In 2019, the City of Atlanta adopted its Clean Energy Atlanta plan, which called for the city to achieve 100% clean energy generation by 2035. While increasing the production of clean and renewable energy is an absolute necessity in the face of global climate change, the city has made minimal tangible progress on this goal in the years since.1 The state of Georgia has nonetheless done a good job producing solar power, though public policies meant to protect utility companies like Georgia Power have meant that over 90% of this power is generated by large commercial solar farms, rather than the rooftops of everyday citizens.
In a new paper published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, my former graduate student Carys Behnke and I examine how and where residential rooftop solar is being adopted across the City of Atlanta, and who ultimately benefits from it.2 Using data on rooftop solar installation permits from 2018 through 2022, we mapped the locations of all 539 confirmed installations across the city. As the map below shows, the rooftop solar generation is considerably uneven, collecting mostly in affluent and white eastside neighborhoods like Kirkwood, Lake Claire, Morningside-Lenox Park, Virginia-Highland, and Ansley Park, mirroring nationwide patterns.
These aggregate numbers give Atlanta one of the lowest solar adoption rates of any major US city. But the city’s rooftop solar market has grown substantially over the past five years, going from approximately 50 residential solar installations in 2017 to at least 539 by the close of 2022, for an 860% increase in these five years. This growth has been especially concentrated in just the last couple of years of our data. From 2018 through 2020, the city saw a total of just 151 residential rooftop solar installations. That number was exceeded in both 2021 and 2022, which saw 215 and 173 new installations, respectively.
But amid this general growth in residential rooftop solar across Atlanta, it’s worth noting how much of a spatial shift has occurred in where these installations are located. Unlike the early adopters on the city’s eastside, a majority of new residential solar permits in 2021 and 2022 have been in majority or plurality Black neighborhoods on the south and west sides. While there had been a total of just 20 residential solar installations in such neighborhoods through the end of 2020 – good for just 16% of the city’s total – of the 388 solar permits added in 2021 and 2022, 56% were in predominantly Black neighborhoods, a pattern that’s evident in the map below.
On its face, this would seem to suggest that through a spatial redistribution of rooftop solar into the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, Atlanta maybe making progress in closing the racial gap in residential rooftop solar adoption and evening the solar-generating playing field. It’s important to remember, however, that just because rooftop solar is being installed in a majority Black neighborhood doesn’t mean that it is necessarily Black people who are doing it or benefitting from it. The concentration of rooftop solar moving from one part of the city to another doesn’t tell the whole story when people and capital are moving at the same time and in the same direction.
Indeed, as our paper suggests through an in-depth analysis of property records associated with these rooftop solar installations, much of the growth of rooftop solar in majority Black neighborhoods is being driven by wealthier (and likely whiter) newcomers rather than longstanding locals. So instead of the arrival of rooftop solar meaning lower energy bills and a cleaner environment, in Atlanta’s majority Black neighborhoods it is more likely to mean gentrification and displacement.
From higher rates of owner turnover to histories of foreclosure and speculative investment, the same homes that are installing solar across Atlanta’s Black neighborhoods provide further evidence of broader inequalities in urban housing markets, especially with regards to the historic and ongoing exploitation of Black people and places. So while the spatial shift of rooftop solar out of the almost exclusively wealthy and white neighborhoods may seem to be a good thing, our evidence suggests that this spatial shift has done little to change the social profile of rooftop solar adopters or make the transition to clean energy more equitable.
- Indeed, Atlanta saw its climate actions plans achieve the ignominious ranking as one of the five worst among US cities. [↩]
- If you don’t have access to paywalled academic journal articles, you can always download a copy of the paper from my personal website. [↩]
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