美国国家公共电台 NPR Stepping Into The Sun: A Mission To Bring Solar Energy To Communities Of Color（在线收听）

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Solar technology is steadily getting better and cheaper, and lots of people are already seeing the benefits through lower electricity bills but not everyone. In black and Hispanic neighborhoods, there is far less solar than in white neighborhoods. NPR's Andrea Hsu went to Nashville to meet someone who's trying to change that.

JASON CARNEY: There's eight right there coming out - two more after that one.

ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: His name is Jason Carney. I caught up with him at Whites Creek High School just a few miles from his home in North Nashville. He was getting a group of teenagers to haul solar panels from a storage garage to a grassy slope on the edge of school property.

(LAUGHTER)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Hey, we're going to carry it on our head.

HSU: This spring, Jason Carney was finishing up his dream project, his baby - a solar installation paid for by grants and donations, designed and built largely by students; students he's pretty sure wouldn't have otherwise been interested in renewable energy. He tells me about one of the kids, Daniel Van Clief.

CARNEY: He said the other day - he was like, man, this was just grass before. It was nothing, right? I mean, you can elaborate on that, Daniel. What were you saying?

DANIEL VAN CLIEF: We turned this field from nothing to something.

HSU: Van Clief spent much of his senior year working on this - everything from calculating how deep the posts for the frame had to be to cutting the steel and pouring cement and now climbing a ladder and throwing himself over the top of the whole thing to secure the panels.

CARNEY: Aren't you a dancer?

VAN CLIEF: I am also a dancer.

CARNEY: That's why you're super limber (laughter).

HSU: Now Van Clief wants to work as a solar installer. In fact, he wants to work just like this alongside his mentor.

CARNEY: Let's put the ladder here.

HSU: Jason Carney gets that. He savors being the mentor that he never had. When he was getting his start, he saw how few African Americans and other people of color were doing green energy work in Tennessee. In meetings and at conferences, he often found he was the only one. He's pretty used to it now. But at first...

CARNEY: It was very intimidating. It was very you don't belong here. That was the feeling.

HSU: This year, a nonprofit called The Solar Foundation put out a report that found executive leadership in solar companies to be almost exclusively white men. It also found women and African Americans to be underrepresented in the solar workforce. Deborah Sunter of Tufts University thinks that may be one reason minority communities have been slower to adopt solar. She's been leading the research into disparities around who's installing solar. She says people also get interested in solar when they see it on their neighbor's house. And in black neighborhoods, that's just not happening as much.

DEBORAH SUNTER: Essentially, half of the black-majority neighborhoods didn't have a single installation of rooftop solar.

HSU: Sunter sees this as a kind of environmental injustice not so different from, say, putting a toxic landfill next to a poor neighborhood.

SUNTER: Equity isn't just, who is bearing the disproportional burdens of the world? But it also is, who's missing out on the benefits?

HSU: That's Jason Carney's fear too. He says communities of color in Nashville spend a lot of their income heating and cooling their homes.

CARNEY: Bottom line is the houses are old. And when the houses are old, they're less efficient.

HSU: Think sagging insulation, roofs that need updating, HVAC units out of whack and a feeling of helplessness.

CARNEY: There is no conversation about what we can do. Conversation is always about how high my bill is, and people almost get into kind of a competition. It's like a sad competition, like my bill was 300 or my bill was $400. My bill's 425 not, you know, I put in insulation, and my bill is now $100. Well, yeah. I put solar on, and my bill's now $80. You know, that's the conversation on which communities of color could start having.

HSU: So Carney hopes the solar installation at Whites Creek High School will help start that conversation. Where it goes is another challenge. Tennessee, like most of the Southeast, has not adopted mandates around renewable energy. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which generates and supplies power for the region, no longer offers generous economic incentives for rooftop solar. So even though solar prices have fallen dramatically in recent years, it's still a lot of money upfront to put panels on your home - upwards of $10,000.

CARNEY: It's still an investment. You're probably not going to get benefit right now. It's going to come later. And when you're in communities where people are hand-to-mouth, they don't have room for investment.

HSU: Still, Carney looks for signs of hope wherever he can find them. Last month, Nashville's Metro Council passed what supporters have called the city's own Green New Deal. All government buildings will have to run on a 100% renewable energy by 2041, and they'll have to meet stricter green building standards. Carney thinks that could yield work opportunities in the near future.

VAN CLIEF: All right. Now it's the moment of truth.

HSU: Back at Whites Creek, Carney stands under a hot sun, watching his students hoist the last solar panel onto the steel frame. He takes a moment to appreciate all they've accomplished with this project and all the possibilities it represents.

CARNEY: No one controls the sun, you know? If someone could, they would. But they can't. Right now all you need is knowledge.

HSU: Knowledge, he says, and the faith to go after it.

Andrea Hsu, NPR News.