To decarbonize the world, ensuring all homeowners and communities can play a role in adopting clean energy is critical. Under the Biden Administration’s Justice40 initiative, the U.S. federal government is directing 40 percent of certain funds and programs at helping low-income and historically excluded communities scale up renewables and energy storage locally.

Why those communities? Because low-income households typically have higher energy burdens – meaning they pay a larger amount of their income to their utility bill than the majority of other households.

Nicole Steele serves as a Senior Advisor for two federal agencies in key areas – leading programs like the National Community Solar Partnership at the U.S. Department of Energy and guiding deployment of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund at the Environmental Protection Agency. Across her career, she has been working to bring clean energy deployment into low-income communities, to grow their use of clean energy and reduce their energy costs, and train new additions to the solar power workforce in the process.

In this episode, Nicole shares stories and experiences with Lincoln from the frontline of these efforts – including the range of instruments helping make it happen like financing products and community solar subscriptions – and how we can all play our part.

Key Takeaways

1. The Inflation Reduction Act created a huge pool of resources to help communities adopt clean energy, but the EPA is continuing to fine-tune the approach to make sure communities most in need are being heard and made aware of opportunities. To do that, the EPA has already held a nationwide RFI process and continues to hold town hall listening sessions to ensure communities can discuss their needs.
2. The goal of $7 billion of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is to deploy residential or community solar and/or storage in disadvantaged and low-income communities. This is part the administration’s goal to make the building sector decarbonized by 2035, and the economy by 2050.
3. Programs at both the EPA and DOE are part of the Justice40 initiative – the product of an executive order requiring that a minimum of 40% of the benefits of certain programs flow to disadvantaged communities.

Resources

• GRID Alternatives, the organization Nicole led in the mid-Atlantic region
• The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool – a geospatial mapping tool developed for the Justice40 initiative to identify disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution
• The Disadvantaged Communities Reporter – a Department of Energy mapping tool intended to allow users to explore and produce reports on census tracts DOE has categorized as disadvantaged communities

Transcript

Dana Dohse: On this episode of The Decarbonization Race…

Nicole Steele: We need folks long term. We need a million electricians over the next decade. We need to be creating an industry that people are inspired to be part of and motivated to join so that we can actually deploy as much as we want and we need to be really supporting minority and women owned businesses to get into the space as well.

Dana Dohse: Nicole Steele is a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy on equity and workforce issues and leads the National Community Solar Partnership. She also recently was named a senior advisor at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to guide the implementation of the new $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. On this episode, Nicole joins our host Cleartrace CEO Lincoln Payton, to discuss how she is working at both agencies to help ensure all homeowners and communities can play a role in adopting clean energy. In particular, helping low income and historically excluded communities scale up renewable energy storage locally. She shares stories and experiences from the front line of these efforts, the types of financial tools the government is using to help communities access renewable energy, and how we can all play our part. Ready to lead the sustainability pack? This is The Decarbonization Race.

Lincoln Payton: Hello everybody and welcome to The Decarbonization Race and today I’m delighted to introduce you to Nicole Steele. Welcome Nicole. Great to have you here. Nicole is a senior advisor with the U.S. Department of Energy focused very interestingly in the energy justice and workforce area and in the Office of Solar Technologies. I hope I’ve got all that right, Nicole. I’m going to actually give you the opportunity to introduce exactly what that means, and it’s at the very least, the intersection of some very powerful factors in our energy future in terms of social justice, the solar and the technology applications, and very pertinently, I think there’s some cash backing it right now.

Nicole Steele: Yeah, thanks Lincoln. Really happy to be here. Again, Nicole Steele, I’m with the Department of Energy. I’m also with the Environmental Protection Agency right now as well. I’m on a split detail between the two agencies as a senior advisor. Speaking from the Department of Energy today, I lead what is called the Workforce and Equitable Access Team in the Solar Energy Technologies Office, and I’ve been in that role for about two years now and it’s truly diving into some of the greatest challenges that the solar industry is experiencing right now. Who is going to do all of this work and how do we build an industry that’s inspiring for a whole new workforce to transition into and folks see themselves belonging to in long-term careers and even their own futures in and ensuring that everyone has a true opportunity to join the clean energy transition, but also really being able to see the benefits of solar energy technology and peripheral technology.

