Sustainable Energy

Think about the last time you opened your utility bill and did math you shouldn’t have to do. Not budget math — survival math. The kind where you’re weighing the thermostat against the grocery list, the space heater against the copay, the gas tank against the rent. Most Americans have done that calculation at least once. For one in seven families, it happens every month.

Loretta lives outside Seminole, Oklahoma. Her family has lived in oil country for three generations — her grandfather worked the fields, her uncle drove tankers. The energy economy built this region. It also left it. The wells that made millionaires in Houston left behind methane leaks, contaminated groundwater, and communities whose tax base collapsed when the boom moved on.

She heats with a propane tank she refills when she can afford it. In winter she keeps the thermostat at 62. Her granddaughter has asthma — one of the respiratory conditions researchers have begun linking to proximity to orphaned well emissions. Loretta doesn’t need a green energy lecture. She needs a utility bill she can pay without choosing between warmth and dinner.

Loretta is not one person. She is a pattern. One in seven American families lives in energy poverty — spending 14 percent or more of their income just to keep the lights on and the house warm. Low-income households spend an average of 8.6 percent of their income on energy, while everyone else pays about 3 percent. That’s a three-to-one ratio, and it’s not an accident. It’s a system designed to extract from the people who can absorb it least. Layer in transportation fuel and the picture gets worse: low-income families spend 17.8 percent of their income on combined energy costs — nearly one in five dollars, gone before rent, before food, before anything else.

And the disparity doesn’t land evenly. Hispanic households pay 42 percent more than the national average for combined energy costs. Black households pay 10 percent more. The people who got the least benefit from the fossil fuel boom carry the highest cost of its infrastructure.

This is what energy poverty looks like in a state that powers the country. And it’s what makes the energy transition not just a moral obligation but an opportunity — if we design it that way.

Foundation is built on the premise that there is a minimum set of conditions people need to thrive. Sustainable energy is one of sixteen components, and in Oklahoma it means something specific: the same land, the same skills, the same ingenuity that built the fossil fuel industry can build what comes next. If we choose to.

The Numbers in Your Home

How much of your income goes to energy? Enter your household income and state:

Full calculator with methodology →

Oklahoma: Wind Giant, Energy Colony

Here’s a fact that should make you angry: Oklahoma generates 41 percent of its electricity from wind — third in the nation, behind only Texas and Iowa. We have 5,624 active wind turbines and over 12,600 megawatts of installed capacity. The wind blows through this state like it was designed for it. And yet Loretta can’t heat her house.

That’s because Oklahoma’s energy abundance doesn’t belong to Oklahoma. The wind farms are owned by out-of-state corporations. The electricity they generate flows to grids in other states. The royalties are structured to benefit investors, not communities. We produce the energy and export the wealth. The same pattern that defined oil — boom, extract, leave — is being replicated with renewables, and nobody in the statehouse is asking why.

This isn’t an argument against wind energy. Wind is extraordinary — it’s one of the reasons this state matters to the energy future. But wind turbines owned by a hedge fund in Connecticut and operated by a management company in Texas do not constitute energy democracy. They’re the same extraction model in a cleaner wrapper. The question isn’t whether Oklahoma generates renewable energy. It’s whether Oklahoma owns it.

The Cooperative Model That Already Exists

The answer isn’t theoretical. It’s already operating at scale, in the form of electric cooperatives — 832 of them nationwide, serving 42 million people across 48 states. Co-ops are nonprofit. They return over a billion dollars annually to their consumer-members. They serve 92 percent of the nation’s persistent poverty counties — the places where investor-owned utilities decided the profit margins weren’t worth the trouble.

Over 90 percent of electric cooperatives now include renewable generation in their portfolios. These aren’t boutique experiments. They’re the backbone of rural electricity in America, and they’ve been doing community-owned energy for decades. Foundation’s energy model doesn’t invent community ownership. It extends the cooperative model to the energy transition itself — so that when fossil fuels phase out, the communities that powered the old system own what replaces it.

Energy sovereignty. Intelligence sovereignty. Leapfrog. Three beats. Each one a full idea.

Phoenix Wells: The Oklahoma Model

We have 22,000 abandoned oil wells in Oklahoma alone. They’re leaking methane, threatening groundwater, and sitting there like an apology nobody made. Our Phoenix Wells project converts them into community-owned geothermal power plants — using the same boreholes that extracted fossil fuels to harvest the Earth’s heat for electricity, heating, and cooling. The Earth already did the work. We’re just accepting the gift.

The workforce that drilled those wells has the skills to convert them. The communities that depend on energy jobs get new ones — and not the “retraining for a job that doesn’t exist yet” kind. The same hands, the same equipment, the same geological knowledge. Red dirt intelligence. The land heals. And the energy stays local, because the ownership is local.

