Amid a surge in utility shutoffs, and in the face of a groundbreaking study finding racial disparities in those outcomes, Minnesota’s largest utility is taking a closer look at the issue.

In a November agreement with consumer groups and the state’s Public Utilities Commission, Xcel Energy has outlined a series of steps to provide more information to customers and make it easier for them to restore service.

Xcel also agreed to hire an outside consultant to conduct a one-year study of disparity issues related to disconnections and outages and, separately, do its own analysis of outages. The move came in response to a University of Minnesota study released earlier this year that found that people of color were more likely than White households to have their service disconnected for falling behind on bills, even when controlling for income and home ownership status. 

The agreement falls short of a demand from the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office for Xcel to institute a temporary moratorium on shutoffs until racial disparities are addressed, based on a recommendation from Fresh Energy and a coalition formed by Cooperative Energy Futures, Environmental Law & Policy Center, Sierra Club, and Vote Solar. 

Erica McConnell, staff attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center, represented the clean energy organizations advocating for grid equity. She supported the agreement but believes it will do little to help reduce disparities in shutoffs. 

“These are very important improvements that don’t really address — and the commission didn’t discuss — the disparate impacts and the racial disparity (of disconnections) and how to address that specifically,” she said.

A temporary moratorium on disconnections would have allowed for time to study disparities and find ways to address them.  

“The commission didn’t talk about that,” McConnell said. “They didn’t address it at all, so that was disappointing. I understand it’s uncomfortable and it’s a tough issue, but it’s disappointing they shied away taking it head on.”

Shutoffs soaring

Beyond the challenge of disparities, Xcel’s number of service disconnections has skyrocketed. More than 45,000 Xcel customers saw their power shut off this year, a number that has grown significantly over the last two decades. 

Xcel agreed to many proposals from the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota, the Energy CENTS Coalition, clean energy organizations and the Public Utilities Commission to create more consumer protection against shutoffs.

Xcel Energy’s involuntary disconnection notices began rising significantly in 2023 before skyrocketing in 2024, when shutoffs doubled the prior year’s total for May through July. Despite Minnesota’s cold weather protection rules that limit disconnections during the winter through April 30, shutoffs even grew during the winter months.

Clean energy and consumer organizations point to Xcel’s ability to remotely disconnect customers who have smart meters as a major reason for the shutoffs, along with inflation, escalating rate increases and challenging repayment requirements. Xcel had demanded customers pay 50% of what they owe to reconnect, which may have violated Minnesota law, according to the Citizens Utility Board. 

Xcel’s pact with the Citizens Utility Board and Energy CENTS “is going to make payment agreements more affordable and hopefully help households that are behind on their bills avoid getting shut off and get caught back up,” said Annie Levenson-Falk, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota.

The utility board and Energy CENTS Coalition forged the agreement with Xcel under the purview of the Public Utilities Commission, which will issue a final order later. The agreement requires the following:

• Customers will pay 10% of what they owe to have the power turned back on, instead of 50%.
• The amount due will have to be at least $180 before Xcel can send a disconnect notice.
• Xcel cannot shut off power until a customer reaches a $300 past due balance. Xcel’s data from this year showed disconnected customers were $441 in arrears on average in October and much higher in other months.
• The utility must wait at least 10 days after a shutoff notice has been sent to disconnect, up from five days.
• Xcel must post clear disconnection and payment policies on its website, along with information about customers’ right to develop an affordable repayment plan. Any changes Xcel makes to shutoff policies and repayments have to be reported to the commission, and it must collect data on repayments and customer agreements.
• A variance allowing remote disconnections without field visits from Xcel remains, but the utility must contact customers via voicemail and use at least one other form of electronic communication.

Xcel spokesperson Kevin Coss said the utility believes “this agreement is a great step toward reducing disconnections for some of our customers who continue to struggle economically.”

Options for customers

George Shardlow, Energy CENTS executive director, said he thought a clearer explanation of the disconnection process on Xcel’s website brings a transparency that had been lacking.

“I don’t think the average person even knows that they have a right to negotiate when they’re struggling to pay their bills,” he said. “It’s all sort of opaque. We’re excited to see better documentation of people’s rights on Xcel’s website.”

Minnesota law says utility customers are “entitled” to a payment plan they can afford, Shardlow said. Customers who cannot afford the 10% down payment can still negotiate for a settlement that fits their budget, he added.

Shutoffs have been growing. This year Xcel sent disconnection notices to 51,000 customers in January and 71,000 in July. But not all notices result in shutoffs. The highest month for disconnections, May, saw more than 10,000 shutoffs. By August, slightly more than 8,400 customers had been disconnected.

