Study Finds Illinois’ Clean Energy Transition Leaves Out Key Components of Energy Justice Equation

In recent years, Illinois has made the transition to clean energy a top priority, passing the Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA) in 2016 and the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA) in 2021. Both pieces of legislation emphasize a just transition that seeks to avoid and address historic abuses of environmental injustice.

However, a recent study published in Political Geography by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the state, in attempting to right historical wrongs, used too narrow a lens to define equality in CEJA, leading to perceived injustices against rural, often white, communities.

The study suggests that the state has prioritized historically marginalized communities when allocating the benefits (low energy costs) of renewable energy sources, but has not been intentional enough to consider the burdens (infrastructure and land-use change) that have fallen on rural communities. This has led to claims of injustice in these communities, particularly near wind turbines.

“There are many ways to define fairness. People understand it very differently depending on the circumstances,” said study author McKenzie Johnson, assistant professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois.

The study, co-authored by Shannon Anderson, a former Johnson student, mapped patterns of wind development in Illinois, categorized by whether zoning protocols were regressive — designed to keep wind power out; progressive — designed to attract it; or neutral — allowing the market to influence zoning decisions that include wind power.

“We found that after the first wind boom in 2007, a lot of counties in the southern part of the state decided they really didn’t want the wind with its huge turbines,” Johnson said. “So we started seeing a lot of regressive zoning with hard boundaries and restrictive regulations that basically prevented developers from building wind farms.”

Johnson and Anderson traced the state’s response, showing that over time, it expanded its authority—from offering zoning guidance to ignoring county-level zoning altogether—to achieve the goals of CEJA.

“Prioritizing communities that have experienced environmental harm may be a fair outcome,” Johnson said. “But when the state unilaterally takes away power to achieve its goals, even if it is the most desirable, fair goal imaginable, that is not fairness.”

CEJA does not define “energy justice” as part of the bill, but Johnson says the legislation relied on conventional environmental justice metrics — especially racial ones — that recognize how the effects of polluting industries downstream have disproportionately affected Black, brown, low-income, immigrant and urban communities. That’s different from the metrics used in definitions of energy justice, which include energy availability and access, affordability, and intergenerational and intragenerational equity. Energy justice also prioritizes representative and impartial energy decision-making.

Johnson said that if CEJA had included energy equity metrics that took into account the perspectives of rural counties, wind energy adoption might have been very different. Instead, feeling left out of the process, white rural communities have largely rejected wind energy.

This outcome led to some unintended consequences.

“We argue that the changing scales of energy governance have reinforced the perception of energy as a partisan political issue,” Anderson wrote in the article. “Rural, heavily Republican communities say Democrats have unfairly used energy legislation to distribute benefits to urban voters while failing to provide similar benefits to rural areas. This has increased antipathy toward renewable projects that were already perceived as undesirable and deepened perceived political divisions between urban and rural Illinoisans.”

Johnson was surprised that the state did not anticipate an objection.

“I think it’s because they thought markets would have a bigger impact on where wind would show up in the state,” she said. “But I think the big lesson from this study is that if you really want to be truly inclusive, there will be conflict. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But you have to anticipate it and be able to resolve it when it does.”

The backlash and subsequent lawsuits are slowing progress. That’s another reason Johnson said it would be better to engage rural communities early in the legislative process. While listening sessions may have taken some time, lawsuits take longer and take up more resources.

“Honestly, doing a just energy transition is really hard. It’s easy as a researcher to be critical of what’s going on, but I think it’s really important to point out some of the paradoxes that arise when you try to do a just transition,” Johnson said.