Alyssa Garza

Across race and class, our communities deserve an energy system that affordably lasts through the season, keeps our air and waters clean, and supports life for generations to come. This can be hard in Texas where fossil fuel interests and monopoly utilities go hand-in-hand. But at Solar United Neighbors, we know when community-members join together, we can do amazing things.

The Lone Star State is the home of the largest oil field in the U.S., producing an average of 4.2 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2019. While oil company executives are padding their pockets with profits, they’re also aligning with their utility allies to gut rooftop solar protections in an attempt to keep us reliant on antiquated and highly polluting energy sources.

To make matters worse, the Texas grid is 90% managed by one entity–the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)–with effectively no oversight or accountability from the Public Utilities Commission, leaving low-income, Indigenous, Black, and Brown community-members at risk under an aging system of failure, raising rates, and blackouts in the face of extreme weather conditions.

But at Solar United Neighbors (SUN), we know that grid deregulation and sneaky tactics from corporate interests don’t stop us from organizing. Real, everyday Texans are relying on people power to get us out of this state of crisis and into long-term resilience. 

In 2022, we kicked off a project in collaboration with a local non-profit West Street Recovery to deploy rooftop solar installations on 20 single-family homes in Northeast Houston. Many folks in this community were still recovering from Hurricane Harvey in 2017, repairing roofs and putting homes back together, even as new crises loomed right around the corner: extreme heat, freezing temperatures, and incoming hurricanes.

In the face of increasingly frequent climate catastrophes, this Northeast Houston community has formed a collective to benefit from local, affordable energy options, and build a network of resilience hubs to support backup power when the grid fails. For two years, SUN offered technical support–requests for proposals, bid reviews, and free 1:1 support to homeowners considering an affordable switch to solar. The Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice provided financial support for this effort. By offering batteries in six of the homes of community-members in a mutual aid network called the Northeast Action Collective (NAC), folks  know that when power is shut-off, they simply need to walk down the street to their neighbor’s home to charge phones, keep medicine cold, and cook food. Now, this member-led network of resilience hubs is a solid step towards an energy future where everyday people have a say over their energy.

We’re creating an alternative to the current Texas energy status quo: local communities–not corporations–having control over and reaping benefits from a clean and equitable energy system. SUN has supported thousands of people in going solar across race, class, and geography, and we’re looking to take this model to help other communities build an energy system that benefits everyone with rooftop solar at the cornerstone.

Neighbor by neighbor, and roof by roof, we’re moving away from fossil fuels in Texas and across the country to show folks that a new people-powered energy paradigm is not only possible…it’s affordable, equitable, and life-saving, too!

Read more about the Northeast Houston project here.