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May 21, 2023

Climate policy despite federal inaction

How decentralized, polycentric governing has led to innovation and progress in the fight against climate change.

“The largest city in Massachusetts, Boston, has recently started its own community clean energy (CCE) and plans to build out 100 MW in solar installations to service its low-income community members”

Over the last two decades, one of the most frustratingly consistent aspects of federal climate change policy has been inaction.

The national Republican Party has set out to sow doubt and distrust among the public towards climate change, while stalling and ultimately stopping almost all meaningful climate policy.

This problem was exacerbated by a recent shift by the national Republican Party to actively dismantle climate research and aggressively block and ridicule any meaningful attempts at climate policy, notably pulling out of the Paris Agreement in 2017 and gutting the Clean Power Plan. The shift has raised the temperature and the resulting ‘hothouse’ climate politics produce
what appears to be inescapable political opposition to effective climate action.

Until summer 2022, the national Democratic Party, had largely failed to break through this Republican wall of opposition to major legislation. Even when in control of Congress or the
White House, Democratic efforts to pass climate legislation were often watered down in an attempt to gain Republican approval. Meanwhile, any successful policy initiatives had faced the
prospect of being removed in future political cycles by ardent political hostility.

And while the current Biden White House succeeded in passing a major climate policy inside the Inflation Reduction Act (2022), progress is limited when compared to state and local efforts.

The result of this conflict is a cyclical pattern of slow momentum towards inaction, leaving the U.S. behind when it comes to global climate policy.
FREE co-founder Dr. John Byrne, FREE research director Dr. Job Taminiau, and Dr. Joseph Nyangon of the University of Delaware, wrote about the pattern in their July 2022 article,
“American policy conflict in the hothouse: Exploring the politics of climate inaction and polycentric rebellion,” published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science.

“We have a repeating cycle in the U.S. case of Democratic Party attempts to fashion a national climate policy continually confronted by successful Republican Party assaults to prevent a
national policy from coming into being,” the authors write. “Unlike the envisioned power-sharing acquiescence under federalism, we recast the conflict as occurring inside a ‘hothouse’ where alarming increases in average surface temperature coincide, in the U.S. case, with loud vitriolic claims that a ‘greenhouse effect’ does not exist.”

Out of this cyclical conflict has emerged a third form of governing in recent decades – polycentricism.

In this decentralized form of governing, local leaders and municipalities negate national inaction and instead take it upon themselves to collaborate and create progressive climate policy.
Polycentricism occurs outside the federal government system, with decision-makers acting in a non-hierarchical manner with no central authority. The polycentric system also utilizes civic
groups with specialties in specific areas, promoting problem-solving and conflict resolution across multiple entities.

“A ‘polycentric’ strategy is developing a favorable politics and economics supporting greenhouse emissions constraint that is material and offers some hope of changing the
American policy landscape,” Byrne, Taminiau, and Nyangon write.

This glimmer of hope is apparent in some of the progress cities and states have made in recent years by coordinating efforts and pushing one another forward.

Competition between New York and California to decarbonize electricity generation has driven each to adopt increasingly more aggressive decarbonization targets. California’s 2015
announcement to generate 50% of the state’s electricity with renewable sources was quickly followed by New York’s 2015 announcement to reach 70% by 2030. In turn, in 2018, California
announced a 2018 goal for 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2045 which was followed in 2019 by New York’s new goal to reach 100% by 2040. The competitive back-and-forth has created a
cycle of rising ambition to the point where now 23 states, including New York and California, have adopted 100% renewable energy targets. As the Byrne-Taminiau-Nyangon paper indicates, progress has been seen at the city level as well.

For example, 468 U.S. mayors currently uphold the commitments outlined in the Paris Agreement, doing so even after Trump pulled out of the agreement in 2017 and before Biden reversed the policy.

In a federal system marred by distrust, vitriol, and overall inaction, a grassroots, decentralized form of governing has become the only way for leaders to make real progress on climate policy.
Byrne, Taminiau, and Nyangon estimate that the contributions of the ‘polycentric layer’ achieve a greenhouse gas emission trajectory that is 70% below a business-as-usual path.

“The formulation and roll-out of community-level action reveals a substantial contribution that is not only redirecting policy and constructing a new governance system, but is also expected to
contest injustice in the national political economy,” Byrne, Taminiau, and Nyangon write.

