Keeping the Lights On: Marrying Disability Justice with Electric Grid Resilience
By Erika Pietrzak and Camille Rohde, December 18, 2024
The threats to electricity-dependent people with disabilities by both natural hazards and a strained national grid are quite clear. These individuals are subject to a host of hazards that may seem a mere inconvenience to the able-bodied, but compromise the safety, security, and independence of people with disabilities.
Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, demonstrated by the 400 percent increase in extreme hydrological events and 200 percent increase in extreme meteorological events from 1980 to 2016. These drastic increases in extreme weather drive more frequent and long-lasting power outages, affecting vulnerable communities across the globe. However, as a 2017 study put it, “[d]isasters do not have to be large-scale events with a damaged infrastructure, but simply the loss of electrical power covering large geographic areas and persisting beyond a few hours could have a significant impact.”
For most individuals, a power outage is an inconvenience: you worry about your milk in the refrigerator, your ice cream in the freezer, and maybe a reptile being without a heat lamp. However, for people with disabilities who need electricity to work their life-saving machines, power outages can be a life-or-death situation.
A Disability Justice Crisis
Whether it be getting stuck on the top floor without a motorized system to get downstairs or losing access to oxygen concentrations, power outages are an emergency for many individuals with disabilities. In 2013, more than 12 percent of the noninstitutionalized United States population had disabilities, including more than 10 percent of working-age citizens and 36.5 percent of those over 65 years old. With 99 percent of electricity-dependent people with disabilities dependent on oxygen concentrators and the average unplugged battery time only 3-4 hours, power outages are life-threatening when not immediately addressed.
When the power goes out, it also impacts people who are not electricity-dependent. For example, people in wheelchairs sometimes get stuck in bed, in the bathtub, or in other areas where they cannot be lifted out by machinery and have to wait for help, which can be especially scary and dangerous for those who live alone.
Addressing the intersection of environmental justice, electric grid resilience, and disability rights is Alex Ghenis, founder of Accessible Climate Strategies and the DisabilityYIMBY blog. Mr. Ghenis provides some much-needed insight on how to ensure the safety of these electricity-dependent populations during power outages. He has spent the past decade advocating for disability justice and electric grid resilience.
“The things that we're concerned about are electric equipment. Mobility equipment, respiratory devices, refrigeration for medication, and then temperature control, within a home I'd say are probably the biggest ones.” Mr. Ghenis lists as top concerns for electricity-dependent individuals during a power outage.
For disabled populations, power outages become even more dire when considering the costs required to purchase generators, large batteries, and other emergency alternatives to provide electricity.. Insurance and medical companies often do not offer any aid when it comes to buying these alternatives. In California, for example, 26 percent of people with disabilities live below the poverty line. Even if they can afford these alternatives, many apartments and small housing units cannot safely hold and operate gas generators inside. To remedy this, more than just the grid needs to be rehabilitated; households also need an extreme makeover of their archaic power distribution systems.
“[It’d be good] for governments to start pursuing grants to allow some energy retrofits of those homes just in general,” Mr. Ghenis emphasizes. “I think we in the U.S have a very tremendously old and not climate-friendly housing stock and that especially applies to people with disabilities. So, the more that we can try to retrofit those or otherwise get people with disabilities into apartments that are, you know, slightly more climate-reasonable, the better.”
Individuals with physical disabilities are sometimes unable to set up or use their machinery without assistance, which is hard to get during any extreme weather event that causes power outages. Without access to this equipment at home, many families are forced to call ambulances, another significant cost on this vulnerable community. These costs are demonstrated by the increased utilization of health care during power outages, especially visits to obtain power for medical devices.
This disability justice crisis may be forcing more people with disabilities into assisted living and other isolated living systems, taking away their agency to choose where to live and removing them from communities vital to their mental wellbeing. Alternatively, they may end up having to purchase a hotel room or go to the hospital to receive proper care, burdening them with significant costs. The NIH believes that “With advances in medical technology and an aging population, it is entirely likely that the electricity dependent will represent a growing portion of the US population whose needs must be anticipated by emergency planners.”
Solutions: Fostering Electricity Independence
Good news for American electricity-dependent communities arrived in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which have provided an influx of funding for programs that bolster electric grid resilience, aiming to provide more independent, sustainable power solutions. These programs are intended to be the vanguard of a green energy revolution, ushering in a new era of clean and more reliable electrical grids.
One of the most promising solutions comes in the form of microgrids - smaller, localized secondary grids often connected to a centralized grid system, but one that can function independent of the centralized grid in the event of a power outage. A microgrid can look like an electric bus depot in Montgomery County, Maryland, or a two-megawatt community battery connecting two hundred and nineteen smart homes in Menifee, California. States, local governments, tribal organizations, and nonprofits that want to create microgrids in their communities can apply for the Department of Energy’s recently launched Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership (C-MAP), a program designed to expand microgrid infrastructure for underserved and remote communities. Assistance for remote communities is especially critical, as they often have poor access to utilities compared to urban populations, and do not typically have the disability disaster relief programs that provide a wider safety net in urbanized areas. Southern states in particular have roughly 40 percent of electricity-dependent individuals with disabilities, including the most in remote settings (over 32,300 people).