Coss said Xcel works with customers to avoid disconnection by starting a nine-week process of contacting them through multiple channels to “point them to available options for energy assistance — both through the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and our own affordability programs — and offer flexible payment plans tailored to their circumstances.”

Minnesota also has cold weather protections that greatly reduce utilities’ ability to disconnect customers in winter months. But people who fail to pay their bills in winter see their balances grow, leading to higher disconnections in summer when they fail to catch up.

Xcel agreed to monitor progress and collect more data on racial disparities involving customers involuntarily shut off. The utility has already hired a third party evaluator, as the agreement requires, to study its shutoff policies and hold stakeholder engagement meetings during the year-long process.

Coss said disparities result in inequities throughout society and Xcel has been doing its part to address them. The utility has worked with the study’s authors and advocacy groups to identify actions to reduce disparities, he said.   

Earlier this year, the commission also approved a proposal by Xcel for a pilot program that will provide bill credits to select census tracts with high levels of disconnections. Coss said Xcel will provide $500 bill credits to customers in low-income census areas who have a greater than $2,000 past-due balance, using money available from a quality of service program.

Minnesota Public Utilities Commissioner Joe Sullivan said he believed the agreement negotiated among the nonprofits and utility would reduce the financial strain on households facing disconnections and assist Xcel in recovering debt.

“I thought that in that docket people came together and were constructive,” he said. “I feel like I’m hopeful that the order will make some progress.”

PUC Chair Katie Sieben said the commission is “always looking at affordability, and especially as it pertains to low-income customers, I think we have a great track record on working with stakeholders and with utilities to provide robust low-income assistance to customers.”

She mentioned the commission’s role in approving an Xcel pilot to decrease payments for low-income, low-usage customers and a September decision that used a penalty for the utility’s service quality underperformance to provide bill credits to around 1,000 customers with the oldest outstanding balances in low-income census tracts.

‘Still more work to do’

The agreement does not solve the problem of low-income customers struggling to pay utility bills. Shardlow said Energy CENTS and the Citizens Utility Board lobbied the state legislature to allow households to apply for energy assistance funding the entire year instead of the current policy of having a deadline of May 31. Only 20% of eligible Minnesota households participate in the program, he said.

Levenson-Falk wants Xcel to consider eliminating the 1.5% late fee it charges customers on their balance, or consider donating the money to affordability programs.

The Citizens Utility Board also wants Xcel to develop a plan to reconnect customers quickly on days of high heat or poor air quality. Coss said Xcel will evaluate reconnecting customers disconnected during days of air quality alerts.

Levenson-Falk said the agreement at least makes progress. “I think we resolved everything that we had discussed with Xcel but that’s not to say that we think this is going to solve the problem, because, of course, there are still going to be continuing shutoffs, and those are still very concerning,” she said. “There’s still more work to do.”

This story was updated to include a statement from Minnesota Public Utilities Commission Chair Katie Sieben.

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As utility shutoffs soar in Minnesota, Xcel Energy agrees to consumer protections and racial disparities study is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Student transportation is entering a new era, when access to real-time data, enhanced visibility for stakeholders, and higher safety standards will become essential pillars of operations.

School districts need to balance these new priorities with unprecedented pressure to meet equity goals and maintain tighter budgets. All these factors are challenging school leaders to reimagine how they transport students in the coming years.

Here are five key predictions shaping the future of student transportation in 2025:

1. Parents and Districts Will Demand More Visibility

The rise of smartphones requires instant access to information in school and beyond. Parents, teachers, and administrators all want real-time tracking updates and videos to ensure accountability and safety on school transportation. This year, the National Conference of State Legislatures reported that at least 50 percent of states have enacted school bus stop-arm camera laws, which ensure cameras are present to document incidents, monitor behavior, and uphold safety standards for everyone.

This demand for visibility extends beyond school buses to alternative transportation. New technology, including in-car cameras, ensures that school districts receive recorded and stored footage that verifies safe rides, monitors drivers, and clarifies any issues. Plus, school districts can close service gaps, dispatch providers, and keep families updated. In today’s environment, an extra level of visibility for all stakeholders is expected and essential.

2. Data and Machine Learning Will Become a Cornerstone of Future Operations

In 2025, route planning, driver assignments, and real-time adjustments will all rely on advanced analytics. Districts that harness data and machine learning through smart tools will see improvements in operational efficiency, increasing attendance rates.

The larger efforts to professionalize school district administrative offices are leading to data-driven decision-making. Many school districts are even hiring transportation directors with backgrounds in logistics and engineering. As school transportation evolves, districts will rely on experts who can understand and interpret complex analytics to streamline operations and improve outcomes.

