Stepping into the sun: A mission to bring solar energy to communities of color

A few years ago, Jason Carney came across a statistic that took him by surprise.

In its 2015 survey of jobs in the solar industry, the nonprofit Solar Foundation reported that 0.0 percent of solar workers in the state of Tennessee were black or African American.

That number caught Carney's eye because the Nashville native is African American — and was working there as a solar installer in 2015. In fact, he was starting to design a solar array for his own home in north Nashville. Clearly, there had been an undercount.

But, he thought, maybe not by much. Throughout his career, Carney, 39, has frequently been the only person of color in the room. It was true when he worked in the heating and cooling industry, and it remained true as his professional path led him into green building work and solar design.

"Going into [a] boardroom, I'm the only person of color. We go to these conferences, and I'm the only person of color. We go to the U.S. Green Building Council — the local chapter — and of 200 people, it might be me and maybe one other person of color," he says. "It was very intimidating."

Add to that, Carney says, there was just no talk about solar or clean energy within Nashville's black communities. It was a depressing reality, he thought, given that solar is booming in the U.S., with installations doubling in the past three years and set to double again by 2023, according to the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

Fearful that communities of color will miss out on the economic and environmental benefits of clean energy, Carney is working to introduce solar in places where it has yet to take off and to people who may not think that solar is for them.

While Carney is focused on Tennessee, research shows that his experiences in Nashville reflect national trends.

In 2016, Deborah Sunter was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, working on electricity grid modeling when her work took her in an unexpected direction.

She was mining the massive trove of data behind Google's Project Sunroof, a website that helps homeowners figure out the costs and benefits of installing rooftop solar. (Rooftop solar refers to solar installations on top of buildings, usually homes or businesses, versus utility-scale solar farms built on vast tracts of land.)

Project Sunroof used Google Earth imagery to analyze more than 60 million buildings across all 50 states, noting which buildings already had solar panels on them. By studying where there already were solar panels, Sunter thought she might be able to predict where they could be adopted in the future.

She looked at U.S. census data for the places that Google had analyzed to see whether there was a correlation between population density and solar installations. To her surprise, population density wasn't among the most statistically significant factors. But race and ethnicity were.

The data revealed that black- and Hispanic-majority census tracts — neighborhoods where African Americans and Latinos make up at least 50 percent of the population — had much less rooftop solar than white-majority census tracts and even census tracts where there is no racial or ethnic majority.

This held true even after accounting for differences in household income and homeownership.

Accounting for household income, black- and Hispanic-majority census tracts had installed 69 percent and 30 percent less rooftop solar compared with no-majority census tracts, while white-majority census tracts had installed 21 percent more.

Accounting for homeownership, black- and Hispanic-majority census tracts had installed 61 percent and 45 percent less solar compared with no-majority census tracts, while white-majority census tracts had installed 37 percent more.

Given how much solar prices have fallen in recent years, Sunter sees these disparities as a kind of environmental injustice, akin to the placement of a toxic landfill near a poor neighborhood.

"Equity isn't just who's bearing the disproportionate burdens of the world, but it's also who's missing out on the benefits," she says.

Now an assistant professor at Tufts University, Sunter is trying to figure out why minority communities are not adopting rooftop solar at the rates of white communities.

One hypothesis is that people of color are less likely to know anyone working in the solar industry.

The Solar Foundation, along with the Solar Energy Industries Association, published a diversity report earlier this year that found that executive leadership in solar companies is almost exclusively white men. It also found that women and African Americans are underrepresented in the industry. (The 2018 solar census found that 7.6 percent of 242,000 solar workers nationwide are African American.) The industry association has called on solar companies to diversify, calling it a business imperative.

Another hypothesis: People in minority communities just don't see a lot of solar around them.

"Essentially half of the black-majority neighborhoods didn't have a single installation of rooftop solar," Sunter says, decreasing the possibility of hearing about its benefits by word of mouth.

Compare that to a quarter of Hispanic-majority census tracts and only one-fifth of white-majority census tracts.