I might be in the solar office, but we want to think holistically as well. And so obviously we want to talk about energy efficiency and storage and electric vehicle infrastructure and any other smart technology infrastructure that’s going to help all of those systems work together and work better together and ensure that our distribution grid is strong and that truly everyone has access to those benefits as we really make this transition.

Lincoln Payton: A wonderful job description. Congratulations. Tell us first of all, humanly, the motivation for Nicole, in terms of being involved in this direction. There’s a million things you could have done, what gets you sitting in this chair and then we’ll go through if we can, a couple of the things you’ve done as well and you’re actually still doing that round out a full picture of what puts you in this interesting seat of both policy connections but also technically and environmentally the position.

Nicole Steele: Yeah, that’s such a deep question, but the love of nature and the connection to is really where my heart originally helped me lead into this space. And so I grew up being a girl scout and loved being outside and loved going camping and absolutely loved playing in the woods and just understanding and pretending how other animals navigate through the natural environment. And as I went to school, I ultimately got a degree in urban planning and really had the perspective of how does the built environment interact with the natural environment and what that intersection looks like and how do we not only use natural elements in the built environment, but as humans interact, like we’re all interacting in nature just in an environment that we’ve constructed ourselves. How do we ensure that our footprint is thoughtful and intentional and not bad for the environment?

And so my lens of just wanting to conserve and protect really evolved over time and want it to be more people focused as well. And so how do humans interact in nature? And what does their built environment look like and how do we ensure that everyone has an opportunity to be in a built environment that has a natural landscape as well as being healthy and able to take advantages of the clean energy transition that we’re part of today?

And so that’s really what makes me tick and that it’s the whole ecosystem of how humans interact in that landscape. And so it’s everything from buildings to transportation to how energy is generated. And that’s really how I got into clean energy and I started that journey as a land use planner and wanting to focus on community and buildings and how do we green those? How do we make buildings more energy efficient? And then again, as a planner, how do you build communities where less transportation is needed? We’re thoughtful about multimodal transportation and now we’re in this transition of even transitioning that transportation into more clean aspects. I also then transitioned my career into really the focus of the clean energy space and really got into clean energy deployment.

Lincoln Payton: How did that start to transition into leadership and policy and trying to drive bigger things than just individual shovelfuls of positive movements, so to speak?

Nicole Steele: A little over a decade ago, when the last stimulus package was passed, so some might be familiar with [Obama Administration era stimulus funding] ARRA. I was a land use planner for local government in Virginia and they needed someone to run the EECBG program, which is the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block program. And they naturally looked at me and said, “Nicole, is this something you would want to do?” There was no one in that government at the time in that role. And so I really was able to roll up my sleeves and figure out how to deploy clean energy and it was everything from energy efficiency with virtual data centers to HVAC upgrades and lighting retrofits to some of the first electric vehicle infrastructure deployment in the state as well as solar energy and geothermal energy. And obviously, it got me very excited about this transition and wanting to be part of truly understanding the role of clean energy and how do we ensure that clean energy can be accessible by all. And I spent all the money and ended going back to being a planner again.

I ended up transitioning over to a nonprofit organization called the Alliance to Save Energy and really got into the energy efficiency space and one of the first big roles in that organization was to come up with the next generation of energy efficiency policies. And so really got to meet leaders across the country in the energy efficiency space. And two years later, Obama was president at the time and he adopted our policy recommendations and even mentioned them in the State of the Union address. And so it was pretty surreal to be part of that movement. And it’s funny, we used to always joke around about how energy efficiency is not sexy, and I really wanted to get more into that sexy clean energy space and there was this technology people were starting to put on your rooftops and transitioned over to helping found and build an affiliate arm of an international nonprofit called GRID Alternatives. And so those are some of the things that I did leading up to what I consider my more recent past and really helped found the mid-Atlantic version of GRID Alternatives.

Lincoln Payton: Please do explain GRID [Alternatives] and exactly where it fits because it’s a very, very interesting background that you’ve got. So GRID and then I’m going to talk to you about the EPA as well.

