New equity resources from Berkeley Lab and Pacific Northwest National Lab
Many states are considering ways to incorporate energy equity and justice into electric regulation for a variety of purposes, including to improve affordability. Given the novelty of issues and solutions under consideration, states at all stages could benefit from an awareness of what others are doing. To aid in this information sharing, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has released an update to its Database of Current State of U.S. Energy Equity Regulation and Legislation and corresponding summary report. The database contains 307 equity “actions” across 32 states and the District of Columbia from January 2020 through June 2024. These actions consist of bills, commission activities, dockets, and executive orders. For each action, information on drivers, regulatory focus, objectives, outcomes, and metrics were identified where applicable. This update expands on the previous 2022 version by incorporating additional actions as well as new figures that explore temporal trends across states, regions, outcomes, equity tenets, and objectives. This report and database are intended to provide a representative sample of state actions and provide a high-level, exploratory analysis that can enable states interested in pursuing their own actions.
In parallel, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed a repository of Energy Equity in Grid Planning Resources containing Department of Energy-funded reports, datasets, and tools related to energy equity in grid planning and operations. The database contains over 100 resources.
The following are a few select findings from the updated database of state regulatory, legislative, and executive actions on energy equity:
Over half of all U.S. states took action on energy equity between January 2020 and June 2024. The database identifies 307 equity actions across 32 states and Washington, DC. The top three leading states in the number of equity actions were California (31 actions), New York (30) and Michigan (25). This updated database includes ten new states with at least one equity action since the previous iteration in July 2022, including three each in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast and one state in the West.
Figure 1: Number of equity actions taken by states between January 2020 and June 2024. States that are additional since the last database update in 2022 are outlined in bold.
Most actions originated from a public utility commission (regulatory) activity. Regulatory activity consists of a notice or scoping, order, proposed order, directive, or petition undertaken by a public utility commission (PUC). On one end of the spectrum, all states that took equity actions apart from Delaware (31 + DC) did so through a PUC activity. On the other end, only eight states took action through Executive Orders. Even so, activities between these three categories may be related. For example, PUC activity may be generated in response to an executive order or an enacted bill. Indeed, many states took action via executive order or enacted bills.
Figure 2: Drivers of state equity actions, by executive, legislative, and/or regulatory activity. Light blue shading indicates that at least one action was taken within each respective driver during the study period.
Over time, states in all regions have taken an increased number of equity actions since 2020, especially in the time period between 2022 and 2024 (since the first iteration of the database). The majority of actions were taken in the West and Northeast, however, the Midwest has seen high growth. Though the South has taken relatively fewer actions, the number has increased during the similar time period of 2022-2024.
Figure 3: Cumulative number of equity actions across regions between 2020 and 2024 that are identified in the database.
For questions on the database or summary report, please contact Sydney Forrester ([email protected]). For questions on the repository, please contact Juliet Homer ([email protected]).
We appreciate the funding support of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium for making this work possible.