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BECAUSE SHE'S POWERFUL. In Conversation with Endria Richardson, Hedy Lee, and Megan Comfort.

by Endria Richardson, Megan Comfort, Hedy Lee

June 28, 2018

This interview with Megan Comfort, Endria Richardson, and Hedy Lee was conducted and condensed by frank news.

Megan: How are you?

Tatti: I'm doing well. I'm glad we could all connect. I think the way that this would be the most

interesting for people is just you guys in conversation as the experts amongst yourselves.

Endria: Okay, that sounds great. Go ahead Megan.

Megan: I can kick us off. I am Megan Comfort, and I'm a senior research sociologist at RTI International. I have been focusing on issues of how the criminal justice system has an impact on families and people's well-being for a while now, and I had a book published in 2008 called "Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of Prison", that focused on women who had incarcerated partners at a California state prison.

Then more recently I've been working with my colleagues, Anupa Bir, Tasseli McKay, and Christine Lindquist at RTI, and we've just released a special issue of the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation about the multi-site family study on incarceration, parenting, and partnering. That was a longitudinal study that followed almost 1,500 families who had a father who experienced incarceration, and an outside female partner and minor children. We have really rich qualitative and quantitative data about their experiences.

Endria: I'm Endria Richardson, I'm the research coordinator at Essie Justice Group, and a lawyer who has worked on criminal policy and advocacy for the past four years. My work at Essie recently culminated in a national report we just released titled "Because She's Powerful: The Political Isolation and Resistance of Women with Incarcerated Loved Ones." Our report focuses on the specific impacts of mass incarceration on women who have incarcerated loved ones. We define “women” as cis women, trans women, gender queer people, and gender nonconforming people.

Hedy: I'm Hedy Lee, I'm a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. I would define myself as a sociologist and a demographer, because I primarily use survey data to try to understand social problems. I'm particularly interested in health disparities, especially black/white health disparities, and figuring out what structures in our society produce the persistent disparities we see, because across almost every health outcome that exists you see black/white differences that are pretty large among both men and women. That has led me to study the role of mass incarceration and the impact that it has on particularly women and their health, especially for women whose family members are incarcerated. It dovetails with the work that you two do, except I came at it from the health disparities perspective.

Over time, I came to the realization, as many scholars before me have, that we should be thinking about mass incarceration as a driver of health inequalities.

Tatti: Would you elaborate a bit about what you found in the Because She's Powerful report?

Endria: Sure. Yeah. I think one of the most important parts of the report is that it introduces data that should have existed in the field already. Essie Justice Group, as a loving and powerful community of women with incarcerated loved ones, has become a space where the mothers, and sisters, and daughters, and grandmothers of incarcerated people can share their experiences of how the incarceration of a loved one has changed their lives.

So we know, and women with incarcerated loved ones have known, and women who are or have been incarcerated know, that mass incarceration is devastating to women.

While our report is indebted to the scholarship of incredibly brilliant women, many of whom are formerly incarcerated Black women, outside of Megan's work and Hedy's work, we couldn't find very much data that really commented on how women are directly impacted by mass incarceration through the incarceration of a loved one. This lack of data really went against the stories that we were hearing again, and again, and again, that describe the similar and devastating ways that women’s lives change when a loved one is incarcerated.

So we launched a national survey that reached over 2,500 women. Once we cleaned the data set, we ended up with about 2,200 surveys. And, we found some pretty stark data points.

We confirmed that the incarceration of a loved one is psychologically and physically traumatic to women: 86% of women that we surveyed reported that the incarceration of a loved one causes depression, anxiety, anger, stress, and loneliness, and reported that the strain this causes on emotional and mental health was significant or extreme. That number jumps to 94% when women's partners are incarcerated.

Furthermore, 62% of women reported a significant physical health impact. Almost 90% of the women we surveyed who were formerly incarcerated had experienced violence or danger to their physical safety.

Another major finding is that women are taking on an extraordinary financial burdens when their loved one is incarcerated. Women are paying attorney’s fees, court fees, and bail fees at the same time that they are losing the financial support of their loved ones. So all of those costs occur pretty immediately, or within the first six months of a loved one being arrested and incarcerated. A third of the women we surveyed lost their household's primary source of income, and 70% of women with an incarcerated loved one shared that they are their family's only wage earner.

Endria: There are also longer term financial impacts. During a loved one's incarceration, women who are now single parents change their educational plans, so maybe needing not to go to college and to work instead, work more hours, need to change jobs, or take on additional jobs in order to pay for the cost of supporting themselves and their family, and for the financial costs of just dealing with incarceration. The cost of phone calls, and visits, and commissary bills.

And women lose housing stability. 35% of women we surveyed experienced either houselessness, or had been unable to pay rent, or unable to pay a mortgage, or have been evicted, or have faced eviction, because of their loved one's incarceration. That number increases to more than half, so 56% of women, when their loved one was the primary income earner.

