Death, energy, and a fairer way forward
Alexis Cureton knows the clean energy fight is rarely equitable. he’s fighting to change that. “I don’t want to be the only person alive on this planet, you feel me? I want my people to make it, too."
Photography by Smeeta Mahanti
In January 2020, Alexis Cureton was living out his dream: He was in Oakland, California, working as a clean energy and equity advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), serving his community, and pushing for more equitable energy policy. He was preparing to attend a fundraiser in San Francisco featuring Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, known for his focus on climate change.
“The governor’s gonna be there, some state government people from California were going to be there, and I was very excited. And I went to sleep that night and awoke to three or four missed calls. When I turned to look at the clock it was 4:36 am,” Alexis recalls. “I was like, it has to be dad, there has to be no other reason my sister would call me at three or four in the morning. And she said, like, ‘Hey, you got to get here.’ And then it was just downhill from there.’”
Alexis had known this moment was coming. Three years earlier, his father, Dr. Alex Cureton — renowned OB/GYN surgeon and rock of the family — had been diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer. And now, more than 2,000 miles away, in Indianapolis, Indiana, he lay dying. Alexis rushed to his side and was with him when he passed away on January 29, at just 61 years old.
“I was so hurt. I was so hurt. I was so hurt. Like, my father passing, I believe, was like my first heartbreak,” Alexis says.
Alexis is one of those rare people who is easy to connect with instantly. He’s athletic-looking, with a radiant smile and an easygoing warmth that draws people in immediately. He had spent the previous five years relentlessly cultivating a career advocating for energy justice and had risen rapidly in his field; and several months after his father passed, he was honored as a sustainability leader in GreenBiz’s 30 Under 30 list, the only Black man to make the list. But his father’s diagnosis had hung like a shadow over the majority of those years and now the grief of losing him came crashing down around Alexis.
“Before my father passed, I used to beat myself up about why I wasn’t able to show up fully,” Alexis recalls. “Why is it taking me so long to do simple tasks? Why can I not meet deadlines? And it got worse after he passed.”
He took a few weeks off to help organize his father’s funeral and grieve with his family, but he hadn’t been in his job at NRDC long enough to qualify for longer leave. As the pandemic unfolded, he decided to stay in Indianapolis and work remotely. But when he returned to work, he was suffering quietly and didn’t know what to do other than push himself to keep his head down and work harder — like he’d seen his father do his whole life.
“I’m missing deadlines, I’m missing meetings… that’s not normal. I’m a high-performing, high-achieving individual. Something is wrong, like I don’t know what’s going on,” he says. He suffered the first panic attack of his life during a presentation at work, and thought he might be dying. His lowest point came around the end of 2020, when he celebrated his first birthday without his father. “I was sick,” he recalls. “It was really fucking bad… I was hopeless.”
“I knew what could happen. I could become addicted to drugs. I could become an alcoholic. I could become abusive, just an abusive, angry, broken man. And there are already plenty of those in the world,” Alexis says, thinking back to that lowest point. “I took it upon myself to be like, ‘Yo, this is not the end.’”
“I finally realized that the grief that was consuming ME was not something to get over or to get past but to work through.”
Photography by Smeeta Mahanti
He finally realized that the grief that was consuming him “was not something to get over or to get past but to work through,” and found a Black therapist to support him. Slowly, piece by piece, his life — and his faith in himself — began to come back into focus. As it did, one thing became clear: He had to get back to Oakland, to continue the work he’d started.
Alexis grew up knowing that he wanted to serve his community, like he’d seen his father do as a doctor. “He provided a lot of free services to individuals who were uninsured, didn't have means to get to the hospital, and so on and so forth. That was his advocacy.”
Although his father’s example inspired Alexis, he knew medicine wasn’t his path. As an undergraduate at Clark Atlanta University, he thought he might make his mark and serve his community as a social work major. But one sociology class changed everything. “It just unlocked a deeper level of understanding about the world and about society,” he says. “It taught me that my passion is improving the lived experiences of Black people in this country and in this world.”
His father, however, wasn’t initially convinced that majoring in sociology was a smart choice. “He's like, ‘Son, how are you going to take care of yourself? How are you going to take care of your family?’ And I was like, ‘Dad, I promise you, I will figure it out,’” Alexis recalls. “I had so much faith in that I was like, ‘No, I'm good, and I'll figure it out because sociology is connected to everything. Business, science, arts, music, everything.’”
“My passion is improving the lived experiences of Black people in this country and in this world.”
He majored in sociology and immediately went on to graduate school at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. There he planned to earn a public policy degree as the next step along the path to becoming a public servant or elected official. But fate — and his innate curiosity — intervened.
“I was reading this autobiography about Nikola Tesla — you know, a genius, the reason for why we have half the things we have right now — and it just so happens that, you know, the first week of school, we students, our incoming class was made aware that there would be an energy concentration offered,” Alexis recalls. “I looked at the description; I was like, ‘Whoa, this is, this is amazing!’ And again, it added a lens to the type of impact I wanted to create.”