While one size does not fit all for electric grid resilience in different communities, lessons from urban energy distribution models are still useful to examine in order to bring best practices to rural areas. Based in Sacramento, the California Foundation for Independent Living Centers (CFILC) provides a robust distribution model to get portable batteries to those that them most, through a network of local Disability Disaster Access & Resource Centers (DDARC) where electricity-dependent California residents can apply for services for natural disasters, as well as other emergency events like Public Safety Power Shutoffs, ahead of time- before disaster strikes. These services are spearheaded by local independent living centers, which distribute batteries to those in need during power outages. Using settlement money won from a lawsuit filed against California utility companies, CFILC was able to assemble a network of warehouses of portable two to three-kilowatt batteries, ready to be deployed by volunteers in the event of a blackout.
“[They’re] managed by the local independent living centers, which then asked for sign-ups from the community members so that, hey, okay, there's a, you know, high fire danger. They're going to shut off the power grid. Let's get these batteries out to our members of the community.” Mr. Ghenis explains.
The CFILC’s efforts are focused on helping those affected by California’s public safety power outages, but the distribution model could be implemented by local, state and federal entities in the event of unplanned power outages during natural disasters, especially natural disasters that can be precipitated by an early warning system, such as tornadoes or hurricanes.
Mr. Ghenis expresses confidence in the CFILC battery distribution model.
“So this is a very replicable sort of thing, and I think it's replicable because there also are some weather events aside from the California public safety power shutoffs where you have a little bit of a warning that something might happen.” he says.
A solution juxtaposed to portable batteries emerges in the form of stationary energy storage units, often manifested in the form of stationary batteries sprinkled strategically across a given utility’s service area. They prove useful in mitigating safety hazards during power outages, as well as relieving stress on the grid during high demand events such as heat waves. These energy reserves, often referred to as Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), are emerging as a pillar of grid stability across the country. Having BESS implemented in vulnerable locales helps preserve and protect grid stability as we transition to renewable energy, which is critical as renewables often rely on intermittent sources such as solar and wind.
“There's no use of having a bunch of solar on the grid if it's getting curtailed because there's transmission bottlenecks. So, then you need batteries at different locations in the grid because of that. In that sense, just having these little pieces of storage scattered throughout the grid, you're providing more stability as we transition to renewables.” Mr. Ghenis says.
BESS and microgrids may offer viable solutions, but the price tag for these localized sources of power is often gargantuan, making them financially infeasible for people with disabilities and their families. Existing government subsidies at the state and federal level are not currently enough to make this a viable solution, but with the right funding, BESS and microgrids could provide a much-needed boost to grid reliability for people with disabilities. This funding would pay off, because the prevalence of BESS only continues to grow. Success stories have emerged from utilities such as the Golden Valley Electric Association (GVEA), an Alaskan electric cooperative serving the greater Fairbanks area. GVEA integrated a BESS into their centralized grid, which allowed them to maintain a steady source of power during an earthquake to some thirty thousand households, households that would’ve had the same widespread power outages as their neighbors in Anchorage if the BESS wasn’t there to keep the power flowing.
A BESS can also facilitate a concept called islanding, where utility providers or homeowners can flip a switch (often quite literally) to temporarily isolate a microgrid system from centralized transmission lines, and run the microgrid independent of the centralized grid.
“If you have a solar and battery system on your home, and it is connected to the broader energy grid and the grid goes down, then your power is just going to kind of flow onto the grid. It's not going to do anything for you. You have to have a switch that can disconnect you from the grid so that you're only pulling power from your solar battery system in your home,” Mr. Ghenis explains. “You hit a switch, you disconnect from the broader transmission or distribution system, and then you run entirely off of your paired solar battery or just your battery.”
“I think it was a ten-megawatt solar farm with two-kilowatt hour batteries that Duke Energy was operating over there in North Carolina,” Mr. Ghenis says, citing another microgrid success story. “They were able to get engineers in there and then island it from the grid recently. It was kind of their first time turning this into a little microgrid for that community that it was directly connected to. And that wouldn't have been available before all of a few years ago. We wouldn't have had these hybrid power, solar, and battery storage systems.” Mr. Ghenis explains.
The threats to electricity-dependent people with disabilities by both natural hazards and a strained national grid are quite clear. These individuals are subject to a host of hazards that may seem a mere inconvenience to the able-bodied, but compromise the safety, security, and independence of people with disabilities. Whether the solutions come in the form of battery warehouses or sophisticated home islanding apparatuses, the fixes for this nationwide crisis must be many and varied.
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