Foundation’s energy component doesn’t just say “switch to renewables.” It says the energy transition must be designed to serve the communities that powered the old system, not abandon them. Community ownership, local benefit, workforce continuity. That’s not a slogan. It’s engineering.

The Clean Energy Economy Is Already Here

The jobs argument against transition is already losing to the data. Global renewable energy employment reached 16.2 million in 2023 — up 18 percent in a single year. Projections put it above 30 million by 2030. In the US alone, over 520,000 clean energy jobs have been added in the past five years. Clean energy employment is growing three times faster than the rest of the US workforce.

Meanwhile, oil and gas extraction is projected to decline 6 percent over the next decade. Coal mining is in structural decline. The workers in those industries aren’t abstractions — they’re the people Foundation is designed to serve. And the transition is coming whether we design it or not. The only question is whether the people who built the old energy economy get to participate in the new one, or whether they get left behind while the jobs flow to states that planned ahead.

Oklahoma has every advantage: the wind, the geological knowledge, the skilled workforce, the abandoned wells, the cooperative infrastructure. What it lacks is a policy framework that treats its own people as the beneficiaries rather than the bystanders. That’s what Foundation is.

AI’s Energy Appetite

Here’s the complication AI advocates don’t talk about enough: AI is extraordinarily energy-hungry. Training large models consumes enormous power. Data centers are proliferating. If we build the AI future on fossil fuels, we’ve traded one crisis for another.

This is why Phoenix Wells matters beyond Oklahoma. It’s a model for powering AI computing with geothermal energy from the very holes the old economy left behind. AI can help optimize these microgrids, predict maintenance windows, and balance generation across a community — but the ownership stays local, and the decisions about where that power goes stay with the people who live there. Sustainable energy isn’t just environmentally necessary — it’s the only way to scale AI infrastructure without accelerating the problems we’re trying to solve.

What This Does to a Person — And to Everything Else

When you can’t afford to heat your home, everything else in this framework buckles. Energy poverty connects to housing — because a house you can’t afford to heat isn’t shelter, it’s a liability. It connects to health — cold homes and heat-exposed homes produce respiratory illness, cardiovascular stress, and mental health crises at rates that burden the medical system. Children in energy-poor households miss more school, perform worse academically, and develop chronic conditions at higher rates — which feeds directly into education outcomes.

And it connects to clean water in ways that are specific to Oklahoma: the same abandoned wells that leak methane also contaminate aquifers. The energy problem and the water problem aren’t parallel crises. They’re the same crisis, viewed from different angles. Phoenix Wells addresses both — capping the methane, securing the groundwater, and generating clean energy from the same borehole. The framework holds together because the problems hold together.

When Loretta pays 14 percent of her income to heat a house that sits on top of enough geothermal energy to power a neighborhood, we’re not looking at a market failure. We’re looking at a design failure. And design failures can be redesigned.

What We Need From You

Those who say the energy transition will kill jobs are defending the industries that already left. The wells are abandoned. The workforce is waiting. The geology is ready. The only thing missing is ownership.

We do not head north with the climate flight. We make our stand here. This is the right place. We will invent our way out of this. Here are the directions we’re building toward:

• Phoenix Wells at scale — convert Oklahoma’s 22,000 abandoned wells into community-owned geothermal power plants. Same workforce, same land, new century. Per pod: $280-350K annual revenue, 2-year payback. Federal ITC covers 40-50% of capital. What engineering challenges do we need to solve first? What does the workforce transition actually look like on the ground?

• Tribal energy sovereignty — tribal nations as first adopters of full-stack community energy, leapfrogging the broken centralized model entirely. The geological knowledge and the sovereign authority already exist. Over 90 percent of persistent poverty counties are already served by cooperatives — the organizational model is proven. What would it take to extend this to tribal-owned renewable generation?

• AI-assisted microgrids — distributed energy networks where AI helps balance generation and demand in real time across a community, with humans supervising the system and deciding priorities. When one house generates excess solar, the grid routes it where it’s needed automatically. Communities decide the rules — the AI handles the math. This is the transportation and housing connection: microgrids power the EV charging networks that connect communities and the homes that shelter them. What does this look like in a town of 5,000?

We need perspectives from people who work in energy, people who live near its infrastructure, and people who pay the bills. If you know what energy poverty feels like — the thermostat math, the bill dread, the choice between comfort and food — that experience is data no spreadsheet captures. Bring it.

This is citizen-developed work. This is one of sixteen components. Explore the full framework →

Join the Conversation

Have ideas about Sustainable Energy? Share them in our community discussion →