Algorithms for Energy Justice

According to the Initiative for Energy Justice, “Energy justice refers to the goal of achieving equity in both the social and economic participation in the energy system, while also remediating social, economic, and health burdens on those historically harmed by the energy system (“frontline communities”). Energy justice explicitly centers the concerns of marginalized communities and aims to make energy more accessible, affordable, and clean and democratically managed for all communities” [1]. Given this definition, energy justice clearly has social, economic, and health components; less explicit is the technological component that, at least in part, underlies our ability to make energy more accessible, affordable, and clean. Power system researchers do not often put our work into the context of energy justice. Energy justice papers are much more common in social science communities. However, I argue that power system engineers have a unique role to play in supporting and directly contributing to energy justice. Though given the techno-economic focus of our field, to make an impact, we must do this work in collaboration with social scientists, and ideally community-based stakeholders. In this chapter, I develop an energy justice research agenda for power systems researchers, define an example problem, and propose algorithmic approaches to solve it.