Tag: renewable-energy

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What to expect when you’re expecting engagement: Delivering procedural justice in large-scale solar energy deployment

Props to Karl Hoesch for an excellent paper and the best title I’ve seen so far…

Community engagement in the planning process to build large-scale solar (LSS) projects can win local support and advance procedural justice. However, an understanding of community engagement in current LSS development is lacking.

Using responses from a U.S. nationwide survey (n = 979) of residential neighbors living within 3 miles (4.8 km) of completed LSS projects (i.e. “solar neighbors”) and project details from the U.S. Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database (USPVDB), this study seeks to answer the following questions: How are solar neighbors’ perceptions of community engagement associated with their attitudes toward their LSS projects? How do solar neighbors’ perceptions of community engagement compare to their expectations? And, how do neighbors explain what they perceived about the planning process?

We find that higher perceived engagement is associated with more positive attitudes toward the project, even when controlling for respondents who acted in opposition. Supporters and opponents alike expect more engagement than they perceived and information about projects both before construction and after operation is lacking. Awareness and engagement expectations increase at certain project size and proximity thresholds. However, most neighbors expect the public to offer input during engagement, but not make decisions.

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New Study! -Energy justice outcomes of a low-income community solar project in Michigan

This study, published in Energy Research & Social Science, and led by Karl Hoesch at UofM, explores one community solar project in a rural community in the upper peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan. The project contained a carve-out for Low-Middle Income (LMI) households identified through participation in the National Weatherization Program (WAP).

Through nine semi-structured interviews, 44 phone surveys, and analysis of two years of monthly energy consumption and bill data we sought to understand three energy justice impacts on the targeted community and participants’ perceptions of the program and its processes. We show that positive distributional, procedural, and recognition justice outcomes from community solar are achievable in a context without supportive legislation, under certain conditions. These results may have implications for expanding community solar to LMI households in small towns both in the United States and abroad.

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You can’t have your cheap solar and make it too

Today’s NY Times article examining China’s efforts to flood the market with cheap solar panels identifies an enduring conflict in the Biden clean-energy agenda: you can’t have both cheap panels and panels made in the US. And for Biden, one without the other is a loss.

Cheap panels mean a speedy transition, more solar farms, more clean electricity, more progress toward his net-zero goals. But cheap panels are made in China. So, more solar development necessarily means more investment in the Chinese solar supply chain, and necessarily less invested in onshoring that supply–bye bye CubicPV!

However, if Biden goes all out, incentivizing, and (hopefully) ultimately relying on, domestically manufactured solar, then the price will inevitably increase, meaning a slower transition, less development, less progress. Slower progress means less wins, which for Biden is essentially the same thing as a loss.

This problem isn’t going away. Navigating it will be difficult, if not impossible. And what’s so frustrating is that this problem is essentially the result of our giving up our competitive advantage so long ago. Not just on solar, but all things manufactured.