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88 U. Colo. L. Rev. 571 (2017)
Clean Electrification

handle is hein.journals/ucollr88 and id is 607 raw text is: CLEAN ELECTRIFICATION SHELLEY WELTON* To combat climate change, many leading states have adopted the aim of creating a participatory grid. In this new model, electricity is priced based on time of consumption and carbon content, and consumers are encouraged to adjust their behavior and adopt new technologies to maintain affordable electricity. Although a more participatory grid is an important component of lowering greenhouse gas emissions, it also raises a new problem of clean energy justice: utilities and consumer advocates claim that such policies unjustly benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, given the type of consumer best able to participate in the grid. These arguments pitting clean energy against equity often prove persuasive to energy regulators considering whether to adopt or maintain clean energy policies. But these arguments fail to seriously engage the question of how energy law's historical equity norms should be interpreted and applied in the era of climate change. This Article concludes that there are legitimate and underappreciated equity concerns with the participatory grid, given that participation in the grid is likely to stratify along income lines. However, these equity concerns do not justify slowing progress on climate change, given the extreme inequities raised by that problem itself. Fortunately, however, there is a longstanding tradition of attention to equity concerns within electricity law that paves a way forward. Throughout the twentieth-century project of * Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law; Ph.D. Candidate in Law, Yale Law School. Thanks to Doug Kysar, Dan Esty, Bill Eskridge, Al Klevorick, Ann Carlson, William Boyd, Katrina Wyman, David Spence, Jedediah Purdy, Nick Parrillo, Ann Alstott, Alice Kaswan, Kay Jowers, and participants in the 2015 Colorado-Duke Climate Law Works-in-Progress Symposium, UCLA Law School's Climate Change Law Seminar, the PUC Clean Energy Collaborative Fall 2015 Workshop, Duke University's New Directions in the Analysis of Environmental Justice Workshop of August 2016, the Yale Law School Ph.D. Seminar, and Yale's Justice in Taxation Seminar for valuable comments on various drafts. All errors are decidedly my own.

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