This record of action moves the U.S. toward a climate justice future despite 20 years of federal policy inaction, according to the researchers who believe that while policy progress in the fight
against climate change is and can happen in the U.S. It’s up to local leaders and civil society to make sure it continues.

July 5, 2022

Environmental Justice and Renewable Energy

By Thomas S. Benson

According to a March 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans favor the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050, with 69% calling for the U.S. to prioritize the development of alternative energy, such as wind and solar, and 31% calling for the U.S. to phase out the use of fossil fuels completely. But what is environmental justice, and what relationship does it have, if any, to renewable energy?

Defining Environmental Justice

To the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), environmental justice is the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.” On Earth Day 2022, President Biden announced that environmental justice is about “addressing the disproportionate health, environmental, and economics impacts that have been borne primarily by communities of color – places too often left behind.” The disproportionate impact of environmental harms and ills felt by minorities and people of color forms the driving force and crux of the environmental justice movement that continues to shape federal, state, and local policy in the U.S. today.

A Transition in Reocognizing Environmental Justice

Regulatory agencies, such as the EPA, have not always recognized the disproportionate impact. Notably, a former assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response of the EPA stated in 1987 that the “EPA deals with issues of technology, not sociology.” [1] Systemic racism in environmental policy has meant that, historically, the formulation of such policy has been premised on notions that “environmental protection is colorblind,” and that the EPA is a “science agency,” not an agency that deals with social issues. Additionally, the eventual recognition of environmental justice has led to what some scholars have referred to as “procedural justice” that solely consists of “more community involvement” and “box-checking exercises” but with “no changes in outcomes.” [1]

However, a transition is taking place to move beyond these box-checking exercises to collect quantitative and qualitative environmental justice data and display them in a transparent, digestible manner. For example, environmental justice mapping tools CalEnviroScreen and EJSCREEN combine numerous indicator data sets and assist in generating insights about environmental risk and impact that are “critical for decision-making purposes” and shed light on “systemic inequities” and “unfair treatment”—the disproportionate impact on low-income communities and people of color, among others. [1] In turn, there has been a call for climate solutions that address social and economic inequities and distribute the benefits, and one such solution is renewable energy.

Environmental Racism

Deploying renewable energy in these historically burdened and under-served communities comes against a backdrop of being subject to environmental racism through redlining and the intentional siting of harmful incinerators, landfills, chemical plants, refineries, and fossil fuel extraction beside these communities. Combined with a lack of resources to hire lawyers to challenge the granting of permits or violation of standards, these communities were left with little to no choice. This situation reflects a concept now known as environmental blackmail, where poor people are forced to choose between unemployment and a job that may threaten their “own health, their families’ health and the health of their community.” [2] One example of this depleted level of citizen power includes Cancer Alley in Louisiana, where nearly “every household has someone that has died from cancer.”

Equitable Deployment

But is renewable energy the solution? Yes, with strings attached. Renewable energy must be deployed equitably, and this means not harming the same communities and minorities that have been disproportionately subject to environmental harm emanating from siting facilities that are detrimental to human health and communities. Without acquiring consent or participation from communities affected by the adverse effects of renewable energy, these communities will remain in a cycle of abuse that capitalizes on their poor health and cheap labor. [3]

For example, as wind turbines grow in size, alongside their corresponding effects, it must be asked what impact these will have on the communities that are integrated into—forcefully or consensually. In practice, this means not only assessing effects on the aesthetic pleasure of the landscape or potential damage to a local ecosystem, such as loss to avian creatures, but also wind turbine syndrome, which has been known to cause “nausea, vertigo, tinnitus, sleep disturbance, and headaches.” [3] As previously mentioned, engaging local communities in a meaningful manner can generate positive community and environmental change. In turn, environmental hazards can be minimized and distributed fairly in proportion to benefits, and protective environmental regulations can be established and enforced with the same vigor for all communities.

One other solution, created from the bottom-up, is the establishment of community energy choice organizations, otherwise referred to as community choice aggregations or community choice energy. These organizations seek to remove the middle-man—the investor-owned utilities—and run community-scale renewable energy projects that decentralize power and reinvest profits from renewable energy generation into local communities. [3] Examples of re-investment include the development of further renewable energy projects, electrification of local bus networks, energy efficiency programs, scholarships for students, and the implementation of electric vehicle charging stations.