He enrolled in the energy concentration and it soon became apparent that he was facing a steeper learning curve than his peers. “Their family members like worked at a gas plant, or worked at like a national park, or worked at FERC — which I'm like, I don't even know who or what FERC is at that time! I never knew what EPA was, never knew what EIA was,” he says. “One of my classmates, you know, he had been building solar panels since high school — I'll never forget — and I was like, what?!”
“I realized very quickly that what I was looking for, I wasn’t going to find in the curriculum,” Alexis says. “I was in a red state, I mean coal and gas, you know. I’m learning about peaker plants and, you know, fracking.” It soon became clear that although the program could help him get up to speed on the ins and outs of the energy industry, Alexis wasn’t going to find what he wanted to learn in the classroom. So began forging his own path, taking it upon himself to learn about Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice, reframing assignments to focus on it, and using his final project to explore how fracking impacts water quality.
His time in graduate school also led him to an essential and empowering realization. “I kept looking for like a mentor or somebody to show me around,” he recalls. “And it’s like, we are the ones we’ve been looking for.... I’m not going to achieve success alone, like achieve what I’m seeking alone. But, like, this person, this imaginary person that you think you’re going to find? You already know him.”
Nevertheless, he networked relentlessly and sought guidance wherever he could find it. Despite this, he initially struggled to get a fellowship or internship after graduate school, and heard the same thing over and over: “You don’t have an electrical engineering degree. You don’t come from a hard science background… basically, you’re not qualified for an internship — when an internship is THE space for you to learn.”
Finally, he learned about the Environmental Fellows Program, a twelve-week summer fellowship for students from groups that have been historically underrepresented in environmental fields, through the University of Michigan in partnership with Environmental Grantmakers Association. “This fellowship understood that Black people and minorities, there’s no way they’re going to have this experience because they’ve never been able to get access to it,” he says.
The fellowship placed him in Seattle with Spark Northwest, a nonprofit focused on getting clean energy into marginalized communities, where he studied the energy burden — the percentage of gross income that a household spends on energy — of low-income residents in King County, Washington. The research he conducted during this fellowship led him to his next job as the first EV Solar Corps Fellow at GRID Alternatives, a nonprofit focused on using renewable energy to further economic and environmental justice.
Surviving in the Bay Area on the fellowship’s meager allowance was “a rude awakening,” but it was also the opportunity that allowed his career to take off. “First week, I’m in meetings with CARB — so, the California Air Resources Board — managing California’s first like clean vehicle grants program,” Alexis says.
It was an eye-opening experience, too. The grant program would give low-income Californians up to $5,000 to help buy a new or used electric vehicle. “At eye level, I’m like, Yo! This is dope as fuck! I’m like, Yo! We absolutely need this,” Alexis recalls. But the more he dug into it, the more he realized it wasn’t quite as helpful as it seemed, given that about half of that amount got eaten up by sales taxes. “When you look at it from that holistic perspective, not just like, we’re patting ourselves on the back because we got a program, it’s like no, like these people are really only getting $2,500 off.”
He pushed others involved in the program to revamp it and heard a version of a response he’d encountered before when advocating for energy justice: “‘This is great, we hear what you’re saying, and we’ll absolutely look into this, but right now let’s table this.’ And I’m like, ‘Man, I wish families could table energy burden. I wish families could table, like, food insecurity. I wish we could table like all these things that screw us daily,’” he recalls. “Energy and the environment are not things that we can wait on, because the longer we wait, the less of us will survive what is to come. And I think we have to speak from that perspective, because that’s the truth.”
As his fellowship at GRID Alternatives was wrapping up, Alexis once again began looking for his next step and found it at a racial equity summit hosted by The Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit working with communities of color to combat racism and create economic opportunity and climate resiliency. He applied and was accepted into their summer associateship program to work on transportation and mobility equity issues. In that role, he dug deeper into the work he’d begun at GRID, continuing to network with folks at CARB, at state Air Quality Districts, and the California Public Utilities Commission, while also forging connections with frontline communities in the East Bay.
That work brought him profound joy, but it was laced with the sorrow of his father’s declining health. “I’m making it, I’m building my dream, this little Black kid raised in the midwest and loved in the south is really thriving in California — but back home, you know, my father is dying.”
Alexis didn’t know it until after his father passed, but Dr. Cureton had been very concerned about his son’s future. “As a Black man who knew his time was limited, the pressure was on to put his affairs in order and his son’s well being was on the list. One of his biggest fears was not being able to take care of his family once he was gone,” Alexis says.
