ENFIELD, NORTH CAROLINA — When history buffs reenacted a Revolutionary War general’s visit to this tiny, rural North Carolina town in February, its top elected official was notably absent.
General Marquis de Lafayette may have helped liberate America from England, but over 240 years later his story has little relevance to Mayor Mondale Robinson.
“I find it extremely hard to be celebrating the Revolutionary War when people in Enfield — households of four people — are living on $24,000 a year,” said Robinson, sitting in his windowless office, sparsely decorated with small, framed photos of Black leaders. “I don’t know what freedom looks like, because you can’t tell me people in Enfield are free to live the way they want to.”
Robinson, who was elected in 2022, envisions a day when Black people in his community are able to live a life of pride, freedom, and economic stability. He believes clean energy will play a central role.
Alongside other community leaders and clean energy advocates, Robinson is planning a new solar farm that could meet most of Enfield’s electricity needs. He wants a modern substation to replace the town’s dilapidated one. And he aims to create a “storefront” for energy efficiency that could help residents reduce energy waste and their electric bills.
“We’re trying to be energy independent,” Robinson said. “Besides green energy being good for the environment, it’s also going to help our people … live a life with dignity. That includes the housing, the grid, figuring out how to do renewable energy in a way that is not just sustainable but also job-creating.”
Some formidable barriers stand in the way, from the Trump administration’s antipathy to clean energy and communities of color, to pockets of local opposition to the large solar farms that have become common across the region. But with money still flowing for now from Biden-era climate laws — which were intended to fund progress in historically disadvantaged communities like Enfield — Robinson and his fellow visionaries say their aspirations are within reach.
“[It’s] a place that has more than 260 sunny days per year on average,” said Robinson. “I’m super excited about what’s possible.”
After leaving the “bleak reality” of his hometown, a political organizer returns
In many ways, Enfield typifies Eastern North Carolina and the rural South. Once a trading post for peanuts, tobacco, and other crops, the town’s commercial district, five miles east of Interstate 95, now stands nearly empty. Like much of the state, the town faces increasingly frequent natural disasters, like hurricanes. It’s devastatingly poor and overwhelmingly Black, home to many descendants of those who remained enslaved long after Lafayette’s victory tour.
Robinson grew up in Black Bottom, Enfield’s historically Black section. The neighborhood still has no sidewalks, and he says indoor plumbing wasn’t a given here until the 1990s. On a walk through town, he pointed out the shotgun home he lived in for a time as a child with his parents and some of his 12 siblings.
“I’m 45 years old,” he said. “I should not know what an outhouse is.”
When Robinson looks back on his childhood, he sees clearly how the lack of infrastructure and the quality of the environment impacted the health of those around him. Many of his schoolmates had ringworm, a result, he thinks, of poor sewer systems, water contamination upstream, or a combination of the two. Severe asthma, which can be triggered by air pollution, kept one brother in the hospital for most of 4th grade.
Dumpster diving for glass bottles and other recyclables as a teenager, Robinson found a copy of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” He must have read it four times cover to cover. The seminal essay collection helped Robinson draw the line between systemic racism and Black public health.
“My people suffer the most,” Robinson said. When America sneezes, he said, “Black people get a flu.”
In 1997, Robinson left “the bleak reality of Enfield” for a stint in the Marine Corps, then Livingstone College, a historically Black university in Salisbury, North Carolina. After graduating, he ran dozens of progressive political campaigns around the country and the world, from the Congo to Illinois.
In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, Robinson founded the Black Male Voter Project — aimed at communicating year-round, on- and off-season, with a demographic often taken for granted by the Democratic establishment.
“I wanted to do something for the brothers,” he said. “Maslow would say they would be on the bottom rung,” referencing the late American psychologist who conceptualized a hierarchy of needs to explain what motivates human behavior. “They don’t have their basic needs met.”
A constellation of political projects still occupies him. But he returned to North Carolina to run for mayor because he felt like a “fraud” for not organizing his people back home.
One of his first official acts: livestreaming the removal of a prominent Confederate monument in town. Any headwinds he’s facing over his clean energy vision are akin to the blowback he’s still experiencing over that day in 2022, Robinson said.
“I’m getting pushback because I’m loud, and I’m a Black man, and I should know my place.”
Creating a solar-powered vision for an energy-independent Enfield
About 30 miles south of the Virginia border, in Halifax County, Enfield is in a part of the state largely untouched by Duke Energy’s grid and its monopoly. The town owns its electric utility, a holdover from when private electric providers couldn’t foresee profiting from serving far-flung hamlets of 2,000 people. Much of the area connects to a regional transmission organization called PJM Interconnection, in which wholesale electricity has long been bought and sold on a competitive market. That means independent power producers can enlist customers besides Duke, and they’ve already built scores of solar farms in the area, demonstrating the economic viability of the resource.
Those factors drew William Munn, regional director of the Carolinas for advocacy group Vote Solar, to Enfield.
“In late 2023, we were looking for communities to share the great news around the Inflation Reduction Act,” Munn said, referring to the 2022 climate spending law that includes incentives for historically disadvantaged towns.
The fact that the town owned its own utility was especially enticing. “If you have the political will,” Munn said, “you can do whatever you want, and that’s rare in this regulatory environment.”
The town’s atrocious energy burden is generating a lot of that will. Despite having small homes and even smaller incomes, Enfield households have average winter electric bills of $650 a month, according to the town finance director. That’s in part because much of the housing stock is old, poorly insulated, and inefficient.
“These are [800– to 1,200-square-foot] homes that have bills this high. These aren’t big homes,” said Reggie Bynum, Southeast community outreach director at the nonprofit Center for Energy Education, based up the road in Roanoke Rapids. “It’s old wiring; it’s old insulation. Weatherization needs are definitely there. These aren’t modern homes.”
Higher-than-average rates compound the problem. The town buys electricity from Halifax Electric Membership Corp., which in turn buys from the statewide association of electric cooperatives. The association owns some generating facilities but also buys wholesale power through PJM and from investor-owned utilities like Duke. In Raleigh, one of the wealthiest areas in the state, Duke charges 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Enfield, one of the poorest, the rate approaches 14 cents.
“We’re selling our residents electricity that’s third-time bought and sold,” Robinson said.
A three- to five-megawatt solar farm on about 20 acres of land, backed up by a battery with a duration of four hours or more, could supply all of the town’s 1,200 electric meters, most of them residential. The move would likely cut rates, especially if government grants covered all or part of the approximately $10 million solar array and backup battery. All told, experts believe the generation system could pay for itself in about 15 years.
The town would remain connected to the surrounding grid during emergencies, Munn said, “but the most important part is that for 95% of the time, they are going to be drawing on their own battery bank and solar generation, and that’s going to stabilize the cost for the long term.”
Replacing the town’s dilapidated substation, which requires frequent repairs, is also a priority. Its wooden poles were erected in the middle of the last century, and its power lines have limited capacity — not enough to receive and transfer power from a five-megawatt solar farm, advocates say.
Six of the substation’s seven lines are at 2,400 volts, said Nick Jimenez, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “It’s so low that they don’t make equipment to fix that anymore.”
