Q&A: Sanya Carley, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning

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. Here, in a conversation that has been edited and condensed, Carley talks about her work, her lab’s innovative new utility disconnection dashboard, and how energy is best spent across competing priorities.

When did you first arrive at Penn and why did you choose Penn?

I moved here last summer, from Indiana University where I was a professor and associate vice provost. The Kleinman Center had a really strong presence within the policy community, and I’ve been so impressed with everything they’ve done and built to date. The incredible brains they bring in, the mission they have, the way in which they build and amplify the climate and energy profile of Penn scholars, everything about it is was really compelling, and why I chose to relocate to Penn.

How do you conceptualize your work?

My work focusses on energy justice, which is thinking about the distribution of benefits and burdens connected to our energy systems. 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. Across all my research, I study the human dimensions of energy systems, which we as a scholarly community often neglect when we focus too heavily on technological and policy solutions.

What are some of those unintended consequences?

One of the main unintended consequences of some energy policies are price impacts. As the cost of energy systems rise for a variety of reasons, some of the more vulnerable populations might not be able to absorb those additional costs and will suffer disproportionately as a result. At the Energy Justice Lab, we focus on communities on the frontlines of the energy transition, including those low-income households unable to pay their bills as well as legacy fossil fuel communities. As our energy systems evolve, a variety of communities face adverse or disparate impacts, includding coal communities, autoworker communities, and low-income consumers. Our work also looks at solutions: which policies are in place, in which places? What can utilities do, and what can the government do, to protect consumers? And we test some treatments in the field of preventative solutions to try and help communities and households overcome problems or avoid them.   

Consumers don’t often have control over energy prices. What kinds of solutions are you seeing?

When it comes to prices and affordability of energy bills, we’re talking within the domain of energy insecurity and energy poverty. When a household struggles to pay their energy bills, it can lead to a variety of adverse consequences: mental and physical health, but also utility disconnection, which can subsequently lead to death. Some of the preventative solutions I study include better weatherization and energy efficiency—essentially sealing up the home more tightly so that it lowers energy bills. In one project, my collaborators and I are introducing weatherization and electrification into low-income, multifamily homes as a possible solution. In another, we evaluate residential solar—asking whether having access to solar on your roof fundamentally changes how you use energy and your incidence of energy insecurity? We’re finding very robust results that suggest a strong correlational link between solar and reduced energy insecurity.

How does do you measure your work?

A major thrust of my work is the 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. One can see that in 2022, almost three million households were disconnected due to non-payment. We launched the dashboard about nine months ago, and in that time we know that it’s helped inform the modification of several states’ utility disconnection moratoria and protections. States have raised these issues in their legislatures, which is a promising development.

And you’re finishing a book on energy justice. What can you tell me about it?

Yes, a book that I am writing with my coauthor, David Konisky, pulls together a variety of important topics that dissect injustices that exist within America. There are winners and losers of the energy transition, and there are some very large geographic and social demographic disparities. Those on the frontlines of the energy transition are truly powerless is so many ways, and they also face impossible trade-offs: energy insecure families face the trade-off of being disconnected or not paying for food because they’re paying for energy. Some coal communities face the trade-off of having a job at some point will disappear, that puts their own health in jeopardy with black lung and other health consequences, and ruining their environment and water systems—or, on the other hand, not having a job. These are just really difficult situations that are rooted in history. Those on the frontlines with whom we have spoken say the country used them for as long as they needed them and now they’ve been abandoned. They say: We’re beaten and broken and just cast aside. That’s not right. It’s important for us as a community writ large to be mindful of and start to deeply internalize some of these challenges in order to find a better path forward for our energy systems and the people who rely on them.