He also felt that his father’s concern “speaks to the lack of awareness that Black people have about the opportunities in this industry.” But as his time at The Greenlining Institute drew to a close, he was able to change this misconception. His father came out to the Bay Area to hear Alexis present his research on “white roads through Black neighborhoods” — the history and impact of highways and major roads being built through Black communities. After the presentation, Alexis surprised his dad with the news that he had just accepted a full-time job with NRDC to be a clean energy and equity advocate.
“Energy and the environment are not things that we can wait on, because the longer we wait, the less of us will survive what is to come. And I think we have to speak from that perspective, because that’s the truth.”
Photography by Smeeta Mahanti
“He just broke down in tears,” Alexis recalls. “That shit meant the world to me, to be able to be like, ‘Dad, this is like one less thing that you have to worry about and, you know, I’m gonna be good.’”
Even if his dad had worried, Alexis never had. In fact, in going into the energy field he was following his father’s advice to find a career where he’d always have opportunities. He saw those opportunities where others didn’t because he had faith not only that he could make it in the energy industry, but that doing so could radically improve the lived condition of Black people.
“So much of this,” Alexis says, speaking about energy justice, racism, and the mental health toll of both, “is about us believing that what we're going through, or what we're experiencing, is how it's supposed to be, you know, how it should be, and how it's always been. And that goes back to this question about like, faith. Like, no, this, this actually isn't how it's supposed to be. It's only been like that because shit is tilted, right? It's inequitable, right? It's systematic racism, like its oppression, right?”
* * *
That same faith that this is not how it has to be is ultimately what also carried Alexis out of his own darkest hours, into therapy, and back to his growing community in Oakland. After two-and-a-half years at NRDC — most of which had been shrouded by his grief for his father, the Covid-19 pandemic, the police killings of Black Americans, and a severe car accident in September 2021 — Alexis felt like he was at a crossroads in his career.
“I had this moment where I’m speaking out loud to my father and I felt him ask me ‘Son, are you happy?’ And I was just like, ‘No.’ And then I was like, I have to figure this out.” Something told him to reach out to Brian Janous, Microsoft’s GM of energy and renewables, who’d spoken on a panel that Alexis had moderated in 2020. The two had taken a liking to each other and stayed in touch, and Alexis wanted to talk to someone who would understand. He never expected that that conversation would launch him out of the realm of nonprofits and onto a much bigger stage.
In the spring of 2022, he joined Microsoft as an energy strategy and policy PM, working to understand how the company can power its data centers with 100 percent clean, renewable energy, around the clock with an emphasis on Environmental Justice. Data centers make our lives easier — allowing us to store our favorite memories in the cloud or compete globally with the latest 2k release — but these benefits come with hefty environmental footprints. Data Centers on average consume nearly 2 percent of the electricity used in the United States every year and account for 0.5 percent of the nation’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, these facilities, or the electricity sources that power them, are often located in or near low-income communities or communities of color, meaning that their health impacts can disproportionately burden these populations.
It was this last aspect that grabbed Alexis. At Microsoft, he saw an opportunity not only to work to advance equitable clean energy policy and business development but also to improve the lived condition of the Black community.
“How do we build data centers with these ambitious clean energy goals, you know, with a focus on environmental justice, with a focus on like social justice, energy justice? What does that look like for a company that’s never done that?” Alexis says. “How do we go beyond making it a positive only for these tech companies, and translate the benefits to communities that are most impacted.”
The vision Alexis is advancing is “bottom-up innovation,” which is “not just community decision making, but it’s also community ownership…. The communities themselves more than likely already have the solution to the issue that’s ailing them. What they don’t have is the finance, right? What they don’t have is the investing power to build it and they actually own it.
“I don’t want to be the only person alive on this planet, you feel me?” he says. “I want my people to make it too.” And not just make it, but thrive, alive with the faith that how it is now is not how it has to be."
Photography by Smeeta Mahanti
Coming into this work from the nonprofit world, and with a perspective that’s anchored in energy justice, has made it easy for Alexis to focus on the should-haves and shortcomings. But Alexis acknowledges the scale of the mountain he is trying to climb. “This is not easy work, and it’s not just shifting the industry, but we have to shift the paradigm of an entire industry.
“One thing that we pride ourselves on at Microsoft is the idea of the growth mindset. You don’t, you don’t grow and develop if there aren’t people with differing ideas in the same room, helping make decisions as a team. And so credit to the Microsoft energy team, for leaning into somebody like me who doesn’t come from a traditional background of those who they hire, to ask these questions,” he says. “They are supportive of me and my efforts and they want these types of questions being asked.”
Moving from vision to policy to implementation will take months, more likely years, of work. But the future Alexis is working for is clear, ambitious, beautiful, and not that different from what it’s always been: Black and frontline communities would not only understand the way that the energy industry influences their lived experience — but they will have a say in the energy future of their community.
“I don’t want to be the only person alive on this planet, you feel me?” he says. “I want my people to make it too.” And not just make it, but thrive, alive with the faith that how it is now is not how it has to be.