Conclusion: A Just Renewable Energy Transition

Overall, renewable energy—as fantastic as it might appear—is not a solution in and of itself. Environmental justice remains very relevant in deploying renewable energy, and local communities must be meaningfully engaged before decisions are made. Where communities do not or cannot create bottom-up organizations like community energy choice organizations, they ought to be brought into decision-making processes that can benefit businesses, government, and citizens alike. And there is evidently bipartisan support for renewable energy, with a majority of Democrats and Republicans supporting the expansion of solar panel farms (84%) and wind turbine farms (77%), according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2021.

The deployment of renewable energy does not need to be an all-or-nothing approach. Instead, by ensuring sufficient stakeholder and community engagement, the U.S. can enhance its prospects of a just and sustainable transition to a low-carbon economy—to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 and meeting public demand for renewable energy. This transition to a low-carbon economy will also ideally fulfill the EPA’s goals of environmental justice, which means that everyone enjoys the “same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards” and has “equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.” The means to achieve this shared vision for the future is already here and is underway, but it must be done equitably to ensure the benefits and hazards of renewable energy are shared.

[1] Lee, C. 2021. “Confronting Disproportionate Impacts and Systemic Racism in Environmental Policy.” Environmental Law Institute: pages 2-4, 10.

[2] Bell, K. 2014. “The Causes of Environmental Injustice.” In Achieving Environmental Justice: A Cross-National Analysis. University of Bristol: Policy Press, chapter 3, page 34.

[3] Ottinger, G. 2013. “The Winds of Change: Environmental Justice in Energy Transitions.” Science as Culture 22(2): 222-229.

October 5, 2017

FREE Facilitates Tour by the Seoul Energy Corporation of U.S. Energy Innovations

FREE facilitated a coast-to-coast tour of innovative energy applications for a delegation from the Seoul Energy Corporation (SEC). Spearheaded by CEO Jin Sub Park, the visiting team included: Jung Min Yu, Chang Woo Cho, and Yong Dae Kim.

SEC is responsible for the supervision of and investment in energy policy programs in South Korea’s capital city of Seoul. In particular, the SEC leads the implementation of the innovative One Less Nuclear Power Plant (OLNPP) initiative which pursues energy reduction targets equal to the production of a nuclear power plant. The visit by the SEC delegation had the goal of observing and learning about innovative, ‘best practice’ energy technology, policy, and financing applications. Lessons learned from this tour might find their way into SEC programming in Seoul.

The tour began with a visit to the San Francisco Department of Environment to go over San Francisco’s climate goals and programming, with a special focus on the CleanPowerSF initiative and new efforts to integrate solar power and storage. CleanPowerSF is the city’s Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) program, which allows cities and counties to partner with their utility to offer clean energy at competitive rates to residents and businesses.

The SEC’s next destination was Philadelphia where it was hosted by FREE at the office of Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP. The Deputy Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania provided a warm welcome letter to the delegation, encouraging the SEC to consider the Pennsylvania Sustainable Energy Finance Program (PennSEF) as a model that could be implemented in Seoul – PennSEF is a partnership program between the Pennsylvania Treasury and FREE. To illustrate how the work done by FREE could inform the operations of the SEC, FREE team members presented the lessons learned in setting up large-scale energy efficiency, on-site renewable energy, and microgrid applications such as the Delaware Energy Efficiency Bond Series, the PennSEF program’s LED Street Lighting Initiative, and a Philadelphia Solar 86 MWp Finance Opportunity. Specific attention was paid to financing and policy challenges facing the SEC delegation and how some of the innovative elements of FREE’s work could potentially help overcome these challenges. FREE made several suggestions regarding the organization of research for SEC’s Research Institute to consider, based on FREE’s own efforts to integrate a research arm into the foundation’s institutional structure. A copy of FREE’s presentation is included here.

The SEC delegation and the FREE team in Philadelphia. From bottom left to bottom right: Baird Brown, Jin Sub Park, John Byrne, Joohee Lee. From top left to top right: Jeongseok Seo, Chang Woo Cho, Yong Dae Kim, Job Taminiau, Soojin Shin, Jung Min Yu.

