Equity and Electricity: Race Gap in Household Energy Use, with Eva Lyubich – August 2020

Resources for the Future Podcast

On a recent Resources for the Future Podcast, Energy Institute Graduate Student Researcher, Eva Lyubich discusses her working paper on energy efficiency disparities in black households. Eva stresses the importance of understanding these inequities in order to help bridge the gap.

“What I find is that… lack renters spend $273 more a year than white renters, and black homeowners spend $408 a year more than white homeowners. This ends up being a gap of about 15 percent over annual average expenditures for both renters and homeowners…It’s so important to [understand] these results in the context of history…Given that energy efficiency depends on capital stock, which requires high up-front costs to invest in, historical policies that excluded black people from home ownership or wealth accumulation or accessing credit could all have been important to contributing to these large differences [in energy expenditures between white and black households].”

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