And then finally, women with incarcerated loved ones are extremely isolated. We included a scale in our survey that was constructed of six questions that measure social and emotional loneliness, and we used that scale as a proxy for isolation.

What we found is that women who have incarcerated loved ones are very isolated.

The isolation of women with incarcerated loved ones has both social and political implications. It also has health implications. The former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared that there is an epidemic of loneliness in the U.S., and that loneliness can be correlated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that of smoking.

When we looked at how incarceration is impacting millions of women in the U.S., we concluded that women are facing an epidemic of isolation, and it is political. We introduce a new theory of political isolation in the report.

Political isolation occurs when a system of control socially isolates a significant number of historically and currently oppressed people, and their social isolation reinforces a hierarchy that is based on race, gender, or class. For women with incarcerated loved ones, who are disproportionately Black and Brown women, and are disproportionately low-income, two agents of political isolation are blame and shame. Political isolation limits collective action, punishes deviance, protects those in power, and ultimately maintains the status quo.

Tatti: I have a question about the term, "epidemic of loneliness." When the Surgeon General said it, was he referring to incarceration? Was he referring to this epidemic happening because the rates of incarceration in the United States are so high?

Endria: Yeah, that's a really great question. Dr. Murthy focuses a lot on the loneliness of people who are maybe working high stress jobs, who are spending a lot of time at their computers or isolated from their co-workers, isolated from their family members. He does talk about the health impacts of not being socially connected to people, which is certainly applicable to incarcerated people. Some of his work shows that even when that social disconnect occurs as a result of choices that people are making to work long hours, to be away from community, the effects on people’s physical and mental health may be quite destructive. But still, those choices are different from the isolation that occurs when someone is forcibly separated from their loved ones, forcibly taken from their families through incarceration or through immigration detention.

We were actually able to speak with Dr. Murthy on the phone while we were writing our report, and share some of our findings. He was incredibly thoughtful in sharing some of his work and his thoughts on loneliness, as a really universal problem that has disastrous health impacts. It would be great to see more work on how incarceration specifically is linked to isolation and what the health impacts are there.

Tatti: When you find these things, and you say these things out loud and you put them into the world and people digest this information, what are we supposed to do with it? What is the active response to this, really data driven, information?

Endria: Yeah. That's a great question. One thing that we were seeking to do with this report and with our work is to highlight that mass incarceration is a barrier to gender justice.

First of all, we aren't listening closely enough to women when we are talking about mass incarceration. That means that we aren’t listening to formerly and currently incarcerated women. And women are the fastest growing population of incarcerated people in the United States. The United States incarcerates more women than any other country.

Endria: We also aren’t listening enough to women whose loved ones are being incarcerated. Women whose mothers or fathers or partners or children are incarcerated. One of our asks with this report is really of the women's rights field and criminal justice fields to start to or continue to center women in work that considers mass incarceration. And to the women’s rights field to start looking at mass incarceration as a gender justice issue.

Also, when we are talking about families, to not use the impact on families as a way to mask the impact on women specifically, or to mask the really core role that women are often playing in holding families and holding communities together.

Endria: Another ask we have is to women who have incarcerated loved ones, to either reach out to us, to Essie Justice Group, to nominate yourselves to our Healing to Advocacy program in California. Or to organize, if you're not based in California, to not wait for us to come to you, but to continue to organize with other women with incarcerated loved ones to help break isolation and end mass incarceration’s harm to women. We know that women are already organizing and advocating for their loved ones in their communities and for themselves.

Tatti: We have had other people who contributed this month say the same thing, which is, not only is this a barrier to gender equality, but this is also one of the largest disparities between black/white health in a lot of situations. Would you elaborate on some of your findings? What are the exact health problems that you're finding in these specific demographics particularly pertaining to women?

Hedy: In prior work that I and others have done, we’ve also found patterns that mirror what has been found in the report, even though the report, I think, provides much more nuance. Prior work has found relationships between family member incarceration and increased anxiety and depression, and increased risk of poor physical health outcomes, related to heart disease, such as obesity.

Tatti: Do you think that these are emotional responses or socioeconomic responses? If you're living in South Los Angeles and your partner gets incarcerated and it cuts your budget in half, or your family income in half, the access to the food that you might be eating is different. Is this a socioeconomic thing, or is this the emotional impact that then leads to depression, that then leads to a lack of self care?

Hedy: I think that there are probably multiple pathways that could link the experience of incarceration to health outcomes. If we take obesity as an example, yes, socioeconomic changes would definitely impact people's food budget, and for some people could compound already existing problems with lack of access to grocery stores that provide affordable, healthy food.

