Julie MacArthur and Emmanuel Ackom
Dr. Julie MacArthur is a Cascade Institute resident fellow, and an associate professor and the Canada Research Chair in Reimagining Capitalism at Royal Roads University. Her work investigates the political economy of low carbon transitions with a particular focus on how grassroots and community-led initiatives can scale up to make radical and transformative impacts to both adaptation and mitigation.
Dr. Emmanuel Ackom is a recent Cascade Institute visiting fellow. He is currently an assistant professor, and sustainability program co-ordinator with the University of North Alabama in the United States.
The Version of Record of this op-ed was published in The Hill Times.
Who deserves modern energy services? Energy is essential for socio-economic development, and livelihood improvement. The lack of modern energy services also stifles local economies as energy touches all aspects of contemporary life, from transportation and home cooling to charging our communication and work devices. However, just as the technical infrastructure that underpins modern life is relatively invisible to the average person, so, too, are some populations that lack access to this infrastructure, significantly limiting the effectiveness of energy policies.
Hidden energy communities are groups of people with limited power and political visibility in energy policy worldwide. These communities frequently lack access to affordable and reliable clean energy services, and include the urban unhoused, renters, and underserved Indigenous communities.
Policy failures in Canada help perpetuate inequities in hidden energy communities: from heat domes in British Columbia disproportionately hitting low-income renters unable to install cooling, to reliance on expensive diesel generation in remote Indigenous communities. These energy challenges then cascade into unfair and socially costly effects—from lack of employment (through transport and connectivity limits) to ill health, poor housing quality, and sometimes even excess mortality.
Hidden energy communities represent a difficult-to-measure but growing segment of the globe—one falling increasingly behind in their access to the necessary access to power. This includes political power, as well as low-cost, low-carbon, and efficient options to meet their basic needs, from access to electricity and clean fuels at a minimum, to the technologies for generating and efficiently using new technologies like micro-grids, battery storage, and renewable generation through solar, wind, hydro and geothermal sources.
In a particular city or regional jurisdiction, hidden energy communities are often a small minority, but aggregated across the country and around the world, their numbers are significant. For example, due to rapid urbanization, 55 per cent of the global population—4.3 billion people—is urban. One out of every three urban dwellers lives in an informal settlement, and faces tenure and inhabitation challenges and lack of services, including lack of energy access.
The urban unhoused form a growing population in cities including Vancouver, Victoria, and Toronto. Increasing incidences of pulmonary diseases, burns, or sometimes death from the use of open flames represent one impact of inadequate energy access. In 2021, 93,529 Canadians were reported to be homeless, and of this, Indigenous people are far more likely to experience homelessness. It is estimated that Canada has spent $3.752-billion to address this problem as of 2016. The homeless population in the United States in 2016 was 634,000 people. This will cost the country US$20-billion to solve it. This translates to the amount the U.S. spends on Christmas decorations each year.
Renters form another hidden energy community, representing more than five million households in Canada (33 per cent). Despite variation between countries, renters generally have far less control of their living spaces, and in many urban settings are confronting a significant cost-of-living crisis, pushing more people on to the streets, and forcing residents to choose between rent, food, and heat. The power imbalance between landlords and renters creates principal-agent problems. This can result in wasteful energy choices, such as renters needing to open windows in winter when they can’t control heat levels, or heat and sleep in only one room in a house to save on heating costs (“functional crowding”), leading to increased cases of respiratory disease in winter. Canadian residential retrofit policies have largely focused on homeowners and landlords, leaving renters’ needs unaddressed.
While Indigenous Peoples in Canada are leading energy system innovation, the legacies of colonial systems and current policy priorities mean that those in remote locations form another hidden energy community. Energy inequities in these underserved Indigenous communities are due to disruptions to Indigenous governance systems, and the perpetuation of British colonial laws that played a role in resource seizures and erosion of trust. Meaningful execution of free, prior, and informed consent is critical to restoring the social infrastructure needed for effective energy transitions. Financial and technical capacity-building support from government to communities can play an important role. Successful Indigenous examples are crucial to replicating community-led clean energy initiatives, as are land-back initiatives like the recent confirmation of Aboriginal title over Haida Gwaii.
Making transitions inclusive requires identifying all hidden energy communities through consistent data gathering and analysis efforts. It also requires drawing lessons from across diverse international contexts, in part to recognize the extremely challenging barriers many people in Canada face when it comes to access and uptake, and the fact that they are far from alone in facing these barriers.
Canada must ensure that no one is left behind in its clean energy transition. This is both a moral imperative, and vital to ensure that the energy transition doesn’t provoke a broader backlash from underserved populations.
Understanding the Policy Implications of Canada’s "Hidden Energy Communities" is a Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University project supported by the Accelerating Community Energy Transformation (ACET) initiative.
