Powered by Poverty

Energy access, income, and poverty in the United States

Soft Socks
Cameron Kull, Maria Persaud Fernandez, and Chris Wang

Project Goal

We built a Closeread story that asks:

As the U.S. grid gets cleaner, where do poverty and fossil-heavy infrastructure still overlap?

  • Audience: public readers interested in climate, infrastructure, and inequality.
  • Product: a guided scrollytelling article with maps, plant overlays, and summary charts.
  • New workflow: Quarto Closeread with interactive {ggiraph} maps and charts.

Data We Joined

1 U.S. Energy Information Administration Electricity data on capacity, generation, and emissions

2 U.S. Census Bureau Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates

3 World Resources Institute U.S. power plant geography and capacity

Product Demonstration

The product is the website: scrollytelling first, with each map and chart introduced only after the prior step in the argument has been established.

Fossil Capacity Is Concentrated

Fossil capacity is not just a plant-by-plant story. At the state scale, the same high-poverty states often sit inside fossil-heavy electricity systems.

10 of 11 Highest-Poverty States Are Majority Fossil

Rows are the 11 states with the highest 2024 poverty rates. Brown is fossil capacity share; New Mexico is the only non-majority-fossil exception.

Product Design

  • Closeread controls the reading order: national transition, state map, scale context, poverty layer, county detail, and synthesis.
  • ggiraph adds hover detail without turning every map into a dashboard.
  • The plant overlays add local context without claiming a causal relationship.
  • Narrative copy explains what the data supports and what it does not prove.

Limitations

  • State energy data cannot identify household-level energy burden.
  • Total CO₂ is not per-capita or per-MWh intensity. It reflects state size and industrial scale.
  • Texas and Louisiana require the industrial-electricity context before any equity claim.
  • WRI plant data is contextual, not a complete 2024 inventory.
  • The analysis shows association, not causation.

Takeaway

A cleaner grid is not automatically an equitable grid.

The question isn’t only how fast the U.S. cuts emissions.

It is who gets cleaner infrastructure first, and who is still waiting.