Power lift: Helping community leaders tackle energy justice challenges

Sara Pyne is no stranger to energy justice issues. An associate director of incentive programs at the Connecticut Green Bank, a quasi-public state agency that promotes investment in clean energy projects, Pyne worked on the Residential Solar Investment Program, which aimed to help low-to-moderate-income homeowners access solar. And she’s now helping administer incentives through Energy Storage Solutions, a program that makes battery energy storage systems more accessible to homeowners and business owners.

But when she heard that Yale was launching a Clean and Equitable Energy Development certificate program, known as CEED, Pyne saw a chance to further deepen her understanding of energy equity. She was part of a pilot cohort that participated in and provided feedback on a test run of the 12-week virtual program last spring.

Taught by Yale faculty and guest lecturers, CEED instructs participants in how to design and evaluate clean energy projects while also giving them a solid foundation in and understanding of energy justice.

“I want to be conscious of any opportunities to help the stakeholders that we work with at the Green Bank,” she said. “That might be homeowners, business owners, contractors, developers, or manufacturing companies. I wanted to understand, are there ways to help others understand what we’re doing here? That’s really important so that we can make sure we are lifting up communities as we go along in our clean energy development.”

A joint offering from Yale’s Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) and the Center for Environmental Justice (YCEJ), the CEED certificate program appears to be the first training program of its kind anywhere in the country, said Coral Bielecki, CBEY’s online programs director. It is an outgrowth of CBEY’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate program, which has been highly successful since its launch in 2019, she said. (CBEY is a joint undertaking between the Yale School of the Environment (YSE) and Yale School of Management (SOM).)

“Our center is a great convening hub of folks working in business and the environment,” Bielecki said. “We want to reach out to working professionals and get them upskilled quickly.”

Accelerating the transition to clean energy is one of CBEY’s top priorities. And historic federal investments in new infrastructure championed by the Biden administration during the past two years — including through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Justice40 initiative — adds to that sense of urgency. The Justice40 initiative requires that 40% of the benefits from certain federal climate and clean energy funds flow to disadvantaged communities, a commitment that is driving demand for expertise in equitable energy development by both energy professionals and community leaders.

“There’s a huge set of drivers now, both in terms of investment dollars on the street and mandates to serve low-income and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Color] communities,” said Michel Gelobter, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Justice, a joint undertaking between YSE and Yale Law School.

“There needs to be training, first, of professionals in the field and people in local and state governments in how to serve those communities. And second, for the people in those communities to be able to ideate and own their own projects,” he said. “That’s a little bit more of a challenge, but those are the people we most want to reach because there’s a lot of money available to them that they don’t know how to get to or use yet.”

Crafting paths forward

The CEED course is the latest of several online certificate programs launched by the Yale School of the Environment in recent years, including Urban Climate Leadership and Tropical Forest Landscapes: Conservation, Restoration and Sustainable Use. Programs in green chemistry and green engineering, environmental data science, and climate change communications are also being developed, said Indy Burke, the Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean at YSE.

“Our overarching strategic aspiration is to broaden and deepen the Yale School of the Environment’s impact on a sustainable future through scholarship, practice, training, and engagement,” she said. “The development and growth of our certificate programs, which allow us to offer working professionals cutting-edge knowledge and practical tools that can often be put into practice immediately, is a critical component of our efforts to increase our worldwide impact.”

The scope of environmental challenges demands collaboration across all geographies and professions, she added.

To that end, the pilot cohort for the CEED program included 25 participants from a broad array of backgrounds, including community activists and organizers, federal government employees, and consultants and advocates working in the policy realm. It was built with input from dozens of experts around the world who engage in equitable energy deployment.

The course is divided into three parts — environmental justice, energy justice, and clean energy project development — each of which has several modules.

The environmental justice segment is fundamental to helping people understand what justice is, the history of the movement, and how to think about and act on justice, Gelobter said. Essentially, he said, it drives home why it’s critical to think about race, class, and gender when it comes to the environment.

The energy justice segment is about how these principles apply to the energy field, specifically, and the high energy burden that falls on low-income communities.

“If you’re developing a solar project, for example, it’s important for you to know that a lot of low-income houses don’t have roofs that are strong enough to support solar panels,” he said. “That’s an energy justice issue. So, how do you serve these communities?”

The development portion of the class also incorporates equity elements, including the challenges associated with financing projects in low-income communities, identifying the right kinds of technologies for these communities, and how to do workforce development.

“People don’t leave the course able to just go develop a project, but they do leave able to own an idea and know what it is they need for their community and the systems that are required to get it done,” Gelobter said. “That puts them at a huge advantage compared with where they are today.”

Another participant in the pilot cohort was Bradley Grams, a regional environmental protection manager for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Great Lakes region. His job, he says, is to help airports “be their best selves” when it comes to climate, energy, environment, sustainability, and wildlife. That might mean building clean energy microgrids to provide resilience to the surrounding community or building solar farms to reduce their own greenhouse gas footprint and feed power back to the grid.

In 2023, Grams completed CBEY’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate and found it so helpful that he volunteered to be part of the CEED pilot. Although he has a strong background in environmental justice issues, he wasn’t as familiar with how to work with a developer to enter into agreements to build out equitable clean energy projects economically, efficiently, and effectively. CEED helped fill those gaps.

“By the end of the program, I definitely was able to craft paths forward for my airport clients,” he said. “I had a better understanding of the project developer initiative, their incentive structure, how it would link with the community, how the sponsor — in our case, the airport owner and operator — facilitates that interaction with the community. And then the legal steps in between.”

Participants in the certificate program should expect to put in about five hours a week, including listening to one to two hours of pre-recorded video lectures, each of which is broken into bite-size seven-minute segments followed by a quiz, reading, or other form of reinforcement, Bielecki said. There is also a weekly live Zoom session with a guest speaker and discussion, and optional times to get together online to network or learn more.

The first official cohort of CEED begins this September. The application period for the Spring session is open through Sept. 9. Tuition is $4,500; a limited number of scholarships are available.

Though the program is designed for working professionals, Yale students interested in getting involved in other ways should email ceed.certificate@yale.edu to learn more.