Unlock the grid and get out of Gary’s way
The Constitution protects fundamental, bodily interests from political winds, placing them beyond the reach of majorities and politics. Sacrosanct principles of bodily integrity are supposed to be protected by the courts, and not be subjected to the weaknesses and foibles of elected officials who must answer to their donors.
Systemic poisoning of certain classes of individuals, infecting them with deadly bone, blood, vascular, and pulmonary cancers at tragic rates, implicates such fundamental bodily interests.
As we watch our coastlines sink while fires, droughts and floods increase in intensity, it is only a matter of time before courts begin to set aside the dubious “political question” defense posed by big oil and coal, and begin compensating victims of mass environmental injury. While legacy cities comprised of poor and/or black majorities would make ideal class-action plaintiffs, the best way to avoid a forced national restructuring of the energy map is for state lawmakers to relieve legacy cities from state-sanctioned monopolies that have harmed them for decades.
Legacycities’primarylegacy is toxins:
Particulate matter is tiny stuff — solid and liquid — floating in the air. A carcinogen, it causes lung cancer, asthma, COPD, heart attacks, premature deaths, low birth weights, and high blood pressure.
Particulate matter exposure is higher for people of color than white people, and not by a little bit. The National Center for Environmental Assessment found that black people are exposed to about 1.5 times more particulate matter than white people. Asthma rates in black children double those of white children. Pre-existing conditions, or “comorbidities” of asthma, lung and heart disease, also greatly increase the likelihood of dying from covid. These diseases are directly linked to living near coal-fired power plants, toxic dumping, and proximity to heavy coal-reliant industry.
Legacy cities — built around heavily polluting industries from 1940-1970 — inherited dystopian realities, including toxic brownfields, disappearing populations, poverty, declining birth rates, and diminished life expectancy from airborne particulates. Study after study has shown that people of color, many of whom live in legacy cities, face disproportionate health problems from pollution including benzenes, coal ash, airborne particulates, industrial waste, and lead. One study showed that a 10 mile difference in where someone lives can make a 33 year difference in life expectancy due largely to differences in air, soil, and water quality.
Northwest Indiana hosts some of the world’s dirtiest carbon-and-pollution-spewing industries, including U.S. Steel, ArcelorMittal Steel, BP Oil Refinery, and NIPSCO’s coal-fired generating plant in Michigan City, complete with leaching coal ash ponds. In January, 2021, the EPA ranked Indiana No. 1 in the US for toxic releases per square mile, while the American Lung Association has given Northwest Indiana failing grades on air quality for as long as air quality has been monitored.
The largest city in Northwest Indiana is Gary, a legacy city with a predominantly black population and abysmal per capita earnings. At 54 square miles, Gary dwarfs other cities in northwest Indiana, and boasts miles of unfettered Great Lakes coastline. However, despite having dream infrastructure including a port, rail, and airport, and its ideal location next to Chicago and Lake Michigan, Gary has been completely bypassed as state utility regulators work to establish wind and solar developments in rural, white communities, bypassing poor, urban and/or black victims of environmental destruction entirely.
Doral Renewables LLC recently announced plans to build the nation’s largest solar installation in Indiana, which is great news for the climate, investors, and rural residents of Starke and Pulaski counties. A total investment of $1.5 billion will generate 1.3 gigawatts of clean energy, enough to power several cities of Gary’s size. Doral Renewables follows closely on the heels of Invenergy, another new solar project slated for northern Indiana. Sited in Lake County 20 miles south of Gary, Invenergy will produce enough clean power to run 75,000 homes, which is double Gary’s energy needs.
Wind is also transforming rural Indiana economies, with Fowler Wind Farm, one of the largest onshore wind farms in the world, and Meadowlake Wind Farm, in Chalmers, generating unheard-of profits for rural landowners. The American Wind Energy Association reports unprecedented economic development from a new source of stable income, transforming rural school districts while local taxes stay low.
These green and clean(er) developments in Indiana offer a transformative boon to the rural economies hosting them. Doral promises 500 construction jobs over three years, and hundreds of millions in contracts to local vendors — as well as heady profits to private investors from around the world. But, given that environmental injury from coal-fired power generation is most felt in poor, urban, black and brown communities, why does the solution fatten the wallets of everyone else?
Where is the plan to build wind and solar wealth in Gary as Indiana retires its coal-fired energy plants? Where is the national policy of equity in developing energy markets that have long excluded poor, black, and brown Americans, while disproportionately poisoning their air? Why are emerging energy projects leapfrogging over poor or black cities to white rural areas with fewer people, fewer contaminants, and fewer cases of lung disease?
