UC Berkeley

Energy justice has emerged as a rapidly growing academic discipline at the intersection of social justice, energy policy, technologies, and the environment. It considers how both the benefits and burdens of our energy system are distributed across society, particularly as our system transitions to address climate change. This dissertation contributes to this emerging field by investigating issues of electricity access, distribution of energy burdens, and fairness of energy decision-making. By combining technical knowledge of electric power systems, methods from applied data science, and theory from energy justice, the following research examines the implications of inequitable access to reliable electricity around the world. Part I of this dissertation summarizes and reviews the landscape, theory, and methods of energy justice in order to motivate Part II which applies these methods and concepts to three timely energy justice issues.

In brief:

Ch 1: Introduction and Motivation - Offers an overview of the landscape and evolution of the energy justice field through a systematic review and analysis.

Ch 2: Theory - Investigates the philosophical roots of energy justice theory by incorporating broader debates and approaches from political philosophy and other social justice disciplines.

Ch 3: Methods - Reviews methods for measuring distributive energy justice via equality and equity, noting their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to inform decision-making.

Ch 4: Application 1: Solar and gender - Using mixed-methods, this chapter investigates how the distributional benefits of off-grid solar are mediated by gender and class in rural Tanzania thereby investigating inequities in access to the benefit of solar electrification.

Ch 5: Application 2: Reliability of energy access - This chapter empirically studies the reliability of household electricity access in Tanzania, Kenya, and India using data from a diverse set of technologies. It thereby investigates inequities in how the burden of unreliability changes across different energy access solutions.

Ch 6: Application 3: Rotating outages - This final application chapter quantifies the extent to which a uniquely shareable energy burden of rotating power outages was inequitably distributed across communities in California in August 2020 and investigates the procedures that led to such outcomes.

Ch 7: Conclusion