3. Districts Will Advance Safety Standards

Safety remains a top priority for school districts, and new state legislation continues to raise the bar. California’s SB88, for example, goes into effect in 2025 and strengthens requirements for student transportation providers. At the local level, many districts are also increasing training protocols for drivers and requiring the use of safe technology to protect students and mitigate liability risks.

Next year, school districts will seek out partners that proactively adopt new safety technology and comply with district, state, and federal regulations. When alternative school transportation providers uphold the highest safety standards, they put students first while building necessary trust with administrators and parents.

4. Rising Demand for Equity-Focused Transportation Solutions

In 2025, the number of students experiencing homelessness and eligible for transportation support under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act will continue to rise. A 2023 report on Student Homelessness in America by the National Center for Homeless Education identified more than 1.2 million students experiencing homelessness in the U.S. in the 2021-2022 school year — a 10 percent increase from the previous year.

Without reliable transportation, students experiencing homelessness are at higher risk of chronic absenteeism. In fact, the same study found that more than half of homeless students in the 2021-2022 school year were chronically absent, and the absenteeism rate for students experiencing homelessness is 22 percent higher than the rest of the student population. School district leaders will need to find more ways to drive students experiencing homelessness to school, turning to alternative transportation providers to scale up support.

5. Budget Constraints Will Drive the Need for Operational Efficiency

Superintendents are under enormous pressure to meet new challenges with smaller budgets, given the expiration of pandemic relief funding, including the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program. These stark changes mean that leaders must prioritize cost-efficiency while maintaining access for students who have special needs, are eligible for McKinney-Vento support, or live out of district or in remote areas without making large investments in new vehicles or new hires.

Moving forward, leaders will leverage tech-forward alternative transportation providers to understand and meet their transportation needs with a click. For example, if a district has a rising percentage of students eligible for McKinney-Vento support, they could choose to used small-capacity vehicles that can make last-minute adjustments based on the students’ locations. Flexing your capacity meets new demands while optimizing transportation costs for the short and long term.

Every school year, new challenges and higher expectations require that school district leaders innovate, evolving their approach for better outcomes. 2025 is no different. By integrating smart technology into their operations, they can drive up safety standards, increase capacity in real-time, and prioritize cost-effectiveness while meeting equity goals. Leaders will ensure they’re setting up their schools and students for success in the classroom, one ride at a time.

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Mitch Bowling is the CEO of alternative transportation company EverDriven, which transported about 30,000 unique students last school year in 33 states.

The post Driving Change: 5 Predictions Shaping the Future of Student Transportation in 2025 appeared first on School Transportation News.

A year-old state law is helping to bring new voices before the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, and advocates and officials hope its impact will grow as more organizations learn about its existence.

Since 2007, small nonprofits have been able to seek financial compensation to help pay for expert testimony they provide in utility rate cases. State lawmakers last year expanded the concept to cover a broader range of cases, including utility pilot programs, infrastructure projects, and performance measures.

“It’s really about getting voices to the table to present us with new arguments and new issues for us to consider,” said Commissioner Joe Sullivan.

Since the law took effect in May 2023, the commission has authorized $124,318 in payments to four organizations, including two groups — Community Power and Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light — that had never before requested or received compensation for expert testimony. The other recipients were the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota and Energy CENTS Coalition, which advocates for low-income ratepayers.

Under the previous rules, some years, including 2019, 2021, and 2022, saw no payouts at all. In 2023, regulators approved $96,000 for testimony under the old program before state lawmakers expanded its scope.

“We’re glad to see broadening participation due to the change in this intervenor compensation law,” said state Sen. Nick Frentz, a Democrat from North Mankato who supported the legislation. “Our hope is that the more voices that contribute, the better the quality of the eventual PUC decisions.”   

Where the money goes

Anyone can comment on utility commission matters, but having a significant impact requires investing in staff time and experts — precious commodities unavailable to many smaller nonprofits.

The compensation process involves nonprofits submitting documentation and a sum for testimony related to a specific case. Rules require the nonprofits to have a payroll of no more than $600,000 for participation in commission proceedings and 30 full-time or fewer employees for the previous three years. The commission judges the merits of reimbursement based on six criteria that focus on whether the organization’s testimony materially impacted its decision.

Once nonprofits receive approval for compensation from the commission, the utility involved in that case pays them. The Legislature set a maximum limit on how much any utility will pay annually to intervenors, ranging from $1.25 million for Xcel Energy to $100,000 for Otter Tail Power and other smaller utilities.

