The Peaker Project
The U.S. electric grid is the largest and most consequential machine ever built by humanity. Every time we flip on the lights, we draw on its continent-spanning power. And yet this most potent machine is largely invisible: most people don’t know much about where their electricity comes from. Fewer still are aware of the disproportionate harms that our electric grid inflicts on working class communities of color, in the form of toxic emissions from the burning of dirty gas and oil in urban power plants. How does one visualize the emissions that emerge from smokestacks of power plants in a city like New York? How does the location of these power plants in the city’s working-class communities of color exacerbate other forms of environmental injustice? What might it mean to think about these communities as energy sacrifice zones?
The intersection of state-sanctioned environmental and carceral violence has turned parts of the city into de facto sacrifice zones in which citizens are subjected to both open and insidious forms of violence. Compare, for example, maps of neighborhoods targeted by “stop and frisk” with the zones of the city where surface temperatures are highest, imperiling vulnerable citizens like the elderly and those without enough income to afford air conditioning – including residents of public housing, only about half of whom have access to cooling. It is no coincidence that people who have been systematic criminalized and subjected to carceral violence also find their lives imperiled by climate change-related health risks. But it’s not just that working class people of color can’t afford to live in neighborhoods with lots of trees and parks. It’s also that the city has a history of locating toxin-spewing fossil fuel infrastructure in neighborhoods populated predominantly by Black and Latinx people. This is a form of slow violence against communities of color. Compare where fossil fuel infrastructure like the city’s dirty oil-burning peaker plants are located to the parts of the city with the highest dangerous heat index and the highest rates of asthma.
Peaker plants are intended to be fired up only when demand is at its highest – for example, during hot summer evenings when many city residents turn on their air conditioners. The majority of NYC’s peaker plants were built many decades ago, before the Clean Air Act. As a result, they spew out particulates, nitrous oxide, and other pollutants. But the city continues to operate them today, arguing that we need to “keep the lights on” and never mentioning the devastating impact of dirty power on the communities where these polluting facilities are located.
It is only by knowing where our power comes from that we may seize and redirect that power to the common good.
Events
- Photographs in Climate Justice exhibition (LaGuardia Community College)
- Film screening & talk (Rice University, Houston, 10 Mar 2025)
- Film screening & talk (University of Toronto, 6 Feb 2025)
- Film screening at Woodbine Social Center (Ridgewood, Queens, 16 Mar 2025)
- Film screening at the James Gallery (CUNY Graduate Center, 2 May 2025)
- Resilience Walking Tour (Long Island City, 8 Jun 2025)
Photo by Regan de Loggans
René Cepeda
Poster by Abygai Peña
Photo courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of Annabelle Heckler