But, there's also a lot of compelling research in the stress literature that demonstrates eating fatty foods is actually a way to deal with and cope with stress. There is also work to show direct biological links between experiencing chronic stress and fat accumulation.

Endria: We were actually very intentional about not asking about obesity in measuring physical health impact, because we didn’t want to pathologize weight, and because we know that there is this tendency--especially when we're talking about women, and talking about women's pain, or women’s bodies, or the ways in which women are taught to process pain, or process grief, or process trauma--there can be a tendency to assign blame to women. Whether through fat-shaming in the case of obesity, or through dismissing women’s specific experiences of pain and isolation in the case of having an incarcerated loved one. And that is part of the complicated ways in which mass incarceration really does function as a tool of gendered oppression.

When we ask "well how are women responding to stress? Are they overeating? Are they not making enough friends?” we are, maybe unconsciously, placing some blame on women. Why aren’t we asking, instead, “Why are women being forced to survive under severely constrained circumstances?”

We also used a participatory action research model in designing our survey, so we had a team of 25 women with incarcerated loved ones designing the relevant questions. Asking about obesity was not a question that people wanted to ask, or thought was necessarily relevant to their experiences. Similarly, we did not ask about “loneliness,” because that is not a word that women used to describe the experience of having an incarcerated loved one. Women, over and over again, use the word “isolation.”

Rather than picking apart women's responses to grief and trauma, we want to focus on, "Well, how do we end this kind of trauma in the first place?"

Listen, let's end the trauma. Let's bring our loved ones home. Let's end the practice of incarcerating people, of decimating entire communities by taking people away from their families, and their homes, and forcing people--who are usually women--to really hold their entire lives together without enough money, without enough support, without enough mental or emotional resources. It's important for us to focus on ending that trauma.

Tatti: Right, right.

Hedy: And I support that point. I just want to quickly add that, and I think you're right, Endria, this isn't just about socioeconomic status and access to food. There is a unique association between incarceration and health that goes beyond socioeconomic status or poor health behaviors. This is about chronic stress. The problem is that of incarcerating individuals and removing them from families and causing trauma.

Endria: Right.

Hedy: And a lot of other social problems that we talk about, that are often in the news, are amplified for women who have incarcerated family members.

For example, there's a growing body of work indicating women with children experience discrimination in the workplace. Think about how that's amplified if you have a family member who is incarcerated. We think about the second shift. Well, think about the “third shift” for women who have family members who are incarcerated. My colleague Angela Bruns is doing work on this issue. And those are the kind of things that we should be focusing on. I agree with that point.

Tatti: Absolutely. Let's just stop traumatizing people rather than trying to figure out how to work with trauma. In terms of emotionally dealing with trauma, what have you found is most helpful, especially to women who unfortunately have already been exposed to this?

Endria: Women with incarcerated loved ones at Essie Justice Group are demanding an immediate end to incarceration of all people in the country including people incarcerated in detention centers. So that's not something that can be ignored. That is necessary.

To end the trauma of incarceration. You need to end incarceration.

Also, women demand and need access to healing and care regardless of ability to pay or immigration status. Access to healthcare in order to address the physical, very real physical impact of incarceration.

Women also are asking for community support. We can break isolation by acknowledging that women are directly impacted by mass incarnation, by asking women about their experiences. By challenging the narratives around mass incarceration that lead to blame and shame and stigma, that are applied to women who have incarcerated loved ones.

Hedy: I know that you're not phrasing the question this way, but it almost seems as though people might see incarceration as this one-time traumatic event, but Megan's work really shows that there are multiple traumas that happen and reoccur. And there are ways in which the carceral institution perpetuates trauma to happen over and over again.

Megan: I appreciate that. It is a really important point to raise, because most records show that when somebody is involved with the criminal justice system, they have a high likelihood of becoming re-involved, and really are often never disengaged if they come out and are placed under community supervision.

People are constantly managing some sort of criminal justice status involvement, and their loved ones are trying to support and help them around that. As you were saying, Hedy, people will be coming and going. They will be re-arrested, re-incarcerated, and each shift in that can really cause an incredible amount of turmoil for people as they're trying to pave the path forward.

Something that I did want to bring up too along these lines, and I think it's a thread that ties into a lot of what Endria and Hedy are already saying, the research really clearly shows – and the MFS-IP study that I mentioned before that my RTI colleagues and I just completed backs this up as well – staying in touch with loving, caring family members is definitely a positive for people who are coming home from incarceration and going on to lead successful lives.

That's kind of a community good, right? Everybody wants that, everyone wants people to be able to stay out of prison and jail. However, many of the systems and many of the institutions are not actually investing in that in any meaningful way, and especially not compared to the investment in putting people in jail and prison.

When we are talking here about women’s engagement with their incarcerated loved ones,and when their financial resources are being diverted to staying in touch with their loved ones, we are actually talking about women contributing their own financial resources, in addition to their time and their energy, to doing something that is for the community good.