Members of the FREE team then accompanied the SEC delegation to Princeton University to discuss their microgrid application and thermal energy storage strategy. The Princeton microgrid system includes a district energy system that provides electricity, steam, and chilled water to power, heat, and cool the buildings on the university campus. In emergency situations, the microgrid can operate independently from the grid – during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy, the system was able to continue operation while the rest of the grid was down. A key innovation of the Princeton facility is its capacity to sell ancillary services to the utility grid based on an automated control system that calculates optimum economic benefit of the range of services available from its microgrid.

The final leg of the tour involved a visit to an innovative community energy governance model in New York City. The Brooklyn Microgrid is a network of neighborhood relationships which relies on peer-to-peer transactions built on blockchain technology. Operated by start-up LO3 Energy, the transactive system allows for direct interaction between neighbors in trading power to each other without requiring involvement from the utility.

It was an honor for FREE to host the SEC delegation and we look forward to working together in the future.

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May 3, 2017

Sustainable Energy Utilities and ESCO Financing Can Save Money and Reduce Carbon Footprints

By Kathleen Saul – Master of Environmental Studies Faculty at The Evergreen State College

Reprinted with permission from: https://www.evergreen.edu/sustainableinfrastructure

“The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket.” —Will Rogers

William Penn Adair, aka Will Rogers, lived at a time before the spread of electric lights, before highways criss-crossed this nation, and when only 76.2 million people lived in the 45 states of the United States (1900 data). His words ring true today as they did back then. Today, over 308 million people reside in the 50 states and draw upon its natural resources to power cars and buses, computers, lights, heating and cooling systems, industrial equipment and cellular phones, hair dryers and electric toothbrushes, toll booths on highways and checkout stands in grocery stores. Energy–sourced from coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, and other sources—keeps the country buzzing.

As expected, using energy is not free. We pay for electricity in dollars per kWh, for natural gas in dollars per mmBTU, and gasoline or diesel for a car, bus or minivan in dollars per gallon. Those prices fluctuate depending on national policies, subsidies accorded providers, global affairs (such as wars in the Middle East), demand, and local taxes (such as carbon taxes or taxes to pay for road repairs).

In recent years concern over global climate change and the impact of energy use on climate has forced many people to take a harder look at their energy consumption patterns. Appliance manufacturers have introduced more efficient versions of popular brands. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy worked to develop labels to make it easier for consumers to choose more energy efficient options. Automobile manufacturers have increased the miles per gallon achieved by many small cars. As a result, the energy consumed by each American has gone down over time.

But there is more to be done. We have to turn our attention to the structures housing the computers and refrigerators, HVAC systems and televisions. We need to look at personal residences and businesses. This work starts with an energy audit. After examining the structure and its energy profile, an energy service company (ESCO) provides a list of different options for making the home or business more energy efficient, how much each option will cost, and the amount of energy each will save. The business owner or resident can determine how much invest. They may decide just to replace light bulbs or may choose to invest in a new heating and cooling (HVAC) system, to replace leaky windows, and to add insulation to the attic and basement. They will contract with the ESCO to do the work and to pay that ESCO based on how much money they save on their energy bills, from the start of the project until the total cost of the work has been repaid. Figure 2 below illustrates a simple example:

**Figure 2: A Simplified View of a New Way to Finance**

If previous energy bills totaled $100 and new bills total $75 dollars per month, $25 per month (the hatched portion of the graph) will be paid towards the cost of the heating and cooling system, windows, and insulation. There is no large up-front investment to worry about. The bills are no higher than before the work was completed and, in the end, the building will be more energy efficient. After the work has been paid off, bills will be reduced to $75 per month.

This same type of financing arrangement can also be applied toward renewable energy projects. Rather than having to buy solar panels on credit, interested parties can work with a solar company which will install the panels and take the money that would have been paid to an electric company as the installment payment for the panels. After a period of time, the interested parties become the owner of the panels and the electric bill drops to zero (theoretically).

