When DeAndrea Salvador was in high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, she volunteered helping out her grandmother’s neighbor with her bills and expenses. One winter, Salvador says, she remembers Ms. Jacobs remarking on how high her energy bill was, and saying how difficult it would be for her to pay it.
In the U.S., an energy bill that exceeds 6% of a household’s income is considered unaffordable. Jacobs’s bill fell into that category, as do the bills of most low-income households in the country, who generally have to allocate around 10%, sometimes as much as 20%, of their income to power their homes because the buildings in which they live are often more poorly insulated against extreme weather conditions, which pulls heating and cooling costs into exorbitant territory; they also have less access to renewable energy technology like solar panels, which can be expensive but ultimately work to lower a household’s energy costs. As climate change produces warmer summers and colder winters, more and more households will find themselves struggling to pay their power bills.
Still living in Charlotte, in 2014 she founded the Renewable Energy Transition Initiative, a nonprofit that educates lower-income people about renewable energy strategies to lower their bills, and advocates for more inclusive sustainable energy policies. This year, Salvador joins the 2018 class of TED Fellows, a group of 20 young innovators working on scalable solutions to global problems.
Through RETI, Salvador is beginning to push to fix the problem. Ultimately, she intends to use the nonprofit as a vehicle for setting up shared solar installations in low-income communities; she imagines large solar arrays that can connect to houses in a neighborhood, and provide supplemental power to offset families’ usual charges through the utility (a pilot project for an initiative like this, she says, is underway in South Carolina, in partnership with the regional utility, Duke Energy).
These are small interventions, Salvador says, but they’re important for galvanizing people to be more proactive in learning about how energy bills are determined, and eventually, uniting to advocate for larger interventions like community solar.
Helping people to take matters into their own hands will be essential for closing the energy equity gap because federal programs designed to do so fall very short of the need. Through the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, North Carolina receives around $88 million in annual federal funds, which only covers 6% of the 1.5 million state residents who qualify for aid. Even for those who receive aid, the money is only enough to offset around one monthly energy bill.
As Salvador continues to educate and galvanize the community, she’s also working directly with the city and community on a project to create a “smart district” in Charlotte’s north end. RETI is instrumental in creating the educational framework for the inclusion of smart homes in the development, which will be affordable and energy efficient in the way that many lower-income homes in the state are not. She’s optimistic that through connections with other TED Fellows this year, she’ll be able to expand the reach and scope of her nonprofit out to other cities where lower-income people face undue burdens in accessing energy.