Getting back to why it's important to even focus on women in the first place, we often talk about mass incarceration without remembering that's just policy decisions.

Megan: When Endria keeps bringing up the demands from the Essie Justice Group around ending incarceration, that's because it is a decision that we can make. Our society has set in place all these policies around policing, prosecution, bail, other criminal justice processes that have resulted in what we now term mass incarceration, but it's not like we didn't make a lot of decisions around that.

Bringing women back into the equation, particularly women on the outside who are again, investing time, resources, energy, and then bearing an impact on their health. We have to look at that piece in order to fully understand the impact of the decisions that we made that have resulted in mass incarceration, because if we cut women out from that, and we're only seeing this tiny sliver, which are the actual people behind bars, which is not tiny, considering the historically large number, but compared to the number of people who are actually impacted by this, it is definitely a partial picture.

Megan: No sound policy decision can be made if we're not thinking about this repercussive effect, this impact on the outside.The system that does traumatize people is a system that drains resources away from people who already have scarce resources. This does have an impact on people's health. It is the stress, it is the grief, it is the trauma, and it is also that women are spending six hours in a car driving to a prison on the weekends instead of being able to be out in a park, or making other decisions about how to spend their time.

If we want to look at this as a public health issue, as a gender justice issue, at the financial soundness of policies that we're making, all of those bring us back to the importance of foregrounding women's experiences.

Tatti: Do you feel optimistic that this all changes?

Endria: I don't know if optimistic is the right word. I do feel that women are extremely powerful, and that we've seen the impact of women mobilizing together recently through the #MeToo movement, through Black Lives Matter, to force discussions about women, especially Black trans women, and sexual violence, and racial violence to the national stage in a way that we've not seen before.

And it's still a fight. Right? Because it is not easy to uproot hundreds of years of white supremacy and patriarchy. So I think that I feel very certain of the power of women, especially the power of Black women, to mobilize and fight for freedom and liberation. I know that it is a very difficult fight to win.

Hedy: I feel as though, I don't know if optimistic is the right word too, but I feel more and more now that people are thinking about connections across different social problems that affect our country, and seeing how they're connected. If we care about women and childcare, and women who are working, and ensuring that they have adequate childcare for their children, we should also be thinking about how childcare is compromised when women are faced with the struggles of having a family member that's incarcerated.

If we care about gendered labor and the ways in which women do more work in the home compared to their male partners, and those kinds of policy conversations, then we should be thinking about gendered labor in terms of how the carceral system works. That women, like Megan says, are pretty much ensuring that their family members are being well fed, that they're getting the psychological and social care they need.

That's being done by women, and not by institutions that should be doing that kind of work. I think that people are starting to see those connections, and that part makes me optimistic. People are starting to see that, thinking about gender inequality and racial inequality as being different but also connected. I am excited that more and more leaders are emerging that are trying to tackle those issues.

Megan: I would echo what Endria and Hedy said in terms of not necessarily using the work optimistic globally, but seeing these pockets of change and strong movements. I think the connections that Hedy was just talking about are really important.

We were talking earlier about the epidemic of loneliness and thinking about that as a public health crisis, which then would tie in with the health crisis that we're talking about for women with incarcerated loved ones, to the isolation that is being imposed on them, and the labor that is being asked of them to support family members who will have better outcomes when they're released from jail or prison. But at their own expense and without support.

There are so many dots to be connected here, amongst things that are going on. It does seem, we're in a moment too, when people are understanding more of the policy piece, that society doesn't just roll along. There are decisions being made every day that have an impact on people, and they have different impacts on different groups of people, and that we really need to hear from those people who are being affected, and think very carefully about the ways things are being put in place. It does seem like there are a lot more people who are wanting to have those conversations now that can be good for the future.

Megan: I think too, the swell of research feels empowering, you know, seeing the work that's coming out from Essie right now. Definitely a really important contribution. It's a good thing too.

Hedy: Yeah. We're armored with lots of facts. And you can't ignore facts. There is so much strength through truth.

Endria: None of our work would have been possible without Hedy's work, among other work her research finding that one in four women has a family member in prison, or Megan's research on women specifically who have loved ones in prison. It is really incredible to be in conversation with both of you.

Hedy: I agree. I think Essie's so amazing. I'm so excited to see what the future holds.

Megan: Right. It's very exciting to see what you all are doing.

Tatti: I'm flattered you guys took the time to talk to me at all, or answered any of my emails. Thank you so much for all of the work and the continued work that you guys are doing.

You can find the full Essie Justice Group Because She's Powerful Report here.

Becoming Prosumers Of Energy

by Ruth Santiago

February 16, 2019

This interview with Ruth Santiago, a lawyer who works with community and environmental groups in southeastern Puerto Rico, was conducted and condensed by frank news.

