Extracting Clean Energy

Rural communities are in the spotlight of the clean energy transition. Utility-scale wind and solar farms require substantial land, which means developers look to rural localities to site those projects. Yet, many rural residents oppose them. Clean energy scholarship has therefore investigated ways to defuse that local opposition and address the potential inequities of this new rural energy burden. “Community benefits” have emerged as a tempting cure-all. Many hope community benefits can compensate and pacify rural localities through frameworks requiring economic resources from clean energy development to stay local.

This Article argues that community benefits fail to address the energy industry’s structural problems that helped create rural marginalization in the first place. Centrally, while community benefits are better than nothing, they (a) stem from a narrow, market-centric conception of energy justice that still prioritizes the activities of powerful, sometimes-predatory, profit-motivated companies and (b) perpetuate a system that treats rural regions as sites of extraction for distant consumers’ benefit. In other words, community benefits help entrench the internal-colonial land relations that characterized the fossil fuel era.

The extractive company-community-consumer triad remains under-appreciated in rural dynamics in the clean energy transition. By examining the intersection of theories on internal colonialism and clean energy justice, the Article sheds light on why many rural communities oppose hosting clean energy even when ample community benefits are offered. If the clean energy transition is going to serve as a meaningful opportunity to help mitigate rather than worsen broader urban/rural tensions, more fundamental structural reform based on a deeper conception of energy justice is needed. This reform requires liberating the internal energy colony through measures to facilitate localized, distributed electricity generation, decenter corporate profit, and take uneven development seriously in its own right, not merely as an afterthought to our collective need to decarbonize the grid.