J_Adams: Divisible Governance and the Ecology of Austin's Environmental Vulnerability
jradams1Howey and Neale’s concept of “divisible governance” (2022) enables of critical understanding of how Austin’s environmental vulnerabilities have been produced in tandem with fossil-fueled, racial-capitalist assemblages. One of the key strategies of divisible governance that these authors identify is the fragmentation and organization of space, time, and jurisdiction to obscure unjust distributions of risk and benefit across populations and scales. In Austin, Texas, contemporary efforts of organizing energy justice around energy transition are both powered by and inseparable from racial capitalism and fossil capital, or what I shall call, following Luke and Heynan (2020), petro-racial capitalism. The same logics of exclusion, marginalization, appropriation, sacrifice, and displacement that characterized and enabled the Texas oil booms and busts, and that are embedded in the state’s social, legal, and technological infrastructures, are being put towards Austin’s renewable energy transition, with unintended consequences. Even those who are explicitly critical of petro-racial capitalism find it hard to recognize and excise these logics, as they become written into the social cycles and rhythms of city life, into our forms of knowledge and self-reflection, into our bodily habits and sensitivities.
The demographic patterns that characterize Austin's contemporary racial geography were largely set into motion with the City's 1928 master plan, which designated Austin's eastern corridor as the city's industrial park as well as the segregated district for the city's Black and Brown communities. This established the legal infrastructure that would enable and justify decades of environmental racism, as the blind eye towards East Austin's racial and environmental injustices persisted throughout the 20th century. Even as more elite, white communities started to organize around the protection of locally vulnerable ecologies, green spaces, and species, since these spaces were predominantly located in west Austin, above the vulnerable Edwards Aquifer, sacrificing the health of the less charismatic Blackland Prarie to the East was seen as an acceptable, if also regrettable, compromise (Walsh 2007). It wasn't until the 1990's, when East Austin's own communities learned of the toxins their communities had been exposed to on a daily basis that this began to change. PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth's Resources) formed soon after, and worked to rid their communities of these risks as well as to rezone their communities to prevent further exposures in the future.
On top from local pollutants, East Austin's environmental vulnerability is also related to infrastructural inequality. For instance, during the 2021 Texas Power Crisis, which ensued in the wake of winter storm Uri, East Austin was subjected to a disproportionate number and duration of outages, when compared to areas of the city. Following up on numerous reports of this kind of racially biased distributions of risk during the blackouts, a study by Carvallo and colleagues provides empirical evidence of the degree to which people of color were disadvantaged (Carvallo et al. 2021). The authors identify a general lack of publicly available data on the locations of blackouts, especially at a granularity that would allow scholars, activists, and other interested persons to make correlations to the racial makeup of these communities, or other important demographic factors. Mirroring the argument of Howey and Neale (2022), the authors argue that this lack of data and lack of access to data plays an important role in mystifying--and therefore reproducing--the material conditions that underwrite structural racism in the United States. Controlling for both income level and the presence/absence of critical infrastructure, they found that communities of color were four times as likely to experience an outage than predominantly white communities. Furthermore, they argue that current rationales for explaining the locations and distributions of blackouts cannot account for this finding, suggesting the need for further research into how and where racial bias has been baked into the energy system and its methods and strategies of emergency response.
The Texas Power Crisis also points back to deeper seated issues related to the structure and operation of Texas' power grid and energy market, which was designed operate at the brink of failure, in order to keep average costs low and maximize the potential for profits during high "pricing events." Unlike many other Independent System Operators (ISO), which often combine energy markets with capacity markets to ensure greater grid reliability, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) uses the price signals of the energy market alone to manage grid reliability. For instance, PJM (another ISO, operating in the northeastern US) has a capacity market that projects and procures the projected amount of energy needed three years in advance of the day it will be delivered. In doing so, they are typically over-budget by about 21%, creating a substantial safety reserve. The costs of this reserve are then recovered through the charges made to ratepayers through their monthly bills.
In Texas, there is no such capacity market. Instead, Texas manages it's marginal reserve by taking the full capacity for energy production in the state and subtracting the projected "peak demand." This "energy only" market, as it is often called, means that energy operators are only paid for the energy they put into the market at the price reflected by the energy demand at that precise time. This creates a volatile market in which energy prices fluctuate wildly, with the final cap set at a whopping $9,000 per kilowatt hour (for comparison, the average price is about $28 per kWh). Accordingly, this creates a supremely tough environment for planning in to the future at all, especially in regard to the timing of new construction projects, facility maintenance, and other such investments. By contrast, capacity markets allow for a steady, fixed stream of income from ratepayers that can be budgeted and invested over an extended period. Thus, there is a real sense in which the Texas energy market dissuades power generators from attending to maintenance issues or for investing in things like winter weatherization, which will be expensive, hard to recoup, and (especially for many Texas generators) only necessary for a handful of days every few years.