How do you think of energy democracy?

Energy democracy stems from the effects of energy coloniality and how certain jurisdictions have been used for extractive and exploitative practices and have become sacrifice zones for operations that create great wealth for other people over time.

How did you get involved in this work?

I got involved because of proximity. We have this saying in one of the groups I work with that says, "The environment unites us and identifies us." Not just the subtropical dry forest, and mangrove forest, and salt flats, and offshore cays, but also things that impact that environment – they also unite us and define us.

I was raised to a certain extent in Salinas. I spent my formative, adolescent years here. I was born in the South Bronx, my parents were part of the return migration to Southeastern Puerto Rico. They were from a municipality that's a little bit further east of Salinas, but very similar in many ways in terms of being part of the sugarcane monoculture, a high concentration of Afro descendent people, and real situations of struggle and survival. They decided to return to Puerto Rico when I was 12. I was raised along this Southeastern coast on and off from that time. One of my memories of growing up here as an adolescent was the Aguirre Power Complex being built in the early 70s. It was something that came to us. We did not come to the nuisances. Nuisance was built where we are.

The government of Puerto Rico tried Operation Bootstrap. Rapid industrialization and a very intense industrialization program that affected Guayama with industry coming in. First, light manufacturing and then the petrochemical industry. Then, pharmaceuticals, which are still very present. These energy plants were meant to serve more than the communities. These big, central station, fossil fuel plants were meant to provide energy to those heavy industrial uses that consumed and required a lot of energy.

What we saw in two places in Southern Puerto Rico, one here in Salinas and the other over in Guayanilla in Southwestern Puerto Rico, was how the power plants were set up very close to the petrochemical industries. We had the Phillips Puerto Rico Core Petro Refinery. Aguirre Power Complex was basically in service to that and other heavy industrial users. People were told they would get jobs. They said, "Oh, we're going to generate upwards of 2,000 jobs." People were a little skeptical and concerned about how that would impact the possibility of safe fishing at least. They were told it would not be impacted. Ultimately, what happened was Phillips did not generate anything close to 2,000 jobs and folded after a few decades, but did leave a terrible legacy of contamination to air, water, and land. People lost a lot of their ability to do the subsistence fishing even.

Aguirre Power Complex came in stages. They had two power plants in one. In 1972, they set up what was known as the Thermoelectric Plant. Again, people were told they’d get jobs from this. Again, the plant does not hire many local residents. It’s estimated there was 20-25% local hires, and the rest came from all over, anywhere but Salinas and Guayama. The same thing with the Combined Cycle units, because as I said, it's two plants in one.

At the dawn of the 20th century Puerto Rico got its first coal-burning power plant and the only coal-burning power plant that was established by AES. They're a Delaware corporation with their headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, but they do business all over the world. In November 2002, they started a brand-new, so called clean-coal power plant. It's been disastrous. Again, people were told, this is going to be beneficial in terms of stimulating the local economy and bringing down the electric rates. None of that happened. What has happened is that people are getting more and more exposed to pollutants and heavy metals and public health is being impacted.

Your work seems two-fold. One is dedicated to producing energy that is actually clean and that will not leave a legacy of toxicity. The other is in trying to invert the power structure of how that energy is produced and sold. Correct?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Can you talk about your work in both areas and how they come together?

We have done a lot of resistance work, and a lot of work to promote community alternatives on energy and sustainability issues. There's a long history of activism here. I became more active in energy issues around 2003. We started participating in the monitoring of the Aguirre Power Complex and how it impacts public health, air quality, and water. Both the sea water and the potable water. The only source of potable water here is the South Coast Aquifer. That was monitoring.

We started participating in different administrative proceedings with a group called Comite Dialogo Ambiental, the Environmental Dialogue Committee. Then we participated in proceedings against PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, but also the AES Corporation.

I've done both administrative proceedings and litigation in courts related to different impacts from those plants, and most recently a company called Excelerate Energy out of Texas was proposing to build what they call an offshore gas port and a marine natural gas pipeline, that we just defeated. It would have been running right through the middle of Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and impacted corals and seagrass beds and offshore cays and all kinds of things, and the ability of people to do subsistence fishing and ecotourism and otherwise just use and be in the environment.

We've done a huge amount of work with respect to the coal combustion residuals or coal ash waste related to the AES Power Plant. The coal ash waste is a concentration of heavy metals, toxic heavy metals that were being spread all over, and is now being accumulated at the AES Power Plant site in Guayama, Puerto Rico.

That summarizes the energy resistance work that we've done. In terms of going beyond resistance and seeking to build the solutions and the alternatives, we've done a lot of environmental education, both with Comite Dialogo Ambiental Inc. and another group, an umbrella organization called, Eco Development Initiative.

Prior to the hurricane in conjunction with IDEBAJO and a community board called Junta Comunitaria del Poblado Coqui, in Salinas, we helped start what is known as the Coqui Solar project. It's a community solar initiative. It was started with lots of workshops and consultation and collaboration with professors, like Efrain O’Neill from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, which is the technical campus here.

It was, for years, before the hurricane, quite a struggle to get people to understand, to want to move towards solar energy, especially rooftop solar communities. It was going very slow. We were certainly doing the education work and the policy work, but not getting very far on the ground in terms of actual implementation of the first steps, the pilot project for the solar community. But right after the hurricane when it became clear to, I think, everyone in Puerto Rico and probably anyone familiar with Puerto Rico that the current electric grid does not work for the people of Puerto Rico. People have been much more receptive to the Coqui Solar project and initiatives of solar communities and other alternatives to central station, fossil fuel generation.

Can you tell me how a solar community works?

That's something that's being developed right now. The way people in Coqui Solar envision it is people who have the appropriate rooftops, usually cement, which is not the case for everyone, are able to come together to think about and work on generating energy using PV systems on their rooftops. It's certainly much more than just everyone in the community having PV equipment. This is beyond just a technological solution. It's about the social agreements necessary to make that energy and that technology serve community needs in the most efficient way.

Are you seeing a lot of progress in new ways of approaching energy? From the community, but also from a municipal government level?

That's really hard to answer. Certainly with the mind set and attitudes. There's much more receptiveness to the things that we've been talking about for years about solar communities. That has definitely changed and there's a lot more interest and it's a very dynamic situation with respect to energy. After the hurricane, honestly, people realized we're basically on our own here and the government, local, federal, municipal, comes to help us. We have to figure out these solutions.

We're seeing a lot more on the formal scale. A group called ACONER, the Association of Renewable Energy Consultants and Contractors, say they're doing five to six times the number of installations they were prior to the hurricane.

Things have definitely changed. We don't know exactly how much.

There is what can be called, lip service. A lot of lip service about renewable energy which is dangerous, especially with the government of Puerto Rico. They're saying they're adopting the 100% renewable energy goal for 2050, and I think 50% by 2040, but their actions are promoting lots of natural and fracked gas. It's a tricky situation in that sense because you hear everyone saying we adopt renewable energy, but not only are they putting the money elsewhere, they're also talking about a kind of renewable energy that's not community-based,.

What we're seeing is that the government is being pushed by every energy company you can imagine. It seems everyone has an interest in doing some kind of project here, including at utility scale. That it is not the same as the kind of alternatives we're talking about in terms of solar communities.

Why is this an urgent issue for you right now?

We saw here in Puerto Rico, that it's a matter of life or death. People need to take this into their own hands, energy by and for the people. Become more than just passive consumers but actual producers of energy and control their means of production.

We knew before the hurricanes, and we experienced it afterwards. This huge and deadly hurricane was compounded by this terrible electric infrastructure system. It's not serving the people of Puerto Rico in a real way. Maybe that was the best we could do at some point, but that's no longer the situation here and we an opportunity to do things differently. To do better. Much better.

Energy Access Is The Foundation Of True Democratization

by Shazia Khan

February 13, 2019

This interview with Shazia Khan, an environmental lawyer, expert in off-grid clean energy solutions, and founder of EcoEnergy, was conducted and condensed by frank news.

Can you tell me about your background and how you came to this work?

I'm a Pakistani-American. I visited Pakistan a lot as a child, and speak the language, so I have a lot of personal ties there. My professional background is as an environmental lawyer. Energy is my area of specialization. I started my career at the World Bank, but had this idea in my mind, even when I was in law school. How do we take something like energy access and make it a priority for the private sector? Which is often times the group that has the resources to make the changes that need to be changed. What can you structure to create incentive for them to get involved and support a social mission or goal?

The idea came in 2001, but since then so much has changed. This concept of social enterprise and entrepreneurship, which didn't have a name back then, started to evolve in a really beautiful way. A lot of companies in the private sector, and a lot of investment firms, decided that a triple bottom line, including an environmental and a social impact component to their investment decisions, was important. For whatever reason, it's important to them, whether it's part of the PR campaign, or whether it's genuinely important to them, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that some resource dollars are now being allocated towards social impact projects.

While I was at World Bank, my boss's boss was working on the Inga Dam Power Project. The World Bank decided they were going to increase their renewable energy portfolio by 20%. They started by building huge hydropower plants all over the world. The Inga Dam Power Project would have the ability to electrify all of Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they put it in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was and still is, quite conflict ridden.

Even if somehow the energy that was generated wasn't all diverted for industrial or commercial purposes, how was it going to trickle down to people living off the national electric grid? Would there be an incentive to electrify those people? The way energy access has unfolded in the West is through government subsidized programs. There's been grid expansion so that anybody, no matter how remote, within the country, will be electrified. But emerging economies and frontier markets don't have the money to do that. So what can they do? One thing they can do is leverage technology. Mobile technology has made a lot of things possible that weren't possible 20 years ago, certainly not 50 years ago.

