What Green Power Owes the People

THE CONTENTS OF NORMAN FRANK’S fridge could mean the difference between life and death. His doctor told him to drink cold water for his kidney trouble, and to keep his medicines, which help manage his diabetes and other health problems, chilled. But he doesn’t have a full-time job, and struggles to afford electricity.

So Frank, a 49-year-old Warumungu Traditional Owner—a term used in Australia to describe members of an Aboriginal group with historical claims to land—uses the power he gets from the utility company sparingly. And he says what he does use is expensive. For the home where he lives with his wife and five children in Tennant Creek, a town on the fringes of Australia’s vast Northern Territory deserts, the monthly electric bill runs about $200, he says. After other necessities like rent and food, he’s left with almost nothing of his government disability pension at the end of the month.

In July, the nonprofit Original Power, an Aboriginal community organization that focuses on energy issues, helped Frank install solar panels that stretch about half the length of the roof of his government-owned one-story, three-bedroom house. It seemed a wise move: with almost 300 sunny days per year, Tennant Creek has some of the clearest skies in the world. But although the physical infrastructure to produce solar energy may be in place on Frank’s roof, the Northern Territory has not yet produced the corresponding bureaucratic infrastructure that will allow him to use it. It’s a matter not of science but of tariff systems, prepaid meters and