Energy Justice in the North Lawndale Community

On August 10th, 2023, the Advanced Energy Group (AEG) brought together industry, government, community organizations, and university leaders in the energy and climate space to discuss the most pressing challenges surrounding grid modernization in the Chicagoland area. At the meeting, a specific challenge with a 12-month plan of action was identified.

The electricity grid's reliability is critical to all of Chicago’s citizens. Most customers have experienced fewer instances of losing power over the last 10 years. However, some customers live in areas where they continue to experience relatively higher numbers of outages. North Lawndale is one such area.  We have launched a Task Force comprising industry volunteers to consider what actions can help North Lawndale benefit from ongoing “grid modernization” efforts to make the electricity grid more reliable.

A full resource page on the meeting can be found here:  https://goadvancedenergy.com/cae-23q3-grid-modernization. 

North Lawndale was selected as the community of focus due to existing manufacturing connections surrounding grid technologies and its strong relation to energy justice. By focusing on a single, vulnerable community, we hope that we can maximize the contribution of the task force's work while using North Lawndale as a model to catalyze change in the surrounding energy justice communities. You can find more information on energy justice below.

The Justice40 Atlas is a national measure of social and environmental factors that contribute to our understanding of environmental justice and the vulnerability of communities. includes a collection of maps of communities that are disadvantaged according to   Justice40 Initiative criteria  in the U.S. and its territories. In this Story map, we will focus on North Lawndale. We invite you to discover and investigate these communities using the  Justice40 Atlas .

This map assesses and identifies communities that are disadvantaged according to updated Justice40 Initiative criteria in the U.S. and its territories. Census tracts that meet the Version 1.0 criteria are shaded in semi-transparent blue colors.

Source:   Justice40 November 2022 Version 1.0 

To better understand the identification of North Lawndale as an energy justice community, we took data from the  Environmental Protection Agency  (EPA)  Environmental Justice (EJ) Screen  and  Argonne National Laboratory 's  Geospatial Energy Mapper (GEM) . This allows for a greater, block-by-block understanding of the relevant health, social, and economic factors surrounding energy justice in North Lawndale. Explore below to see maps of these metrics centered on the North Lawndale community. Zoom out to see how this compares to Chicagoland.

EJScreen is an environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach that combines environmental and demographic indicators in maps and reports. This can help to highlight geographic areas and the extent to which they may be candidates for further review, including additional consideration, analysis, or outreach. The tools also allow users to explore locations at a detailed geographic level, across broad areas or across the entire nation. For this Story Map we will focus on the detailed geographic area of North Lawndale, Chicago, IL. We invite you to explore other cities or the nation as a whole using the  EJScreen App. 

This section of the story map features a collection of data from the EJScreen. The data was sourced from    https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/    using the ArcGIS REST endpoint.    Learn more about Environmental Justice at EPA. 

This map is showing all the 2022 EJScreen Data Indexes with a 75% transparency. The result allows you to see darker red areas as areas with the most amount of overlay concerns (red). If you zoom out you can see how this community compares to the rest of Chicago.

Several partnerships anchor the task force's actions in the North Lawndale area. These include  The Will Group ,  North Lawndale Employment Network  , and  University of Illinois Chicago   The Lawndale Center . We have met and worked with these partners to make sure the actions of this task force align with the community's interests and goals.

The long-term goal of these partnerships is to catalyze this work into grants including support offered by the  Climate and Equitable Job's Act . The Group will also consider the merit of other State or Federal funding opportunities to support North Lawndale and other communities where grid modernization would have the greatest impact.

The task force has met with community leaders and partners on-site 6 times and virtually 2 times to understand the needs of the community and provide technical support. Here are some highlights from those meetings:

One key connection that was made by this coalition was with Alderman Monique Scott's office. We worked with them to align our mission and goals with the plans of the community leadership. This meeting led to several letters of support for grants surrounding this work from local and state representatives.

The maps and data from this story map will be combined with specific, technical data surrounding grid resiliency and worst-performing circuits. This will allow the task force to connect the energy justice components with specific infrastructure needs and improvements for the North Lawndale community. All of this data combined would allow for an easier grant application to address some of the identified issues. Using this combined data, the task force will identify other communities in the Chicagoland area with a similar intersection between energy justice and grid modernization for future work.

This story map features a collection of data from the EJScreen and Justice40 Atlas. The EJScreen data was sourced from   https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/   using the ArcGIS REST endpoint. Special thanks to  Trubel&Co  for setting up the initial template that this story map was based on. Also, thanks to Katie Grill ( City of Cambridge  IT Department) and Mark Petri ( Argonne National Laboratory ) for their assistance with the GIS data used in this story map. If you duplicate this map, let Michael Thuis (michael.thuis@goadvancedenergy.com) know so that we can help and add your good ideas to these templates.