Analyzing Socioeconomic Impacts on Energy Resource Allocation: A Demographic Assessment Framework

As nations increasingly focus on promoting energy resource allocation, ensuring proportional access to energy resources and decarbonization measures is especially critical for historically marginalized communities. Achieving energy resource allocation requires addressing persistent inequities in access to distributed energy resources (DERs), which disproportionately affect socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. This paper presents a novel energy resource allocation assessment framework that incorporates hosting capacity (HC), demographic data, and socioeconomic factors to evaluate and address these disparities. Communities are categorized into four distinct classes based on socioeconomic and demographic characteristics: Class A, Class B, Class C and Class D. The analysis focuses on New York City (NYC), mapping the distribution of HC and examining key indicators such as population, income, and community classifications. Results reveal that beyond population size and income levels, community classifications significantly influence HC distribution, with Class A and Class C communities disproportionately experiencing systematic disadvantages due to lower socioeconomic conditions and geographic placement. Simulation case studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in identifying unbalanced patterns, offering actionable insights for proportional energy planning. The proposed energy resource allocation metrics provide a robust, data-driven framework for visualizing and addressing disparities in energy access, contributing to the broader goal of achieving energy resource allocation and fair resource allocation across all communities.