Nicole Steele: I was the executive director of GRID Alternatives in the mid-Atlantic region for about six years. And it’s funny thinking back to when I originally took that role of not really understanding the major challenges that were ahead of us in building that office. There was no policies in place that were supportive of clean energy deployment and really no policies in place that were supportive for low income households and there was no workforce that existed on the East coast really. And so we’re talking about, this was 2014 and so not that long ago, but I came on board and with a small startup grant, really helped build this nonprofit organization whose mission is to ensure that low income households have access to the benefits of clean energy and that includes jobs. And so really the model is that we installed solar at no cost for exclusively low income communities, whether it was residential rooftop solar, multi-family affordable housing solar or even community solar. We did it all.

We also included storage in some of our projects and then also electric vehicle infrastructure towards the end. But with all of that installation, we also had a job training model. And so we really wanted to make sure that folks in the communities that we were installing in also had an opportunity to get out on the roof and really truly understand what it meant to be a solar installer. And so we would offer days on the roof so that you could participate in your own install or your neighbor’s install, but we also offered full 12 week, 200 hour installation basic training and really give folks an opportunity to be able to enter into the solar industry and have that credential to get that job. And so we launched a program in Washington DC called Solar Works DC and really set a model for the rest of the GRID offices across the country.

The benefits of solar truly is driving down energy burden in lower income communities, but then also seeing the lives that we were able to touch by connecting trainees to jobs, whether that was a job at GRID Alternatives or a job at a local installer and really staying in touch with the number of folks today and just being so proud of what they’ve been able to accomplish over the last 10 years or so. It feels really good to be able to have that human element in the conversation and really make sure that as we’re building a new energy system, that it’s truly democratizing our energy structure and that the benefits of clean energy generally can be accessible by all and impacting no one. And so really supporting an equitable transition in those communities that have been historically impacted the most by fossil fuel technologies.

Lincoln Payton: Yeah, I love that because it’s skills teaching, it sets up a career, it sets up a path for people in disadvantaged communities that can really change things. So that’s great. Is that program still rolling? Still going?

Nicole Steele: Yeah.

Lincoln Payton: Fantastic.

Nicole Steele: Yeah, absolutely.

Lincoln Payton: Fantastic. Let’s talk about your EPA role and we’ve got a significant amount of money. I think it’s 27 billion for the Greenhouse gas reduction fund, not a small amount of money in anyone’s checkbook. What’s your involvement? I know you are a senior advisor there, big picture first and then maybe we’ll drill down to some specifics. How do we take that massive amount of ammunition and use it really well?

Nicole Steele: So I recently joined that team as a senior advisor and am really focused on a portion of that funding called the Zero Emissions Technology Fund, otherwise known as the 7 billion dollar fund, in really helping lead and build that strategy for deployment. And there was a federal assistance listing, very wonky government terms that was released on Valentine’s Day that talked about what the plans are at a high level for both buckets. So the 20 billion being the financing arm and the 7 billion really being the grant arm. And so those are meant to be grants available to states, territories, municipalities and qualifying nonprofits to deploy residential solar, community solar with storage, and then any associated related upgrades.

And so thinking really thoughtfully about how to ensure those technologies and those business models are available across the United States is not a small challenge. The other thing that I’ll mention that’s an important element to what that bucket will be focused on is also disadvantaged and low income communities. So that’s a really important lens to that fund. And then on the other side of the houses, the more traditional bank that I think most folks are thinking about when they think about the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and so that’s meant to be the lending arm and being able to provide those financial products for all types of clean energy technologies.

Dana Dohse: Solar power equipment has become much more affordable over the past decade, making onsite solar increasingly attainable for businesses and residences. According to the 2022 Solar Market Insight report put out by the Solar Energy Industries Association, a record 700,000 US households installed solar panels in 2022 alone, totaling just shy of six gigawatts of a capacity overall, which represents a 40% growth over 2021. However, the cost of installing solar at one’s home is out of reach for many US households. The Department of Energy Solar Future Study found that only 31% of solar adopters came from households that earned less than the area’s medium income. Community solar or solar projects where a single larger system is installed to benefit multiple customers within a specific area, has also grown significantly in recent years, offering a different path for low and moderate income households to source solar power for their homes.

