How Utilities Can Mitigate Risks through Robust Community Benefits Plans

This briefing by RMI explains how electric utilities can use Community Benefits Plans (CBPs) to mitigate project risks and secure federal financing, specifically through the Department of Energy's Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment (EIR) program. It argues that meaningful community engagement and commitments to labor and equity reduce the likelihood of project cancellations, address workforce shortages, and improve a utility's social license to operate.

• The Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment (EIR) program provides $250 billion in low-cost financing for projects utilizing operating or legacy fossil fuel infrastructure, such as coal mines, power plants, pipelines, and gas stations. To qualify, applicants must develop a Community Benefits Plan (CBP) that outlines community priorities and the developer's commitments across four DOE priority categories: Community and Labor Engagement, Quality Jobs, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA), and Implementing Justice40.
• Robust community engagement through CBPs can mitigate significant financial and operational risks associated with local opposition. Local opposition is one of the top three reasons for project cancellations and delays; by the end of 2023, 15 percent of counties had enacted restrictions on wind or solar development. For developers, cancellations result in average sunk costs of over $2 million for solar projects and $7.5 million for wind projects.
• CBPs help utilities address skilled labor shortages, particularly in rural areas, by using EIR financing to support worker training programs and partnerships with community colleges and minority-serving institutions. The document notes that unionized workers in the utility sector—which has a 20 percent unionization rate compared to 6 percent for the private sector overall—tend to be more productive and have lower turnover, benefiting the company's bottom line.
• Implementing CBPs can improve a utility's reputation and social license to operate by addressing energy poverty and ESG goals. The text highlights that more than one in seven families live in energy poverty (spending more than 10 percent of household income on energy) and that US electric and gas utility customers owed $32 billion in late bill payments at the end of 2020.

APA

RMI (2024). How Utilities Can Mitigate Risks through Robust Community Benefits Plans. https://rmi.org/resources/how-utilities-can-mitigate-risks-through-robust-community-benefits-plans/

Chicago

RMI. How Utilities Can Mitigate Risks through Robust Community Benefits Plans. 2024. https://rmi.org/resources/how-utilities-can-mitigate-risks-through-robust-community-benefits-plans/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=How Utilities Can Mitigate Risks through Robust Community Benefits Plans |date=7 May 2024 |url=https://rmi.org/resources/how-utilities-can-mitigate-risks-through-robust-community-benefits-plans/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2024how, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{How Utilities Can Mitigate Risks through Robust Community Benefits Plans}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2024}, month = may, url = {https://rmi.org/resources/how-utilities-can-mitigate-risks-through-robust-community-benefits-plans/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }