New Program Set to Fight for 'Electricity Future That Works for People and the Planet'
CSA Z462 Arc Flash Training – Electrical Safety Compliance Course
Our customized live online or in‑person group training can be delivered to your staff at your location.
- Live Online
- 6 hours Instructor-led
- Group Training Available
Energy Justice Program drives a renewables-based transition, challenging utility monopolies with legal action, promoting rooftop solar, distributed energy, public power, and climate justice to decarbonize the grid and protect communities and wildlife nationwide.
The Core Facts
A climate justice initiative advancing renewables, legal action, and public power to challenge utility monopolies.
Challenges utility monopolies impeding clean energy adoption.
Pursues legal action against anti-solar rate designs and barriers.
Supports local solar and energy freedom strategies in the South.
Develops policy aligned to 90% carbon-free power targets by 2030.
The Center for Biological Diversity on Monday rolled out a new program to push back against the nation's community- and wildlife-harming energy system that the climate advocacy group says is based on fossil fuels and a "centralized monopoly on power."
The goal of the new effort, the Energy Justice Program, is to help forge a path towards a just and renewables-based energy future informed by equitable regulation principles.
"Our broken energy system threatens our climate and our future," said Jean Su, the Energy Justice Program's new director, in a statement. "Utilities were given monopolies to ensure public access to electricity, but these dinosaur corporations are now hurting the public interest by blocking the clean energy transition, including via coal and nuclear subsidy schemes that profit off the fossil fuel era."
"In this era of climate catastrophe," she continued, "we have to stop these outdated monopolies and usher in a new electricity future that works for people and the planet."
To meet those goals, the new program will pursue a number of avenues, including using legal action to fight utilities' obstruction of clean energy efforts, helping communities advance local solar programs through energy freedom strategies in the South, and crafting energy policies on the state, federal, and international levels in step with commitments from major energy buyers to achieve a 90% carbon-free goal by 2030.
Some of that work is already underway. In June the Center filed a brief with a federal court in a bid to block Arizona power utility Salt River Project from slapping a 60-percent electricity rate hike on rooftop solar customers—amid federal efforts to reshape electricity pricing that critics say are being rushed—a move the group described (pdf) as an obstacle to achieving "the energy transition demanded by climate science."
The Center is among the groups in Energy Justice NC. The diverse coalition seeks to end the energy stranglehold in North Carolina held by Duke Energy, which continues to invest in fossil fuel projects even as it touts clean energy and grid investments in the region.
The time for a new energy system, says the Energy Justice Program, is now, as climate change impacts increasingly strain the grid.
"Amid this climate and extinction emergency," said Su, "the U.S. can't afford to stick with the same centralized, profit-driven electricity system that drove us here in the first place. We have to seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to design a new system of accountable, equitable, truly public power."