This type of solar has been a fast-growing segment. The Solar Market Insight report noted that 2022 was the second year in a row with one gigawatt of new community solar projects deployed. New York made up over half of the install capacity in states including Virginia, New Mexico, and Delaware are ramping up community solar activities in 2023. Interestingly, in states with enabling programs, community solar has grown twice as fast as in states without those programs. Nicole and her teams at both agencies understand not only these disparities and the need for affordable access to clean energy in low to moderate income communities, but also that incentives and supportive regulations are critical to empower states and municipalities to ensure these projects become an attainable solution for communities.

Through the federal assistance listings recently released in February, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that Nicole just discussed and the Justice40 initiative, it’s clear that there is a fresh wave of federal support for solar adoption to reduce energy costs on large and small scale, all with the goal of decarbonizing grids across the US. This breakout is brought to you by Cleartrace for more information on how art platform can help you at your stage of the decarbonization journey, visit cleartrace.io.

Lincoln Payton: So on that, drilling down again a little bit to the next level, when you contemplate implementing something that’s as sizable and significant as this, what are the operational structures that you either have in your mind or already have operating that will spread this out the way you talk there, Nicole?

Nicole Steele: Yeah, unfortunately I think my answer needs to be “stay tuned.”

Lincoln Payton: No, that’s good though because there’s a lot of people listening who will have opinions on it and ideas, so that’s interesting. Having good ideas and probably there’ll be some bad ones in there as well, but having lots of ideas with a challenge like this is very cool and you’re in an interesting position to filter and think and apply and test. So tell us, where are you now?

Nicole Steele: Yeah, so the one thing I can add is as part of that federal assistance listing, we did indicate timeline in statutes. So when the Clean Air Act was amended to include the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, it indicated that all 27 billion of these dollars need to be obligated by September 2024.

Lincoln Payton: Which is a remarkably short period of time.

Nicole Steele: As someone who has been in the federal government for about two years now, I fully understand how long it takes to get money out the door. There are, and for good reason, very strict processes, but yeah, they take time. And so in order to meet that September 2024 goal, we must get our notice of funding opportunities out on the street this summer to allow for that full process to play out. It’s the middle of March right now, so we are just a few months away from people being able to dive in on and better understanding what that strategy is going to look like. And to your earlier question of operationally, how do we approach, it’ll be here before you know it for sure.

Lincoln Payton: What kind of help do you have literally to put that sort of thing together? You’ve obviously got some pretty good technical background there, but I’m assuming that you’re getting a lot of advice from the technical end of the industry as well. A lot of the people that are listening to us are certainly in the renewable space, so they’re just wondering where are you taking advice and help and suggestion from in compiling all of that?

Nicole Steele: There was a request for information that happened this past fall, and I will say that we take that information to heart. Absolutely appreciate everyone who took the time to respond to that RFI. I know that’s not the most fun thing to do. No one’s paying you to respond to an RFI, but it really is helpful to understand what stakeholders are thinking about and how they’re thinking about it as we are building the strategy.

There was also a series of talent hall listening sessions that happened back in December and there’s going to be another opportunity for listening sessions in the coming weeks as well. While we do need to be careful and thoughtful about who we’re talking to and how we’re talking to them, we want to make sure that we are creating opportunities for folks to really make sure that their ideas are heard and considered as we’re building out the strategy. I will also say that there’s an amazing team that has been put together and it’s really fun to work with some of the best and the brightest across not only government, but there’s lots of folks that came in from the financial sector as well as consulting sector to really help us design these strategies and programs. Huge kudos to the team that’s come together to make this all happen.

Lincoln Payton: Unusually, in government because of the timeline, because things are going to move fast, everybody’s going to see the progress and the movement and the policies, I know you’re still working on it, but how are you thinking in terms of rolling that out? Clearly, the disadvantaged societies, the justice, the equity elements are important in what you’ve done so far. We touched on how the job element locally and some of the things you’ve done has been an important part. Do you foresee that type of consideration being present in all of the elements that you roll out?

