Q&A with Stephanie Pincetl

What’s the relationship between urban tree canopies and environmental justice? Are Southern California’s wealthy really conserving their fair share of water? Is zero waste really achievable in a city like Los Angeles? IoES Professor in Residence Stephanie Pincetl’s three-decade research career has always positioned her as a public intellectual as well, contributing to many of the big questions facing cities as they reckon with the impacts of their activities on the environment and socioeconomic equality.

Her “new” project — the L.A. Energy Atlas, making its public debut — has been four years in the making, most of which Pincetl spent struggling to gain access from public utilities to energy-use data on the household level. But the database, she hopes, will help revolutionize how energy policy is made in Los Angeles County and perhaps other cities as well. We caught up with her to find out more.

Q: Why an “Energy Atlas”? What problems will it help solve?

STEPHANIE PINCETL: About 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from cities are from buildings. Cities have the biggest human impact on the environment. So the more we understand in a very specific way how large and complex urban areas use resources like energy and water, the better we will be able to figure out how to reduce their use in targeted and effective ways.

Q: Wait — so isn’t urban environmental policy already based on that kind of knowledge?

PINCETL: No. I began the Energy Atlas project because there was all this policy in California that was being passed and enacted with no data. I was shocked by that.

For instance: Since 2002, when energy was deregulated in California, ratepayers for the investor-owned utilities have been charged essentially about $13 billion for energy conservation and efficiency programs. I discovered there was no baseline for these charges. There was no accounting in a consistent, clear way of energy use before and energy use after the programs. There are big numbers, but we don’t know what’s worked where.

That gap got me rather incensed and also concerned. The Energy Atlas was my answer: figure out energy use by building and then begin to develop baselines of energy use by building type, age, size, socio-demographic characteristics, all the characteristics needed to actually develop better programs.

Q: Isn’t the problem individual behavior rather than infrastructure?

PINCETL: No, and let me give you an example. We are now moving towards time-of-use pricing for electricity. But having more information isn’t going to help you overcome the structural infrastructure conditions of your building. We first need to create a level playing field for people, with very high-performing appliances and buildings in terms of electricity use — and then you can have time-of-use pricing. Until we get to that point, low-income people will continue to be screwed. They will continue to face a decision when it’s really, really hot of whether to turn off their air conditioner or their refrigerator.

It’s the same thing with water. I had a very interesting conversation with an L.A. Times reporter not long ago who asked: “Well, what about the idea of having all apartments be metered for water? Wouldn’t that help? You would be aware of how much water you used.” Well, what if you’re in an apartment building where your landlord has not replaced your dishwasher for decades and there are still high-flush toilets? Where there are no flow restrictors in any of your faucets, and you have a washing machine that uses a lot of water? What are you going to do to reduce your water use? It’s out of your control.

So we need to use this kind of information mapping to reflect more deeply again about the infrastructural conditions under which can individuals have choice or not and how we move the dialogue and move the investments to a place where the infrastructure itself reflects our priorities rather than pointing the finger at individuals not making the right choices, under conditions about which they have really not much choice.

Q: Do we have a bias to point that finger at individuals?

PINCETL: Oh, absolutely. Infrastructure is an embodiment of societal understanding about abundance or lack of abundance. You build an infrastructure that reflects what you have assessed is the availability of the resource. So we have inherited a 20th century infrastructure, a modernist infrastructure, which basically is predicated on the assumption that you build it, the resources are available to fill the capacity of that infrastructure.

We don’t think about infrastructure this way, but we adjust our lifestyles and consumptive patterns according to the infrastructure. If our roads were much narrower, for instance, what good would it do you to have a car that can go however fast in however many seconds? Our infrastructure and consumer goods are in alignment, but they’re out of sync with a more parsimonious future.

Q: Why create a tool rather than a report?

PINCETL: An individual researcher can’t even begin to imagine all the questions that can be answered by this kind of dataset. I wanted to create a public database that becomes a community resource — for people who just don’t have this information at all and want to know “where am I going to invest my insulation programs,” and also for the larger research community to begin to analyze in a richer way how energy flows in the urban environment and how the legacy of the built environment contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. The data allows for all sorts of interesting complex questions.

Q: But your research often poses tough questions about environmental shibboleths. So what are some of the tough questions you want people to use the Energy Atlas to ask?

PINCETL: For example: Can rooftop-distributed solar generation in a city fulfill that city’s demand for electricity?

I think that this kind of atlas can be joined up with, say, really good information on the electricity and natural gas grid, and then take a hard look at solar capacity to ask that question. It might mean that putting big solar arrays out in the desert is possibly not necessary.

And we should add to that a good analysis of land use, seeing where there’s room for battery storage, thinking about things like how do you zone battery storage in a city. There will be fear of fire and toxic releases, but with a granular look at just how electricity and natural gas is used where, by whom, and what quantities, we can actually think about designing it intelligently across the region.

I’m actually a very firm believer in public utilities and also publicly regulated utilities, but I think that the utilities are inherently conservative and really need to be pushed using good data, and that’s what’s been missing.