Modules and Metrics Available to Purchase

Chapter 3, “Modules and Metrics,” theorizes how solar panels’ modularity and electrical currents’ quantifiability affectively incubate equicrats in activist spaces. Lennon grounds this discussion in an ethnographic analysis of an online flyer for a grassroots community solar campaign that misleadingly aestheticizes racial diversity, and a spreadsheet comparing solar installation contractors that focuses narrowly on market values. These graphics show how justice-oriented work often operates through idealizations of market-based opportunity, revealing the equicratic character of environmental justice (EJ) activism. Lennon suggests that solar’s modularity and quantifiability accentuate this equicratic character by centering economies of scale in activist spaces that have traditionally rejected economizing imperatives. Specifically, the power to disconnect solar from the centralized grid and the physical imperative to quantify solar’s electrical inputs into the grid enable EJ activists to participate in electricity production, shifting their concerns from the bodily well-being of low-income communities of color and toward neoliberal mandates for cost efficiency.