Nicole Steele: Yeah, the goal of the $7 billion fund is to deploy residential solar, community solar with storage in disadvantaged and low income communities. And I will say that there’s a couple layers to what drive a lot of what I just said, and it’s the administration’s goal to make the building sector decarbonized by 2035 and the economy by 2050. So it’s already 2023, and so we have a lot of work ahead of us in order to actually meet those goals. But there’s another goal that’s layered in there. It’s called Justice40. And so this was an executive order that was created the first few days of the [Biden] administration, which requires as part of this clean energy transition that a minimum of 40% of the benefits flow to disadvantaged communities. There’s two things in there. It’s what are the benefits of clean energy and really driving down into those meaningful benefits. And as we’ve been doing work over the past couple of years, really understanding that it’s way beyond just access. And in the early days we talked a lot about access.

How do we make solar accessible to everyone? But that’s step one. So access is through programming and policy and also financial products. And so access, yes, absolutely number one. But then also thinking about the actual savings that those households are going to see through the deployment of solar and other clean energy technologies, including storage. We all know that low-income households and disadvantaged communities have higher energy burdens, meaning they pay a larger amount of their income to their utility bill than the majority of other households. It’s a large percentage, and so we really want to drive that energy burden down. It can be all the way up to 40%, which is insane when you think about it. And the average consumer pays about 3% is their utility bill percentage based on their income.

And so really want to utilize solar and energy efficiency and storage as a way to drive down that energy burden. So how do we do that? We create financing products that really are thoughtful and accessible, those power purchase agreements or leases that are going to drive down that cost, but then also thinking about community solar subscriptions as well and how do we increase the value of those subscriptions? And today we see roughly 10% bill reduction and we have a goal as part of the National Community Solar Partnership to increase savings to 20%. So that’s another major benefit to solar deployment. I can’t talk about benefits and not talk about resiliency. That is another major benefit to the deployment of distributed generation, putting solar on rooftops or on the distribution grid just generally.

So what does that actually mean? It’s like solar in your community, solar not out on the transmission lines as utility scale, but really truly in your community, where those electrons are going to be used really strengthens the grid and also if thoughtfully installed with storage can also provide gathering places in case of outage or an emergency. We have lots of seniors on fixed incomes that need access to electricity and medicine and even just elevators, when you think about it, it’s like how do you get out of a building if you’re in a wheelchair? You either are carried down the stairs or you use your elevator that’s on a backup system. So resiliency should absolutely be part of this benefits conversation.

Lincoln Payton: You’re right down the middle of personally my fairway because one of the big issues that isn’t perhaps talked about as much as it should be is the actual potential for the grid system that we have, especially in North America, to have more connection of utility scale renewables attached to it. It’s very limited, the whole resiliency and part of the actual equation of balancing the need for energy. For me, it’s driven by that down to the community micro operational area. So I’m fully agree with you and rather than take you away from the detail, I was actually going to drill one more question into it, which is you’ve been quite early in really pulling together that little micro operation of local generation and storage. So storage is where I’m going. There’s been reluctance around storage, particularly in built up areas and residential areas. How are you approaching that? How are you envisioning storage? You’ve already used it, but looking forwards with some of those questions that are still out there about safety and fire and combustibility and built up area.

Nicole Steele: I think I can take my answer in a whole bunch of different directions, but all of the different technologies, we need to be thinking holistically together. We absolutely should not be siloing. You do solar, you do storage, you do microgrids, you do energy efficiency. It needs to be a holistic system in order to make sure that not only are we deploying as efficiently and effectively as possible, that’s the only way we’re going to be able to actually transition in the timeframe that we want to transition in is if we do it all together and we’re thoughtful about how it all talks to each other. And so I think it’s interesting that you brought up microgrids because that’s such an important element to creating the resiliency hubs that we need. And it also allows for this wealth building component that I feel like we’re just starting to crack the nut on a little bit and what I mean by wealth building is how do individuals actually own these assets and really play a major role in owning and operating their electricity?

And so there’s local economic development or wealth building potential and it started out with rooftop solar deployment. There is an option to own that asset, right? If you don’t enter into a power purchase agreement or release, you just buy the system outright. That’s an asset you now have in your home that increases your home’s value. And we’re looking at ways to allow for people to invest in assets that are not necessarily just on their own home but in their community as well and being able to build that local wealth through the ownership of those assets. And so I really see that as a potential major benefit to deployment as well. And then I would say the last benefit I would add is workforce in entrepreneurship. And we talked a lot about workforce earlier around the opportunity to be part of this clean energy transition and getting that long-term, I say, career, not necessarily just job because we need folks long-term.

