Five leaders, authors, and organizers who are working towards renewable energy systems for New York City spoke about their efforts this Tuesday in a panel co-sponsored by the Architecture, Environmental Science, and Urban Studies departments.

This Tuesday in Barnard’s Alstchul Atrium, several departments from Barnard and Columbia collaborated to host the Energy Democracy and Community Empowerment panel. Five participants from organizations working towards environmental justice in New York City spoke about their efforts to facilitate renewable energy projects. 

The event was co-sponsored by the Barnard Environmental Science Department, the Barnard and Columbia College Architecture Department, the Barnard and Columbia College Urban Studies Program, the Barnard College Office of the Provost, the Barnard Office of Sustainability and Climate Action, and the Barnard Office of Community Engagement and Inclusion.

Sandra Goldmark, a theater professor, the Director of Campus Sustainability and Climate Action at Barnard, and the Senior Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Engagement at the Columbia Climate School, welcomed the audience and panelists to the evening. She spoke about the importance of collaboration between Columbia and the larger city as the university thinks about its energy usage, as well as collaboration between university staff, students, and faculty as new sustainability projects begin. 

The event was a sequel to last year’s Mobilizing Communities for Climate Justice panel, according to Ralph Goesch, the panel’s moderator and an architecture professor at Barnard. This year’s panel continues that discussion of mobilization, now with a focus on community empowerment as a response to the disproportionate costs of climate change on Black, brown, and impoverished communities in NYC. We must “cultivate a new kind of politics,” Goesch argued, one that is grounded in a collaborative, sustainable energy democracy. 

The panel took the form of five longer speeches by each of the panelists, followed by a few minutes of questions. Ashley Dawson, an author and a professor of environmental humanities and postcolonial studies, spoke first. According to Dawson, over a million New Yorkers cannot afford their utility bills, and many live in areas where climate change has been truly catastrophic. Dawson argued that for-profit utility companies are a large part of this issue, so one solution is “a publicly-owned, democratically-controlled energy system.” 

Dawson spoke primarily about his work as a member of Public Power New York, a coalition that successfully mobilized and lobbied to pass the Build Public Renewables Act through the New York State legislature this spring. The act mandated the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to build facilities for energy generation and storage, in order to reach the goal of 70% renewable energy by 2030 set by the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The act required that NYPA’s peaker plants in the state be phased out by 2030, which are plants that only turn on when other power systems cannot handle an increased load, like at the beginning of the summer. These plants rely on fossil fuels, are extremely expensive, and often emit high levels of pollutants. The act also contained important provisions focused on social justice and the democratization of energy, many requiring NYPA to maintain ownership over energy facilities. 

Public Power’s next goal is to make sure that these initiatives and projects actually come to fruition. Some off-shore wind deals have been under stress in recent weeks, Dawson said, so the provisions of the bill will face obstacles. Summarizing Public Power’s goals and initiatives, Dawson said that they “are fighting to get NYPA to be a public alternative… and fighting to make sure it happens in a democratic and just manner.” 

The second speaker was Lawrence Haseley, the senior program manager of Solar One, a nonprofit organization centered around education and workforce development to “[foster] sustainable practices and environmental equity across New York City.” Haseley’s talk focused on solar energy, which he presented as a solution to the disproportionate impacts of climate catastrophes and increased utility bills in northern Manhattan. Solar energy could provide jobs and lower bills for at-risk communities. 

Haseley spoke about Solar One’s Here Comes Solar program, which reached out to residents of affordable housing communities and owners to develop solar energy facilities for these buildings. As a result of the project’s outreach, Housing Development Fund Corporation cooperatives in Brooklyn and NYC Housing Authority developments in Manhattan built solar panels on their rooftops. In all, 500 low-to-moderate income households saw their utility bills lowered by about 20%. Workforce development was also a huge part of this project, which involved training members of these cooperatives and larger communities in solar panel installation. This ultimately led to the creation of Solar Uptown Now, a worker-owned cooperative that installs solar panels and is also being trained to work on the development of solar.

Haseley emphasized the importance of outreach within communities to explain what the installation process and benefits would look like, and of ensuring that the whole process stayed within the community.  According to Haseley, making every part of the process democratic and cooperative is another way to ensure a just transition to renewables.