Usually, Texas' reserve hovers at about 12-15%, which is about the same as ERCOT's neighboring ISOs. However, there is another marked difference between Texas and these other ISOs: a notable lack of interconnections. For instance, in an emergency or a power shortage of some kind, both the Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent ISO have substantial capacity for electricity to flow between these otherwise independent control areas. ERCOT, by contrast has only a handful of DC ties to other systems, with very limited capacity to bring in or send out energy across these interconnections. In that sense, the Texas grid operates more like an "island system," like Hawaii, or New Zealand, which do not have the option of bringing in power from elsewhere. This forces these island control areas to operate with a substantial reserve, almost double that of Texas' 12-15%.
So, why doesn't Texas interconnect? Well, that has to do with the long-held value for independence. Because, by limiting these cross-state interconnections, Texas has been able to avoid federal oversight, offering the state an impressive amount of political autonomy over its power system. However, in a paradoxical way, this very "Texan" desire for autonomy at the federal level, to be even "more autonomous" than the rest, combined with the emphatic preference to govern through market in order to keep prices low, has actually restricted Texas capacity, at the state level and below, to ensure safe, affordable, and especially equitable access to electricity; a fact made most evident during the 2021 crisis.
Within the ERCOT's "island" grid and energy market, Austin Energy serves as another, different kind of "island." That is, unlike many competitive regions in Texas, Austin's utility is municipally owned and operated. This effectively means that Austin Energy has a monopoly on electricity provision within their service area, which they are in charge of managing under the direction of Austin's City Council. This structure enables Austin more democratic control over the way they produce, distribute, and consume electricity, allowing for planning processes like the Resource Generation and Climate Protection Plan, which generates goals and guidelines for the utility to follow in performing the city's transition to renewable energy.
However, despite this democratic control at the retail level, Austin Energy must still operate within the ERCOT market at the "wholesale" level. That is, first and foremost, Austin Energy produces and sells electricity into the ERCOT market at the current market price. They then buy this electricity back from ERCOT in order to finally sell this electricity to their customers. Because of this, there is only a round-about, and somewhat fictitious sense in which Austin produces its own electricity. And, importantly, it also means that Austin Energy, like all power generators in ERCOT, are subjected to the Texas energy market's renowned price volatility, increasing the financial risks of investing in new infrastructure, like renewable energy. Thus, there is a very real sense in which the utility and, by proxy, City Council are forced to adopt or at least factor in capitalist logics and strategies into their energy transition planning.
As a result, even superficially democratic energy transition planning processes end up being overly technocratic. Take, for example, the Resource Planning Working Group, which brings in appointed "representatives" of the Austin community to discuss various transition goals, strategies, and scenarios in order to settle on a set of recommended updates to the City's ten-year Resource Generation and Climate Protection plan. While this group proudly operated by what they referred to as “consensus,” this largely translated into the use of the market as the dominant logic for resolving any differences in values or perspective back to identity, back to “the bottom line” if you will. See, for example, this discussion taken from my field notes during one of the Resource Planning Working Group meetings, in which participants were debating the pros and cons of a new, market-based approach to carbon reduction:
Charles (CFO of Austin Energy): If the scenario does what it says, what is the push for the other scenarios? Because this scenario removes carbon faster than all the others, and it does so safely and affordably.
...
Cary (Chair of the RPWG): Kaiba, I think if you massage it and understand this plan a little better, you’ll like it.
Kaiba (Local environmentalist): "Massage it, or understand it? Because I could massage it into something better... My point is that you do not have a column, or rating system for local economic benefits besides PSA [i.e. the costs forwarded to ratepayers] and for establishing an energy democracy. I understand that is not the priority of the utility, but it is for us. There are values that are not being reflected here."
...
Charles: On social benefits and detriments... Some of the things proposed, the low-income people are not going to be able to handle this. People who rent can’t add solar. Those things, as the models show, are not the best for … [in a more frustrated tone] What we are trying to do here? Are we trying to advance solar, or are we trying to decrease carbon? If we are trying to decrease carbon, this plan does that, and it does it affordably. It is not doing it through added solar or DR [demand response]; it is doing it though.