We need a million electricians over the next decade. We need to be creating an industry that people are inspired to be part of and motivated to join so that we can actually deploy as much as we want, and supporting those individuals to join the clean energy industry and be part of and long-term. And that also applies to building businesses and really supporting minority and women owned businesses to get into the space as well. And so those small startups that we were chatting about earlier need to be well-supported and we need to be creating an infrastructure that allows for startups to test out these new technologies because that’s what we’re all doing right now. We’re trying to figure out what business model works the best and it really is an all hands on deck moment.

Lincoln Payton: It’s that whole culture of every element of this challenge working together and pulling in the same direction, which you certainly seem to be doing a very good job. I can feel the personality, if you like, of trying to do that, which is great for the role that you’re in. So step back from that. Three years from now, what looks like success for you?

Nicole Steele: It’s funny, as my role in the Solar Energy Technologies office and really leading the National Community Solar partnership, I would immediately come back at you and say, not only have we met our goal of ensuring that there’s enough community solar in the United States to power the equivalent of 5 million households with a billion dollars in savings, we have surpassed that goal and launched a new one. And I would say yes, those benefits that I just went through. So access, energy burden reduction, resiliency, wealth building workforce, that’s the lens we should all be looking at through all types of clean energy deployment. And so we have this massive goal of decarbonizing the building sector and the entire economy. And in three short years, there is a lot of change that needs to happen in order to really meet those goals. And we’re also three years into implementing the inflation reduction act, which is enough time to really start to see the impacts of that deployment.

So you’re going to start to see this massive transition to electric vehicles, school bus, fleet transformation. I think about when I used to ride the school bus as a kid, those aren’t diesel engines and we were sucking in fumes with all the windows down. It was just like that’s what your kids are breathing in all day every day. And so being able to actually see that transition I think is going to be incredibly powerful. I touched on a little bit of that storytelling when I was at GRID, but at a massive scale. That’s what we’re talking about, being available in all 50 states, territories and tribal governments. Being able to tell stories across the United States from Alaska to Florida to Nevada to Pennsylvania and everywhere in between. And it’s not that theoretical conversation of what is clean energy and what does solar do and what does a microgrid and why do I want storage to check out my new electric car?

And being able to see solar on rooftops everywhere and being able to actually have places to gather in your local community in case of an outage, because we all know those outages are happening more and more. And so just feeling safe in your community and knowing that you have a place to go because a resiliency hub exists and you can go have your medicines refrigerated or whatever it is that your need is. And it’s everything from rural communities to suburban communities to urban communities. It’s across the board. We’re not exclusively focused in one geography, so that might sound a little optimistic, but as somebody who’s really deep in it, I can feel it. It’s happening. I see it all around me. It’s happening. And really in my role is to not only make sure that the right folks are getting the right types of dollars for actual deployment, but also to really break down the challenges and barriers that folks are seeing to actual deployment.

Lincoln Payton: Look, it’s a really beautifully positive forward-looking vision. It’s great. Last question for you. Where are you in three to five years? You’ve got a very infectious positive energy. How do you keep adding value to this equation that you’ve been doing for quite a while?

Nicole Steele: I can only say that I am humbled and happy to be at the service to this country and really being able to apply all of that varying experience that I am able to bring to the table from understanding what state and local politics look like to what is actual on the ground deployment, to how do we glue affordable housing into this conversation. That is a major part of my motto of needing to make sure that we are keeping our ears to the ground so that we can be responsive to that next thing. Where are we needed next? What is next? How do we ensure that that next conversation is accessible by all Americans? How do we make sure that the workforce is there and ready and that everyone has an opportunity to be part of that next thing?

Lincoln Payton: Look, it’s really lovely to spend the time with you. I look forward to maybe coming back and touching base with you on those steps along that three year journey to see how you’re measuring it as we go. But really lovely to spend the time with you and thank you very much, Nicole.

Nicole Steele: Thank you so much. Lincoln.

Dana Dohse: Thank you for joining us on The Decarbonization Race. For more resources to help you lead the pack in the most important race of our lifetime, visit cleartrace.io/podcast.