The answer — or excuse — can’t be logistics. Although rural counties offer access to land, Gary’s biggest challenge is that it has too much land. At 54 square miles, Gary has enough vacant land to host the Doral Renewables and Invenergy projects combined. Gary also boasts miles and miles of unfettered Great Lakes shoreline, offering incredible — but untapped — offshore wind potential. Offshore wind complements solar wind in that it is strongest during the afternoon and evening, when consumer demand is at its high peak. Wind turbines along Gary’s industrial coastline near Buffington Harbor, only 20 miles from Chicago, would also use shorter transmission lines to connect to the power grid than most solar projects. When logistics often favor legacy cities as drivers of the new green economy, why are cities like Gary being left out?
Enter the utility monopoly, comprised predominantly of white, mid-to-upper wealth, males. Thirty-four states, including Indiana, have created regulated energy monopolies under which competition is eliminated in exchange for “heightened state control”; these controls are exercised to guarantee regulated utilities a certain rate of return on their capital investments, regardless of injuries and pollution caused along the way. The statutes guarantee that the more power plants utilities build, the more financial rewards for their investors, regardless of whether or not those projects injure public health.
Utility monopoly states like Indiana have established public utility monopolies to control local electricity production and distribution. Through public utility commissions (PUCs), they govern and regulate monopolies conceived as vertically integrated businesses, meaning the monopoly provides service from front (generation) to end (the consumer meter.) The entrenched array of state-controlled monopolies throughout the U.S. has resulted in increased reliance on coal and coke powered facilities that leach chemicals toxic to human life in predominantly black, brown, Asian, and poor communities.
According to the Indiana Energy Association, the role of utility regulators is: To act as a “substitute” for competition; to look out for the broad public interest; to balance the interests of the utility against that of the utility’s customers; and to ensure just and reasonable utility rates and safe, reliable and adequate utility service. In short, Indiana’s PUC bars any new players from entering the state’s energy market, solely to protect the private profits of existing monopoly investors.
Follow the money: Transferring green energy generation to legacy cities and away from monopolistic utilities would bring a profound economic shift, offering sustained economic opportunity to poor people, people of color, and others who live next to industry that ravages its host. Because this economic restitution concept is based on evidence that black, brown, and poor citizens are disproportionately harmed by industrial pollution, toxic brownfields, and airborne particulates linked to living in legacy cities, compensation for personal injury and wrongful death offers a path for legal redress that is relatively less complex than traditional equal protection challenges.
Redress is not suggested — nor recoverable — for decisions made in the 40s and 50s about where to site polluting industry. Demographics have shifted, and many entities have engaged in corporate shell games designed to insulate them from misdeeds of their corporate forbears.
This is not to oversimplify energy market complexities, like forecasting load, grid, transmission, and storage capacities. Nor would it be fair to provide grid access to legacy cities without compensation to the utilities. For sure, regulatory commissions have developed sophisticated expertise and energy infrastructure over time. However, there is no shortage of alternative energy firms with green energy expertise to share with municipalities like Gary, in exchange for a share of the profits, if only they were not barred by artificial market constraints. It’s not hard to draft a 30-year lease where the energy developer provides expertise and equipment, and the city provides land, tax and permitting incentives. Over time, shared profits would gradually shift to the city while private investment is recovered, and within only a few years, Gary would be able to retire its municipal debt and double its operating revenue.
In a post-George Floyd world of lip service to equal economic opportunity with no real plan to achieve it, bringing energy autonomy to legacy cities presents a viable and sustainable economic justice model. Exempting legacy cities from state restraint as compensation for decades of pollution and diminished life expectancy seems like a win-win, especially compared to the potential devastation of a well-supported and well-funded class action.
A simple exemption for legacy cities would free 48 cities to set up green utilities through public-private ventures of their own choosing, and would soon provide cash-strapped cities more than enough money to enhance city services and possibly pay dividends to residents. Instead of drowning in debt, legacy cities like Gary could soon pave roads, buy municipal EV fleets for police and fire, and provide the kind of early education that gives urban youth a real chance at succeeding.
The closing push for energy equity and equality is this: as long as we inhabit a spinning ball that circles the sun, we will have all the wind and solar energy we will ever need. Black, brown, and poor communities disproportionately poisoned by fossil fuels own the wind and sun as much as anyone else, and should not have to sue the richest defendants in the world just to get their fair share.