oil and gas interests are undermining communities’ right to limit or regulate industrial activities. Many local governments have responded to quick booms in fracking or the injection of fracking waste by enacting stricter regulations, bans, or moratoria. This report discusses how fracking companies and state governments have challenged many of these local bans, as well as how state supreme courts have upheld some of them. Other local bans, however, have been struck down by courts elected with money from fracking companies and other fossil fuel interests.
Most state constitutions outline the boundaries …
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