In Nashville, Carney doesn't know of any black household — aside from his own — that has installed solar. That troubles him, given what he knows about black neighborhoods in Nashville. Many residents, including his own grandmother, face high energy burdens, meaning they spend a large share of their income heating and cooling their homes.

"Bottom line is, the houses are old. And when the houses are old, they're less efficient," he says. "Insulation may have never been there, according to old codes that aren't as good as the codes are today. Or it's old and sagging and not doing what it used to do. Roofs may need to be updated. HVAC units [may be] out of whack."

Carney says all of this contributes to monthly utility bills running in the hundreds of dollars — and to a sense of helplessness.

"There is no conversation about what we can do. The conversation is always about how high my bill is. People almost get into a competition. It's like a sad competition" about who has the highest bill, he says.

Through advocacy work over the past few years at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and now at his own clean energy consulting business, Carney has tried to steer the conversation elsewhere.

And then there's his project at Whites Creek High School, a majority-black, majority-low-income public school that is a seven-minute drive from his home in north Nashville.

While a graduate student in 2015, Carney had the idea to build a solar array somewhere in the community as an educational model — a conversation starter of sorts. By providence, he says, the local high school turned out to be the perfect spot; it's home to several career academies aimed at giving students exposure to fields such as community health, automotive technology and alternative energy.

Over several years, Carney has given guest lectures about clean energy, accompanied students on field trips to Music City Solar, the local utility's community solar project, and led the most enthusiastic students through designing and building a solar array on a grassy slope beside their school, with costs covered by grants and donations totaling around $40,000.

Eighteen-year-old Daniel Van Clief spent much of his senior year working alongside Carney on the project, calculating the depth of the steel posts that hold up the frame, pouring concrete for those posts, building the frame and installing the 48-pound panels, a task that required no small amount of acrobatics. Seeing the solar array take shape, other students would drop by to ask questions and help out.

"We turned this field from nothing to something," says Van Clief with a hint of pride, giving Carney credit for inspiring him to take a leadership role. "He made me want to do this." The new graduate hopes to continue working with Carney.

"It's kind of cool, because it's like a reverse job shadow," says Trevor Johnston, who teaches agriculture and alternative energy at the high school. "The professionals come to you, and you learn the same skills as if you were doing it out in the field."

Carney's message to students goes beyond that. He talks a lot about job opportunities in clean energy and tells them they can absolutely take part.

"No one controls the sun," he says. "If someone could, they would, but they can't. Right now all you need is knowledge. You need to understand how it works. And you need to have faith in yourself to go after it."

Carney hopes he can help fill the mentorship void he experienced in Nashville.

"There's just no other way to get this to our communities," he adds.

But he knows that rooftop solar is a hard sell in Tennessee right now. It's part of a bloc of Southern states that, unlike much of the country, has not adopted mandates promoting renewable energy.

And while the Tennessee Valley Authority, the federally owned power supplier, once offered generous economic incentives for installing rooftop solar, it no longer does so.

"Our analysis shows utility-scale solar provides the best value for all of our customers across the Valley," Doug Perry, TVA's vice president for commercial energy solutions, said in a statement to NPR. "We can use our economies of scale to ensure it's reliable and at the lowest feasible cost. When we do that, everyone benefits, even those who can't afford or don't want to install personal solar panels."

So even with the dramatic drop in the price of solar installations — 70 percent over a decade, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association — and even with the help of the federal solar investment tax credit, putting solar on your roof in Tennessee remains a costly endeavor, in the tens of thousands of dollars.

"It's still an investment," Carney says. "And when you're in communities where people are hand to mouth, they don't have room for investment."

Still, Carney looks for signs of hope where he can find them. In early June, Nashville's Metro Council approved a trio of bills that supporters are hailing as the city's own Green New Deal. The legislation sets a 100 percent renewable energy target for the metro government, requires government vehicles to be zero-emissions by 2050 and also introduces new green building standards for government buildings.

"So there are still these seeds of what can happen tomorrow," Carney says. "But we've got to keep pressing."

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