From Policy Targeting to Lived Access: Decentralized Renewable Energy and Community Participation in the Bay Area, California

This thesis examines whether decentralized renewable energy programs move beyond policy targeting and create meaningful access, understandable benefits, and real opportunities for community input in practice. It uses the Bay Area as a case study within the wider California policy context to investigate the gap between formal equity design and lived experience. The study asks under what conditions decentralized renewable energy moves from simply targeting disadvantaged communities to delivering meaningful access, understandable benefits, and real opportunities for community input. The research uses a convergent mixed-methods design. Quantitative and qualitative evidence were collected during roughly the same period, analyzed separately, and then brought together for joint interpretation. The study combines four main sources of evidence: a community survey, open-ended responses and interviews, policy and program documents, and GIS-based spatial analysis. The spatial component uses CalEnviroScreen 4.0 and SB 535 disadvantaged community designations to examine environmental vulnerability and program presence across Bay Area census tracts. The findings show a clear gap between policy targeting and lived experience. Disadvantaged communities are formally recognized in California’s equity framework, and DAC tracts in the Bay Area face much higher pollution burden than non-DAC tracts. However, program presence and uptake remain limited and uneven across those tracts. Survey results show that respondents did not strongly reject renewable energy programs, but they also did not rate them as highly accessible or participatory. The weakest dimensions were procedural justice and accessibility, while perceived benefits were only moderate. Open-ended responses and interview evidence reinforce this pattern by pointing to low awareness, unclear guidance, trust concerns, confusing billing, and renter-related barriers. The thesis concludes that decentralized renewable energy can support more equitable local development, but only under more demanding conditions than policy targeting alone. In the Bay Area case, the main problem is not the absence of programs, but the weak conversion of formal targeting into usable access, understandable benefits, and real community voice. The broader lesson is that equity becomes meaningful only when program design, communication, and governance make participation and access workable in everyday life.