What is an “Energy Community”?

What is an “Energy Community”?

As I’ve said before, I’m strongly in favor of “Community Solar” efforts.

But what would a “Solar Community” be?

This fall, I learned a new term, “Energy Community”.  What could this term mean?

Daniel Raimi and Sophie Pesek explain that this term comes from this year’s US federal legislation, so it has a legal definition [1]. It also may mean substantial amounts of money for clean energy projects in some places.

The basic idea is an attempt to make green development more “equitable”, placing green energy developments in localities that currently produce or are impacted by energy production.  The intuition is to mitigate the economic impact of the upgrade, helping jobs and businesses flow to places where jobs have been or will be displaced.

The legislation defines “energy communities” that are to be eligible for targeted incentives for green energy projects.

This is US federal legislation, so the “targeted” communities are broadly defined.

As Raimi and Pesek discuss, the definition includes three categories: brownfields, “coal communities”, and a third category based on tax revenue from fossil fuel production and current unemployment. 

The idea is clear enough.  Cities or rural areas that are currently invested in or impacted by fossil fuels should be helped to install green energy production that will replace the older technologies.

Taken altogether, these categories seem to encompass about 50% of the land area of the US (!), covering most of coal and oil country, as well as a lot of brownfields in the rust belt.

OK, this isn’t exactly what I might think of when I think of “energy community”.  And it’s not exactly what I think of when I worry about “equitable” distribution of green energy resources.  But I get it.

However, if the goal is to target localities that will be disproportiately impacted by technological change, the law does seem “both overly inclusive and overly exclusive“, as R&P say [1],

A lot of the specified data probably doesn’t exist in the form imagined by the law, and in any case is only a rough measure of the intended “impact” variable. And there are surely cases that will be left out by these definitions.  And, of course, the new clean energy developments will only approximately replace the fossil fuel business and jobs.

If I understand correctly, this part of the legislation is all about incentives to build new green energy sources in one place rather than another.  The good news is that these incentives will be only one part of the overall decision making.  Being in an Energy Community may tip the balance between two roughly equal sites, but it won’t eliminate investments elsewhere.  (Not least because there are other incentives, e.g., from states, etc., that are targeted differently.)

Overall, this is a classic piece of large scale legislation; too big and too small at the same time.  It combines multiple goals, addressing multiple kinds of “equity”, to serve multiple constituencies. 

For me, I don’t really care where green energy is built, so long as it is built. (I’m pretty certain that rich people will not allow infrastructure in their back yard, regardless.) It is irritating to have the loss of oil revenue be equated to the legacies of environmental racism.  But I understand the politics, and this particular part of the program is relatively harmless so far.

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1. Daniel Raimi and Sophie Pesek, What is an “Energy Community”?, in Resources , September 7, 2022. https://www.resources.org/common-resources/what-is-an-energy-community/

Daniel Raimi, Sophie Pesek, What is an “Energy Community”?,