I started thinking about, is there a more grassroots approach to electrification, and does it have to be as expensive as it is now? Does it have to be that a power plant has to be built, it has to cost millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars, and then need to be very labor intensive? Even after the fact, the costs are so high, is the customer whose been connected able to pay for that service? Maybe not. I run across people all the time where power lines go over their homes in rural Pakistan, and they choose not to be connected because it might cost them $60 or $70 a month. The reason it's so expensive is because they're having to cover the cost of building that infrastructure.

What we do is called distributed solar. It's taking small solar home systems and putting them on the roofs of homes and small businesses. Some people are like, "That's cute, but it's not a long term solution. You really need to wait for the infrastructure for the grid connectivity."

And to me, that's like someone saying, "Well your cell phone's really cute, but you should really be waiting for the infrastructure for a landline to be built into your house." That's ridiculous.

That's really antiquated, and as soon as people found that cellular phones were actually much more convenient and much cheaper, they started adopting them in a widespread manner. That's happened all over the world, and wasn't anticipated. In this same way, I feel that distributed solar can be adopted, deployed rapidly, much more efficiently, and cheaply, than traditional grid expansion.

I did field work in 2008 in Pakistan, and in 2009 launched a non-profit called Eco Energy Finance. The purpose of Eco Energy Finance was to build a business case for affordable solar energy for off-grid people in Pakistan. We had to do extensive market research first to understand who this group of people were, what all the different segments were, and then what their purchasing power was? What their purchasing power was genuinely. Not, "Let's shove this product down their throats and hope that they can afford it, but what can they actually afford? And can we match a technology and a product to them, and distribute it to them?”

I met my co-founder in 2010. He was working on energy access surveys, and I had just received a very small grant. We decided to team up and build a skeletal team of 12 people to go and collect this data. We went to 44,000 households. Really trying to understand the true picture of what their lives were. We wanted to understand their consumer preferences without any sort of bias. What type of technology or what use cases are really going to fit their lifestyle? Then we spent three years market building.

We tested a number of different products, and within that time, a new technology became available. It's called "Pay-As-You-Go Solar." The concept is that in the same way somebody in a developing country will go every month and pay for their cell phone. Pay-As-You-Go technology for solar allows you to do the same thing. You go to the same mobile money agent and you give them a fee – we can remotely unlock the corresponding amount of electricity to them, and they get an automatic receipt on their cell phone. If they don't pay, we can shut the system off remotely. When they do pay again, we can turn it back on. It's just like a cell phone.

Only 13% of people in Pakistan have bank accounts. We're, at the same time, generating a credit score for them and deciding who we're going to take a bet on because ultimately what we're doing is financing the cost of a solar home system for them. We're buying it, they pay us a deposit, and then they give us monthly payments until the system is theirs. They can also pay rent every month and we can just perpetually rent the system to them.

We did that for seven years, had 200 customers, and a repayment rate of over 85%, which is pretty high. We decided, "Okay, this is a commercially viable model that we can take to investors." So we re-launched as Eco Energy Global. Eco Energy Finance, the non-profit still exists and we will use it again to go and explore other markets, but Eco Energy Global went out to raise investment money.

Things are going well, but it's been a long road.

To clarify, you’re using off-grid solar as your primary energy system? Do you feel like that's the future of energy? That everything will be private?

I think we'll get a happy medium. For instance, our customers all have these independent solar systems on their houses. But that's because they're coming from having zero demand, to now having a little bit. Eventually we’ll have to connect them. We’re going to be piloting a mini grid next year. I think what will end up happening is that people will either have community based micro or mini grids, and they will be able to plug and play the systems they already have into that system.

Alternatively, in areas that are much more established, I think there will be a way for private, maybe community based solar to feed into and supplement the grid that already exists. I don't think in developed countries the grid is going away necessarily. It's relatively affordable. It's relatively efficient. But I think there are other ways to have an interface between these newer technologies where people feel like they have more say and more control in the fuel source. People will start pushing towards renewable and demand that of their utility companies. As long as there's a way to integrate new energy capacity being generated into those systems, I think that's where a lot of the work and the evolution will come.

With solar and wind I worry about resiliency. When you're dependent on something natural that you can't control, and there is no mass process for storing energy, what happens in a scenario where there is no sunshine, or too much sunshine? How do you deal with that?

That's a really great question, and that's becoming an increasingly important question as time goes on. There's this race for storage capacity. How do you take renewables and store them? I think a lot more innovations will come out of that. In a country like Pakistan with very high solar radiation, it's not as much of an issue just because it's sunny all the time.