The Delaware Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU) has built on this model to help increase the energy and water use efficiency of prisons and schools in Delaware, invest in renewable energy systems, and reduce the energy use of households. The SEU, a tax-exempt entity, tapped the private bond market to raise $72.5 million with which to implement large scale, long-term sustainable energy measures. These projects involve four interrelated contracts: a) A program agreement; b) A guaranteed savings agreement; c) An installment payment agreement; and d) An indenture (Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU): The Business Model of the SEU, https://freefutures.org/policybriefs/). The program agreement describes the contracted relationship between the SEU, the ESCO(s), and other participants in the program. It provides details about reporting requirements and monitoring programs, as well as specific targets for the programs. The guaranteed savings agreement follows an audit by an ESCO and outlines the appropriate energy, water and other conservation measures, or renewable energy or distributed energy system installations that will be undertaken to reduce consumption. The installment payment agreement details the plans for payments from the participant to the trustee. The trustee works on behalf of the bondholders. In the case of the Delaware SEU, the SEU is the trustee. The relationship between the bondholders and the trustee is outline in the indenture. Because the model relies on contractual agreements, the risk to any one party has been reduced. Setting targets at the outset and providing monitoring throughout the life of the project both help ensure success of the energy efficiency and conservation projects. Any deviations from the energy efficiency and conservation plans can be identified early and can be corrected.

In the case of the SEU, the figure looks slightly different than Figure 2 above. Figure 3 shows that the Aggregate Guaranteed Savings over the life of the project will far exceed the Aggregate Payments made toward the project. Thus, the concept is the same. Regardless of the source of the funds, there is no large up-front payment and the contractually guaranteed savings will exceed the payments made.

**Figure 3: Large Scale, Long Term Deep Retrofits** (Source: Sustainable Energy Utility, SEU – The Business Model of the SEU)

Projects using this type of financing approach also have been implemented in Thane, India as part of the Campaign for Renewable Energy under Dr. Sanjay Mangala Gopal ; in Sonoma County, California and in Pennsylvania (See https://freefutures.org/). Small scale, short-term projects can benefit from this approach, as can large-scale, long-term ones. We can then put the money back into our pockets as Will Rogers bade us to do many, many years ago.

July 8, 2016

The Scale of the Energy Access Gap

By Benjamin M. Attia
Access to electricity is a key catalyst correlated with economic development.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently estimated that over 1.5 billion people do not have access to affordable electricity, representing one quarter of the world’s population [1]. In the absence of aggressive new policies and significant financing, it is estimated that that number will drop to only 1.3 billion by 2030 [1]. The United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative, which is working toward a goal of global universal energy access by 2030, estimates that approximately 600 million of these unelectrified people live in Sub-Saharan Africa [2]. This number is expected to rise to approximately 645 million by 2030 under a business-as-usual scenario due to expected explosive population growth [2, 3]. This widening gap of energy access is a complex and multidimensional problem and represents an important hindrance to economic development and social change in the developing world.

Historically, the access gap since the initial commercialization of electricity has “consistently been between 1 and 2 billion people… as grid expansion has roughly paced global population” growth [4]. This suggests that the access gap is a reflection of a persistent lack of equity in distribution. In fact, in 1983, Krugmann and Goldemberg famously estimated that at 1983 global consumption levels, the “energy cost of satisfying the basic human needs” of every person on the planet was well within the available supply of energy resources [5, p. 60].

Today, the consumption and distribution inequalities are even more pronounced. In 2011, the average American consumed 13,240 kilowatt hours (kWh) per person per year, while the average Ethiopian consumed only 56 kWh [6]. Further, across all of Sub-Saharan Africa, annual per capita kWh use is one-sixth the load requirements of a relatively efficient American refrigerator [7]. Globally, the poorest three-quarters of the world’s population comprise less than ten percent of total energy consumption [8, p. 5].

The inequities that underline energy poverty and energy access are also fundamentally connected to climate change. Looking ahead, the world’s demand for electricity is estimated to increase by more than 70% by 2040, and the World Bank and IEA estimate that a doubling in installed energy capacity will be necessary to meet the anticipated growing demands of emerging markets [9], [10]. Despite the accelerating paradigm shift to low-carbon and renewable energy generation technologies, there is a paradoxical irony to the link between development and climate change which has left the poorest countries with the lowest contributions to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as the most vulnerable and most susceptible to the effects of climate change [11, p. 591, 12]. As markets evolve to value avoided GHG emissions [13, p. 215], reconciling the joint–and possibly conflicting– goals of development through universal energy access and combating climate change will accelerate, but at present, the inequity in energy access is only further exacerbated by the parallel inequities with respect to climate change adaptation measures.

