Chinatown Energy Literacy Campaign

Chinatown Power, Inc., Chinatown Community Land Trust, and Climable crafted an energy literacy campaign tailored to Boston’s Chinatown. It includes a suite of educational materials covering energy resilience as well as environmental justice and public health risks, written in plain, easy-to-understand language in both English and Written Chinese.

This project complements ongoing work around energy democracy, climate resilience, heat mitigation, and open space in Chinatown. This includes advocating for community governance and improvements for Reggie Wong Park, a new community-oriented park in Parcel 25 development, and green space next to the future Chinatown Library. It also includes the development of a community-owned, clean energy virtual microgrid in Chinatown. A microgrid is typically a series of interconnected buildings that share a local energy generation source. In Chinatown, rather than interconnecting buildings, the project is installing solar panels and battery storage in buildings around Chinatown and coordinating their loads together virtually. This design will provide resilience and democratic decision-making control, as well as cost savings and improved comfort, to residents of the participating buildings.

This literacy campaign provides necessary background information and vocabulary around environmental justice issues in the community and contextualizes the need for and benefits of a community microgrid. This will empower residents to provide input on the design of the microgrid and to get involved in work addressing heat mitigation, open space, and green infrastructure. The campaign will be shared on social media, and live on the Chinatown Power website that is under development with the Hideo Sasaki Foundation’s support.