Energy Ownership and Organizational Structures in the Just Transition: Reclamation, Remediation and Rejuvenation for Eastern Kentucky (RPA Pilot/Seed)

Practitioners and advocates stress the urgent need to reduce fossil fuel dependency to combat climate change through smart technology and renewable energy. They afford significantly less attention to the democratic and organizational structures that best enable sustainable energy production and use. In energy production, “natural monopolies” are assumed to be the optimal organizational form, whether public or private. This approach continues a long-standing tradition in the study of efficiency and competition, where output and input centers on firms and consumers to define market power. Left out of consideration and often computation are the broader ecological and social effects or opportunities. Our research project builds on our market network power method to create a new network measure of democratic organizational structures in energy production. Rather than beginning with the generic firm and consumer at the top, we begin with environmental injustices on ground in Eastern Kentucky to characterize the organizational forms in energy utilized by the most environmentally and socially problematic firms. We work with the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center to identify Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act permits in Bell and Martin counties. We then utilize Social Network Analysis to compare existing structures for maintained and unmaintained permits to our ideal democratic organizational model. We plan to leverage this work into a later NSF grant that hones our approach to studying market power and organizational structure across sectors.