Among the expert voices at last month’s Energy Week at Penn was Weitzman’s Sanya Carley. Carley believes that energy justice should be a central part of America’s energy transition—and she’s collecting the data to show why it’s necessary.
As Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning and the faculty co-director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, which co-organized Energy Week, she’s teaching students, policymakers, and practitioners what energy justice means. And as co-director of the Energy Justice Lab and as a Resources for the Future University Fellow, she’s building metrics for utilities to report where their power does and doesn’t go, and develops policy suggestions to ensure the relevant communities have political power, too.
“My work focuses on energy justice, which is thinking about the distribution of benefits and burdens connected to our energy systems,” Carley says. “It’s thinking about who has access to decision making and who has leadership over the decisions we make about our energy systems. In electricity or transportation markets, I also study the effects, effectiveness, and unintended consequences of policies.”
Carley describes the function of her Utility Disconnections Dashboard, which tracks all disconnects from utilities that report them across the United States. “Through a data scraping exercise with a fabulous team of students that work with us at the lab, we routinely gather all these files and post them on an interactive dashboard. Using the dashboard, one can see where people are disconnected more often, which utilities disconnect more often, and what kinds of protections are in place or not in place in different places.”
This story is by Jesse Dorris. Read more at Weitzman News.