Many scholars agree that access to electricity in itself is not fully sufficient to bring about the required economic and social development to break the cycle of poverty [14, p. 1058, 15, p. 2194]. It has also been widely settled that access to electricity is a key catalyst correlated with economic development and that a lack of electricity access is a key bottleneck to growth [16], see [17] for comprehensive rebuttal]. However, approaches for tackling the problems associated with energy poverty are often difficult to scale up because of the difficulties associated with navigating this uneven technical, sociocultural, agricultural, and institutional landscape, and, as will be demonstrated below, the multidimensionality of energy access inhibits scalability of any one catch-all solution.

The IEA estimates that 30% of those without access to electricity would best be served by grid extension, 52.5% would be best served by micro-grids, and 17.5% would best be served by stand-alone energy systems [3, p. 14]. There is a clear need for investment in rural electrification initiatives at all three levels and a clear gap in understanding routes and sinks for effective impact investing [3, p. 14]. National grid extension programs and firms selling small energy systems are generally much better funded than the community-scale solution of micro-grids, despite their significant potential market share and niche ability to provide scale benefits, rapid deployment, flexibility of business models, and energy storage, security, and reliability [3, p. 15]. The micro-grid space is rife with opportunity to build markets, innovate new business models, develop new financing mechanisms, and provide the sustainable development benefits of renewable electrification and increased economic potential.

As one development professional put it, “If rural [people] have power in their lives, they will have more power over their lives” [16]. Access to electricity is not the answer to the greater global problems of poverty and inequity, but can be a good place to start.

References
[1] “World Energy Outlook 2014,” Paris, France, 2014.
[2] SE4ALL, “Energy for all: Financing Access for the poor,” in Energy for All Conference, 2011.
[3] M. Franz, N. Peterschmidt, M. Rohrer, and B. Kondev, “Mini-grid Policy Toolkit: Policy and Business Frameworks for Successful Mini-grid Roll-outs,” EUEI Partnership Dialogue Facility, Escheborn, 2014.
[4] P. Alstone, D. Gershenson, and D. M. Kammen, “Decentralized energy systems for clean electricity access,” Nat. Clim. Chang., vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 305–314, 2015.
[5] H. Krugmann and J. Goldemberg, “The energy cost of satisfying basic human needs,” Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 45–60, 1983.
[6] C. Kenny, “If Everyone Gets Electricity, Can the Planet Survive?,” The Atlantic, 2015.
[7] “Power Africa Annual Report,” 2014.
[8] J. Tomei and D. Gent, “Equity and the energy trilemma Delivering sustainable energy access in low-income communities,” International Institute for Environment & Development, London, United Kingdom, 2015.
[9] “World Energy Outlook 2015 Factsheet,” Paris, France, 2015.
[10] R. K. Akikur, R. Saidur, H. W. Ping, and K. R. Ullah, “Comparative study of stand-alone and hybrid solar energy systems suitable for off-grid rural electrification: A review,” Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev., vol. 27, pp. 738–752, 2013.
[11] A. Yadoo and H. Cruickshank, “The role for low carbon electrification technologies in poverty reduction and climate change strategies: A focus on renewable energy mini-grids with case studies in Nepal, Peru and Kenya,” Energy Policy, vol. 42, pp. 591–602, 2012.
[12] J. Byrne, Y.-D. Wang, H. Lee, and J. Kim, “An equity and sustainability-based policy response to global climate change,” Energy Policy, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 335–343, 1998.
[13] U. Deichmann, C. Meisner, S. Murray, and D. Wheeler, “The economics of renewable energy expansion in rural Sub-Saharan Africa,” Energy Policy, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 215–227, 2011.
[14 A. Bhide and C. R. Monroy, “Energy poverty: A special focus on energy poverty in India and renewable energy technologies,” Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev., vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 1057–1066, 2011.
[15] B. Mainali and S. Silveira, “Financing off-grid rural electrification: Country case Nepal,” Energy, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 2194–2201, 2011.
[16] D. Mans, “Back to the Future: Africa’s Mobile Revolution Should Inspire Rural Energy Solutions,” Huffington Post, 20-May-2014.
[17] L. A. Odarno, “Negotiating the Labrynth of Modernity’s Promise: A Paradigm Analysis of Energy Poverty in Peri-Urban Kumasi, Ghana,” University of Delaware, 2014.