To help the Chicago suburban region achieve their clean energy goals as a means to realizing
equitable and sustainable outcomes, ELEVATE has been working with the five municipalities. To
develop comprehensive plans, quantitative data about their energy, climate, health, and
economy are necessary.
However, the five municipalities have very little data to work from and
need both to understand their current situation and how the community could develop in the
future. To promote the climate prioritization efforts, Greenlink was engaged in the data
collection and analytics providing information about existing community electricity usage, clean
energy potentials, emissions benefits, job creation potentials, the distribution of various
economic, social, and health-associated burdens.

Using a fixed effects model to isolate the effects of dynamic societal conditions, this research examines the drivers of utility burdens in three U.S. cities at a neighborhood scale. Energy burden reduction opportunities are forecasted through an evaluation of potential energy efficiency technologies using several utility cost tests. A discussion around leveraging current and future energy policies to redress systemic inequities in the residential energy ecosystem concludes.

In this study, novel datasets and machine learning
modeling techniques are applied to evaluate the relationship between urban tree canopy, energy burden, redlining, energy use intensities, population migration, socio-economic indicators, and displacement, among others, at the neighborhood level in three U.S. cities.