Season 2, Episode 11: ‘Re-Imagining Energy for Our Communities’: Crystal Huang, People Power Solar Cooperative
Hello, Everyone! Welcome back to Brym - it’s Season 2, Episode 11! This has been such an amazing season so far with people sharing their stories from all over the world! If you want to take a look back at all the amazing work being done, check it out here! We will be producing 1-2 more stories in Season 2 before regrouping over the Summer to think about the next evolution of our Storytelling Platform. Hint: Video? Short Films? Documentaries? We’ll see :) Thank you for being here and a part of this exciting ride that’s just getting started!
After almost two seasons of collecting stories from around the world, Food, Water, and Energy have emerged as constant points of community focus. Motifs and trends throughout these stories inform what Brym is working towards and how, especially as we move towards translating stories into projects through our upcoming Innovation Lab!
Today, we dig into one of those focus areas: the world of Community Energy with two amazing leaders in the space, Crystal Huang (who writes her story below) and Julius Mujuni!! The podcast interview includes questions directly from our Brym Global Working Group and there are a ton of great resources below shared by Crystal if your community is thinking about building decentralized systems of energy! That’s a huge focus of Brym as well, so feel free to reach out with any questions moving forward!
If you’re not already subscribed, we’d love to have you along for the journey!! Subscribe at brym.substack.com
‘Reimaging Energy for Our Communities’
Author Crystal Huang, People Power Solar Cooperative, May 11 2023
Let’s take a brief moment and reflect on what energized you today…. It is important to take some time to give thanks to the living and non-living beings that give us energy.
Now, I am confident that whatever you are giving your thanks to right now is not going to be a piece of technology (e.g. solar PV, heat pump, cars) or a piece of policy legislation. So why is it that when we start thinking about energy as a climate solution, we tend to default to technology or policy? How do we really center the solution around people?
To enable everyone to own and shape our energy future, People Power Solar Cooperative began digging deep into understanding what “energy” really is. And here is what we found:
The truth is, just because we have a Cooperative that owns energy assets does not mean we are building the people-power to create a better world today and for generations to come.
This is why People Power Solar Cooperative created Tools 4 Transition, inspired by the 4 elements - water, earth/soil, fire, and air.
Our intention is to restore our relationship with these fundamental energy forms - remembering that they are what we need not only today but for generations to come, because they are foundational to life. And maybe even more importantly, they are also the resources that private utilities use or exploit to power the extractive economy.
They are, therefore, the tools WE need to create resilience amidst the climate crisis. When we recognize the continued well-being of these four elements as non-negotiable, we also have a framework to assess how lasting the solution we are considering will be, and the impacts they will have on future generations. For example, how real is the solution if “decarbonizing means clean air and water are polluted along the way?”
This might be a drastic shift from the dominant understanding of energy to you. Like Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” This is why we invite you to reimagine energy for our communities with us. You can hear more about how we engage in co-governance of energy in today’s podcast episode. Where do you see your work fit into the Tools 4 Transition?
In addition to reframing energy, we also work to shift the narrative around what real climate solutions look like. Check out the zine we created with the Energy Democracy Project to help tell stories on people-powered solutions!
Who Is People Power Solar Cooperative?
People Power Solar Cooperative was established in August 2018 to create a just and inclusive transition to renewable energy by enabling everyone to own and shape our energy future. We do this by creating pathways for communities across California to collectively transition to renewable energy systems. We were founded as a result of the 2017 CalSEED Concept Award. In March 2019, we announced the construction of our first solar project, piloting a new model for community-owned energy in California. To our knowledge, it is the first cooperatively-owned residential project in California.
We're proud to share that in our short existence, People Power has 1) installed three community-owned solar systems; 2) established the People Power Battery Collective to share mobile energy resources during times of crisis and work toward resilience; 3) provided technical assistance to the RYSE Commons resilience and liberation hub in Richmond; and 4) supported a variety of community energy projects to meet the needs of our Members (see here for our project galleries to date). Our work has been recognized by the U.S. Department of Energy as Semifinalists for the American-Made Solar Prize in 2021 and Meaningful Benefits Category Special Recognition award for Community Ownership in 2022. We achieved all this despite the tragic undermining of California's community solar policies by corporate interests.
Meet the People Power team here.
Why Is Our Work Important?
In California and across the world, the climate crisis is creating more extreme and unpredictable weather patterns. Already in 2023, hundreds of thousands of people across California have lost access to the power needed to live because centralized utility infrastructure could not withstand climate-change fueled storms across the state. We know this will only intensify going into the summer months as hotter, drier weather pushes outdated, poorly managed infrastructure toward failure and ignites deadly wildfires. The impact of these utility failures is compounded in communities who have historically had the least access to affordable, reliable energy, and yet are the most exposed to the harm done by these extractive industries.
People Power Solar Cooperative envisions a world where communities can meet our needs ourselves, ensuring that all people have access to the energy needed to live, work, and play. We believe this can and must be achieved in ways that support the wellbeing of the community by designing energy systems that work in harmony with local ecosystems. This vision begins by restoring our relationships with energy and each other. Above all, the largest barrier we face is in fact changing the nature of our relationship with energy from one of consumption to that of collective governance.
Why is Collective Governance Important?
People-powered solutions are increasingly important because policymakers in California have made it clear that they have no intention of implementing community-owned solar policy and in fact are being pushed by utilities to roll back policies that support rooftop solar. In an environment where policymakers believe that communities should wait for private utilities or corporations to save us, People Power organizes energy projects that showcase how communities want to and can own and shape our energy systems today.
How Do Our Members Co-Govern Energy?
1) Tools 4 Transition: A 6-week energy systems primer available on our YouTube channel and told through the lens of energy justice and ecology. It includes a foundational understanding of California's corporate utilities and PG&E's convictions in wildfires and manslaughter.
2) Battery Collective: Given the immediate crisis of power shut-offs and rising utility costs, the Battery Collective is an active space for our Members to focus on meeting immediate needs as utilities continue to fail us.
3) The Energy Sharing Network offers mobile and permanent energy sharing stations that safely and reliably meet the needs of our communities, especially when utility providers cannot. The idea is to both share mobile batteries and create permanent resilient hubs, homes, and spaces powered by diversified sources that support the mobile resources. The Energy Sharing Network aims to provide a return of more resilient communities and tangible alternatives that actively resist PG&E - including if power sharing is needed due to inability to pay. Plus, we do not need to wait for policymakers to understand or approve what is possible.
These might seem small today, but all of these people-powered solutions can be done without policies in place today. As Movement Generation has said, “if we are not prepared to govern, we are not prepared to win.” When we know that communities want to and can own and shape our energy systems today, let’s start repairing our relationship with energy and each other by practicing energy democracy in our communities!
About the Author: Crystal Huang
Crystal Huang is a Co-Founder and Worker Owner of People Power Solar Cooperative - a movement cooperative that aims to enable everyone to own and shape our energy future. She is a grassroots community-builder and a 2020 Roddenberry Fellow with more than 10 years of experience deploying climate solution technologies. For her work building popular education on energy and power, she serves on the Resilience Hubs Advisory Council for “Toward Resilient California Communities” Initiative funded by the Strategic Growth Council. Nationally, she also leads the Energy Democracy Project, a collaboration of close to 40 geographically and racially diverse organizations working to democratize the energy sector in the US. She is the Board Treasurer of the People’s Solar Energy Fund. Check out her story featured by Seventh Generation here.
