Access & Equity
The energy transition that is already underway will bring our energy landscapes into a cleaner and more reliable future. But that future must equally lift up minority and low-income communities and ensure energy access to everyone, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Recent Work
Measuring What Matters: Rethinking Energy Insecurity Metrics
A quarter of American households experience energy insecurity, forcing trade-offs between utility bills and other essentials. This digest discusses existing energy insecurity metrics and proposes a new holistic framework for measuring this hardship.
Looking Forward: Future Proofing SDG 7 Indicators Post-2030 for Equity, Outcomes, and Interlinkages
Although energy is central to sustainable development, existing SDG 7 indicators lack demographic disaggregation, rely heavily on input-level metrics, and fail to capture interlinkages with other SDGs. Drawing on existing examples of effective indicators across institutions, this brief outlines three recommendations to review the post-2030 SDG 7 framework.
Covid-19
Energy Insecurity During the Time of COVID
Millions of Americans struggle to pay their energy bills and avoid being disconnected from their energy services. This digest evaluates the incidence and implications of such for low-income families during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Opportunities to Equitably Expand Bikeshare: Learning from the Covid-19 Period
Bikeshare systems are historically thought to be used predominantly by white, middle-class populations. This digest looks at bikeshare use patterns during the Covid-19 pandemic and finds substantially increased use among more diverse populations, signaling new opportunities for equity-oriented bikeshare policy in the future.
Featured Researcher
Sanya Carley
Mark Alan Hughes Faculty DirectorSanya Carley is the Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center. She is also Vice Provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action at Penn and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design.