Next, Andrea Johnson, a landscape designer, educator at RISD, and professor at Barnard, spoke about her work on the Renewable Rikers project. Rikers Island currently hosts ten pre-trial jails, but a bill passed in 2019 requires all ten to be closed by 2027. The Renewable Rikers project hopes to turn the island into a green energy hub. Johnson’s plan proposes that part of the island be dedicated to wastewater treatment, part to organic waste processing, and part to solar energy and battery storage. Rikers currently sits at the center of several peaker plants and other fossil fuel dependent energy facilities in East Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens. This plan would ideally enable the state to phase out peaker plants and consolidate other waste facilities. 

The plan would also create a research and training institute as part of its goal to understand and memorialize the history of incarceration and its intersection with environmental harm on the island. People who were incarcerated at Rikers or communities central to the island would be able to be part of the building of the project. The Renewable Rikers project as a whole is still in the works, and very few studies have been done to determine what the land is actually like, Johnson said. Still, it’s a promising project that could produce about 50 megawatts of energy that could act as a redundancy for the city’s energy grid, meaning that in cases of emergency or increased demand, like heat waves, extra sources of energy are built into the system as a kind of fail-safe. The energy could also be used to fuel the city’s wastewater facilities. 

Next, Daniel Chu spoke about his work on the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC EJA). This is a grassroots alliance that seeks to coalesce its constituents’ goals and ideas into policy initiatives. A key component of their work is the PEAK Coalition, which focuses on peaker plants and their impact on NYC residents. That coalition specifically put pressure on the NYPA to release Requests for Proposals, which are essentially calls for alternative energy systems that could replace the peaker plants, like battery energy storage systems. Chu also spoke of the general importance of building new, publicly owned renewable energy resources and, importantly, training workers in the communities that are most affected by pollution to work on these issues. 

Chu also spent some time discussing the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initative, which is a coalition of thirteen Northeastern states, including New York, that hope to reduce CO₂ emissions through a system of allowances and caps. Chu spoke about the importance of coordinating statewide efforts with the larger region and, hopefully, the country. The NYC EJA’s next goal is to pass the Just Energy Transition Act, which has passed the State Senate and is now in a State Assembly committee. That act would develop a study and blueprint for the goal of phasing out old fossil fuel plants by 2030. 

Summer Sandoval, a policy advisor in the Mayor’s Office of Climate And Environmental Justice (MOCEJ), was the last speaker. Her perspective, directly from the government, focused on the challenges to current renewable energy goals and on current and future project plans. 

“It’s super hard to build stuff in New York City,” she said, describing difficulties with land ownership and construction. Even though the state is well under its 2030 goals for renewable energy, she said there are nearly double the number of projects in progress as have been completed. Every failure is a “lesson learned” and means that the next project goes more smoothly. 

MOCEJ hopes to decarbonize city-owned buildings and work on increasing methods of energy transmission from upstate to NYC. Upstate energy systems are relatively clean and have high percentages of renewable energy, Sandoval said, so the next goal is to bring that energy to NYC. That also means coordinating with the state to allocate more resources to NYC for renewable energy projects. 

The evening ended with a few questions from audience members. One asked what methods of redundancy might be available as peaker plants are phased out, creating a deficit in reliable energy. Chu spoke about a potential opt-out system where companies might reduce energy costs by very small amounts across the system, such as five volts less for refrigerators. Right now, those kinds of small reductions are choices that individuals can opt in to enact. An opt-out system would immediately reduce the amount of energy required across the city, and require individuals to actively choose to increase their energy consumption Sandoval spoke again of the many projects in the queue, and said that technical issues around interconnection between different resources are partially to blame for the hold-up.

Another student asked about organizing in low-income communities with members who have little time and no background for mobilizing around these issues. That’s the “trillion dollar question,” Chu joked. Dawson pointed out that many communities have faced these issues of pollution in their homes for years, which is crucial: they’re more invested than some organizers might think. Haseley added that “we really have to invest in civic infrastructure” for people to have the space and time to engage, and that organizers need to be out on the ground, supporting community wellness and learning about local issues. “People have more capacity to organize than you think they have,” Chu said, “because that is how they survive and that is part of who they are.”

With that final note, the evening concluded. Several of the panelists encouraged interested students to reach out to organizations like We Act to learn how they can get involved in organizing and mobilization.

Renewable Rikers via Event Poster