Does too much sun ever cause outages?

No. Our customer will be able to power the product for four hours during the day, and then they'll have, say 16 hours of power. There is a battery being used. There is a battery in the system. The batteries will have to get larger and larger and more and more efficient. It's not a problem to us right now, but that will be a problem for the whole industry moving forward.

A race in the tech to create storage.

Yes.

How affordable is solar?

We've got a solution that's a four watt solution that costs $35 a system. Somebody will pay a couple dollars a month for 18 months until they pay it off. Then there's a larger system that's a 12 watt, and costs $80. People will pay $9 a month until they pay that off. Then there's the one we sell the most, the 50 watt system, and that costs $100. Whatever configuration a person wants, we can supply them with that. Then like I said, we're going to be piloting a mini grid soon too.

What we really look to do is figure out what people are currently spending and then try something comparable in cost to, or less than, what they are already spending. A lot of the small business owners, for instance, don't usually use kerosene, they use diesel generators, but that diesel generator might cost $35 a month. We can offer them something for $28 a month, and as they're paying $28 dollars a month to us and paying off the product, the fuel source becomes free. Whereas a diesel generator you have to pay in perpetuity.

Are you looking also to integrate this idea into U.S. energy systems?

Probably not to be honest with you. There's 1.4 billion people globally who are completely off the grid, zero electricity. We will look more at markets similar to Pakistan. We're looking at Afghanistan next. I'm really interested in looking at overlooked markets, and for whatever reason, people are not interested in going into these countries, but there's definitely a demand. Bringing something as basic as electricity could be life changing.

We're not the only ones doing this. I would say globally there's about 15-20 entrepreneurs just like me who do this in frontier markets. I met colleagues that are working in the Philippines, all over east and west Africa, Vietnam. Any place there's a high density population and a huge off grid population is a good place for us to go to.

Energy access is a basic infrastructure people need to improve the quality of their life. Electricity is an underlying basic infrastructural need that needs to be in place before anything else can be delivered.

Energy access for us is a starting point and a very, very critically important one because it's a foundation to so many other things, and to true democratization.

If somebody has to walk eight hours a day to go and collect fuel wood, they're contributing to deforestation, and that eight hours a day could be spent doing something more productive. As far as countries like the United States, what I see happening is that consumers have demands unlike the consumers of 20, 30, 50 years ago. People care about where their money is going, where their dollar is going, and they want to know that it's being used in a way that drives what their personal values are. Consumers will probably be demanding more and more clean energy, to be integrated into the traditional grid system. The technology to become grid independent if you're a person that wants to do that, is becoming available. So, that might happen too.

I wonder how we'll be able to participate in clean energy on a large scale in Western countries with our current grid.

It takes, on average in a developing country, nine years to have a grid line built out to you and hook you onto it. That's somebody's entire childhood. Being an environmentalist with my family originating in Pakistan, I was thinking, this is a country of 210 million people. It's about to be the fifth largest country in the world in terms of population, and the population's not slowing like it is in India or in China. How are we going to meet the demand of these new people? Two thirds of the population is under the age of 35. We need to figure out ways to meet the demand. They're going to continue to have growing energy needs.

How do you define energy democracy?

Democratization means giving people access to the basic infrastructure that's available to people in other parts of the country. If you extrapolate from that globally, developing countries are not able to contribute to their local or national economies, or to the world economy, because they don't have access to basic infrastructure, and that's why they're not able to break the cycle of poverty.

Globally, there needs to be a democratization of energy, because it's one of the fastest ways to allow people to break the cycle of poverty and enable them to contribute to their household and to the local and national economy.

It has to be done. Now it’s just how are we going to do it, and how can we do it quickly, and can we think of new ways to do it? Why do we have to rely on antiquated ways of doing things now that we have new technology? It's an equalizer.

International development experts have figured out it's really important for developed countries to help developing countries have democratized energy, and for everybody in these countries to have access to basic infrastructure, like clean drinking water, electricity, healthcare, and education. It makes for a much more stable population.

Any time we speak with or work with the U.S. government, there is a clear recognition that if the United States wants to spend their money on security, outside of military aid, building basic infrastructure and making sure people have access to basic infrastructure, is good for security.

That's interesting.

We need people to have a chance at living within a certain standard. You don't know where the next major insight or breakthrough is going to come from. If people don't have a fighting chance to develop a thought or an idea, because they're so focused on meeting their basic needs, those innovations won't come to light. A rising tide lifts all boats.

If we can leverage technology to make energy access quickly and cheaply and efficiently, I think it's a win-win globally. It's definitely a priority globally. It's one of the sustainable development goals. It's Number 7 in the Universal Energy Act, so there is a recognition globally that this should be a priority, and it's just a matter of getting there.

There are a lot of us working on it, we'll get there eventually.

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