Although less than a quarter of Americans know much about the Inflation Reduction Act even a year later, it still has the potential to improve people’s lives and transform our energy system and economy for the better. Whether we will realize the full potential of this historic legislation depends on how we approach public engagement, who is at the proverbial table, and what outcomes we’re optimizing for.
The Inflation Reduction Act is an incredible opportunity for transforming our energy system to one that is equitable, resilient, and carbon-free. It’s also an opportunity to make our economy stronger, cleaner, better protected against extreme weather, and healthier for all of us and future generations.
For people to reap its full benefits, we will collectively need to embrace building the things that are needed to support broad-based clean energy deployment, such as the following examples:
- Build hundreds of thousands of square miles of wind and solar farms
- Develop enough battery storage and other flexible zero-carbon sources to keep power flowing through the grid even on calm or cloudy days
- Double (at a minimum) the country’s transmission line capacity
- Exponentially increase electric vehicle adoption, charging stations, and manufacturing capability
- Make millions of households and businesses aware of the tax credits they can claim for everything from heat pumps for heating and cooling to electric vehicles
- Significantly increase our critical minerals capacity, including recycling batteries and other technologies at end of life
- Catalyze a 13-fold scale-up of carbon management capacity and achieve 210-250 million metric tons in annual emissions reductions by 2035 to give us a shot at net-zero carbon emissions by 2050
The legislation, signed into law a year ago today, has already spurred massive investments in domestic manufacturing and clean energy project announcements. It’s also sparked a flurry of preparation by public and private sector entities aiming to access new funding opportunities and incentives. And people are beginning to navigate the wide array of consumer-facing incentives, from clean energy projects to home efficiency upgrades.
And yet, at a time when we need to build more and do more on so many fronts, there is significant pushback from some quarters. Even renewable energy—which in poll after poll ostensibly enjoys enormous support—in practice faces major hurdles to being deployed at the pace and scale needed, caused by long queues to get connected to the electric grid, a congested transmission system, and sometimes local fights over a specific solar or wind project.
Community engagement and benefits key to clean energy deployment
Driving this pushback are two challenges bound up with one another.
In some cases, people don’t have good information about a technology, why it’s needed, and the potential impact on them, both good and bad. In other cases, people opposing things understand the technologies perfectly well and don’t want to live next to them.
For communities that have been harmed by energy and infrastructure development and left out of the benefits in the past—often lower-income communities and communities of color—proposed infrastructure and projects also have the potential to perpetuate negative impacts unless engagement, planning, and deployment are done differently.
One key solution is finding respectful ways to site new facilities that provide tangible benefits to the impacted communities, including money to people or entities that own the property where a facility is located (the “site host”), local taxes, water quality and other environmental benefits, and opportunities for family-sustaining jobs.
It also won’t be enough to promise previously disadvantaged communities only the generalized benefits that everyone will enjoy (e.g., cleaner air); they must also have access to the wealth-creation opportunities inherent in making this shift to cleaner technologies (entrepreneurship, business ownership, and the chance to be suppliers and developers).
Unless we find better ways to engage people early and often, a “please don’t build anything anywhere” sentiment will become a primary barrier to deploying clean energy technology and infrastructure at the speed and scale required to achieve net-zero emissions by at least 2050.
Flipping the script on community engagement
On this anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, we need two things.
First, a sustained public awareness campaign, because people can’t take advantage of clean energy incentives they don’t know about.
And second, we need an approach to clean energy infrastructure development that flips the usual script on its head.
Instead of seeing communities as “sand in the gears” of decarbonization, we must come to see them as partners who share in the benefits. People won’t support new infrastructure if they don’t see why they should. And those conversations must come as early as possible in the process.
Clean energy implementation hinges on buy-in and broadly-shared benefits
The one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act is a reminder of the monumental opportunity to engage people, communities, states, Native nations, and other key actors on clean energy implementation.
And it’s a reminder that we’ll only achieve implementation at the unprecedented speed and scale required by also ensuring that the jobs, wealth creation opportunities, and human health benefits of this global transition are accessible to all.
At GPI, we’re focused on engaging communities and other key actors across the US, knowing that the era of clean energy implementation will be defined by how successful we are at engaging people early on the options in front of them, the implications of those options, and how different solutions contribute to their goals.
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