One notable feature of this discourse is that, even as it pertains to equity, the discussion focuses on the producers and the consumers of energy, rather than the victims of the environmental injustices engendered through this energy production. This particular feature of energy transition planning discourse relates to what Cohn has called "technostrategic language." First used to describe the language and thought of nuclear defense strategists, “technostrategic languages” represent a mode of speaking/articulation, developed alongside certain technologies, that is structured in such a way as to inhibit technocratic experts from being able to recognize and/or consider the unexpected or the wider implications of that technology and their use of it:
“Structurally, speaking technostrategic language removes [the speaker] from the position of victim and puts them in the position of the planner, the user, the actor. From that position, there is neither need nor way to see oneself as a victim; no matter what one deeply knows or believes about the likelihood of nuclear war, and no matter what sort of terror or despair the knowledge of nuclear war's reality might inspire, the speakers of technostrategic language are positionally allowed, even forced, to escape that awareness, to escape viewing nuclear war from the position of the victim, by virtue of their linguistic stance as users, rather than victims, of nuclear weapone” (Cohn 1987, 706).
The language used in the Working Group discussion similarly positions the planners as the users of fossil fuels (and/or renewables), rather than those who were dealing with the pollution they produce, rather than those who deal with climate change. Even when they considered "equity," it was in equitable "use" of the fossil fuels, or making sure you could access this energy at an equitable price. There wasn't a consideration for which of Austin Energy's assets were harming local ecologies and populations the most. It was only ever some vague sense that carbon is causing climate change and more extreme weather "for all of us."
In a later moment, during a discussion of "asset substitution," or, the very real problem that, due to the structure of the Texas market, if Austin Energy shuts down one of their dirtiest facilities, it may bring an even dirtier facility online elsewhere, resulting in a "net" loss for carbon reduction in Texas. To this, Kaiba responded by suggesting that it might still "send a market signal," which could end up greening the grid over time. That's not a bad play, in this context. But, once again, it is evidence of the technostrategic language at work. Kaiba, who is an astute environmental justice advocate, adopted a way of thinking and speaking that focused on the producers and the consumers of fossil fuel and renewable energy, rather than recentering the conversation to the people of La Grange or those living near Decker Creek who have had to deal with decades of coal ash and toxic smoke, and who bear the most weight of Austin Energy’s worst polluting energy facilities.
This discussion of "technostrategic language" paves the way for one last "scale" of action/activity, affected by divisible governance, that plays into Austin's environmental vulnerability: the scale of subjectivity. In particular, certain tactics of power, like technostrategic language (Cohn 1987), keep separate the otherwise tangled and multi-dimensional fragments of our subjectivities and ethics. Take, for example, this quote by Katie Coyn, who was one of the co-chairs of Austin's Climate Equity Plan's Steering Committee.
"I just wanted to quickly talk about one more thing. I think it is important to talk about the hard points. Here is just a little anecdote. Most of our steering committee meetings I was a facilitator, trying to frame conversations. As an example of how much white supremacy culture is ingrained even in the way that I think, in the way we have been taught to think about efficiency. After George Floyd was murdered, we had a steering committee meeting the next week, and we got on, we made space at the beginning for black members to talk. And... the amount of trauma that we unpacked and listened to... was so vital for everyone to hear. But at the time, I had so much discomfort letting go of the idea that I had to get the meeting moving along. And that’s coming from someone who really cares about being empathetic to people and wanting to hear those stories. And even knowing that, I was so uncomfortable with the idea that we ended up using that entire two-hour meeting to unpack that trauma. And, I don’t know... for me that was so revealing that, you know, I think I am mindful of all these things, and I still could feel my body, uncomfortable with doing things that way."
Identifying as a politically active member of Austin's LGBTQ community, Katie sees herself as empathic, as a feminist, and a trained and committed anti-racist ally. And, in my experience, she does quite well in these regards. And yet, in this particular context, she felt the conflict, viscerally, between the demand to keep separate the time and space for grief, and the time and space for planning. She felt the pull of divisible governance, urging her to keep her identity as a feminist, her role as a ally, separate from her identity and role as a Steering Committee co-chair.
This evidences the way that divisible governance works, not only on juridical divisions, but also the way that we distinguish and purify our professional lives from our personal lives, the way critical academics take a blind eye to the problematic dynamics of their departments and universities, the way we keep our professional ethics separate from our ethical sense as a sister, an aunt, a grandmother, by keeping our training in the scientific method separate and purified from our love of literature, or of music, or philosophy, or what have you. In this way, in addition to being a technique for the production of space and time, divisible governance also produces ethics; it influences the location of the fault lines that define the contours of our ethical plateaus. The location of the lines that distinguish the categories of experience that ebable the specificity of our ethical sense, shaping the ways such plateaus align, overtake, and resist each other, producing the ethical double binds and contradictory obligations, incentives, and opportunities of energy transitions.