The 30314 ZIP code of west Atlanta, home to the neighborhood of Bankhead, is one of the most energy-burdened zip codes in the city. Residents pay five times more for electricity and gas than their neighbors in Buckhead in north Atlanta do, despite making an average annual income that is five times less, according to a 2021 report by Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance.

The ZIP code also happens to be home to the Atlanta University Center (AUC), the world's oldest and largest association of historically Black colleges and universities that includes Spelman College, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Clark Atlanta University. Morehouse College is the future location of a first-of-its-kind on-campus resilience center that will be supported by a solar-powered microgrid. In the event of a grid-scale power outage, the resilience center is being designed to operate on battery-stored solar power, providing essential resources to students and residents of the surrounding community.

Groundswell, a nonprofit focused on building community energy resilience, initiated the project in late 2019 in partnership with the AUC and Partnership for Southern Equity, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that advances racial equity and shared prosperity through policy and institutional actions. Formally called Breaking Barriers, the initiative also includes the development of another independent community resilience center to be located in the west Atlanta community, one that will also be powered by solar generation and backed up by battery storage.

As a participating team in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Solar Energy Innovation Network, the Breaking Barriers partners received technical support and facilitated stakeholder engagement from NREL, the U.S. Department of Energy, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Georgia Power is also assisting in developing the project.

Energy equity is the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of energy production and consumption. In Atlanta, low-income residents face the fourth-highest energy costs as a percentage of their income of any city in the nation, and over 35 percent of Black and Hispanic households in Atlanta experience a high energy burden, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficiency Economy.

Read the full article about energy equity initiatives by Sophia Wu at GreenBiz.