Although the new law broadened the types of cases in which nonprofits could seek compensation, three of the six 2024 awards went to organizations testifying in the Xcel Energy rate case. However, the Citizens Utility Board received the largest amount for its recommendations in an integrated gas resource planning docket, an issue that would not have been eligible for compensation in the past.

Nonprofits typically use the money to offset the high costs of expert testimony or staff time related to cases where utilities usually spend millions to influence the commission’s decisions. Other intervenors often include larger nonprofits, industrial organizations, chambers of commerce, labor unions, national associations and, on occasion, cities and counties.

Frentz, who chairs the Senate’s Energy, Utilities, Environment and Climate Committee, said he thinks more organizations are out there that could provide testimony at the commission. But they must have the resources available before intervening, and believe their input will influence the Public Utilities Commission, he said.

Commissioner Sullivan said regulators have “seen a little bit more utilization” of the compensation law. The 2023 law specifically encouraged tribal participation, though no tribes have done so yet. Barriers may include a lack of familiarity with the commission or the need for a local budget to hire experts or allocate staff time to complex cases, Sullivan said.

‘A difficult needle to thread’

Solar entrepreneur and tribal clean energy advocate Robert Blake said he was not surprised to hear tribal nations had not participated in the expanded intervenor law. He said many are administratively stretched thin and focused on taking advantage of federal and state opportunities to fund clean energy projects on reservations.

Also, many of the issues that come before the commission involve large utilities that do not serve reservations, which often also get electricity from locally owned cooperatives, Blake said.

Community Power and Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light each received $17,984 after each requested nearly $26,000. Community Power employee Alice Madden said the money paid for expert witnesses who “cost hundreds of dollars per hour” but did not cover the staff time of either organization, which involved door-knocking and collecting more than 1,000 ratepayers’ comments.

“The intervenor compensation works for covering narrow costs but does not help people intervene and front the costs of that,” Madden said. “It accomplished allowing us to have extra witnesses, but it does not cover the full cost of intervening, nor of organizing to get community voices to the table.”

Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light Executive Director Julia Nerbonne was disappointed that the commission only partially reimbursed what it had requested, but she decided against appealing the decision. The organization has been involved in several dockets outside of rate cases and may someday ask for compensation for expert witnesses.

“I feel like the PUC has a difficult needle to thread, and I appreciate that they did that (provided compensation),” Nerbonne said. “I want to say thumbs up for expanding it.”

In its order, the commission granted compensation to the two organizations because they “made a unique contribution to the record, promoting public policies and representing interests of people of color and low-wealth households that would not otherwise have been adequately represented. The evidence and arguments they presented would not otherwise have been part of the record and were an important factor in producing a fair decision.”

Citizens Utility Board Executive Director Annie Levenson-Falk said the compensation received in 2024 was the amount it would have been for similar testimony in the past. The commission granted it compensation in two dockets, the largest of which was $41,385, for promoting a requirement that natural gas providers file periodic integrated resource plans that the commission has required from electric companies. The money paid for some of the expense of outside experts to research and testify on behalf of the organization.

In an order approving payment in the natural gas case, the commission said it had adopted the Citizens Utility Board’s recommendation that the state’s three natural gas utilities develop integrated resource plans. The commission determined how much each utility would pay the board, with Xcel providing nearly $30,000.

The prospect of compensation does not impact the Citizens Utility Board’s decisions on whether to intervene in commission matters. “It is something we keep in mind at the end if the PUC (Public Utilities Commission) has adopted a position we advocated,” Levenson-Falk said.

Levenson-Falk said she was unsurprised that organizations new to regulatory proceedings have yet to often participate in hearings or ask for reimbursements. “I think it is more difficult for a group that does not have utility regulatory professionals,” she said. “We have a team of folks who do this kind of work, but if it’s your first time coming to the PUC, it’s a challenging statute to take advantage of. It’s not easy.”

Energy CENTS Coalition received $36,785, the second largest disbursement under the new law, for testimony in the Xcel rate case that led the commission to adopt a “low-income, low-usage” discount. The organization provided “an important factor in producing a fair decision and would not otherwise have been part of the record,” the commission said in its order.

Executive Director George Shardlow wants to expand the organization’s involvement beyond rate cases to other issues. “It’s very helpful for a small consumer advocacy organization to have this added support to play in dockets over and above rate cases where consumer advocates need to show up,” he said.

The commission is required to issue a report on the intervenor law to the Legislature by July 2025.

Hiring experts to testify in utility cases is expensive, but a Minnesota law is helping more groups participate is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A prospective buyer’s recent commitment to reinvest in a Gary, Indiana, steel plant sought to address union and government leaders’ worries about the sale’s potential impact on jobs and U.S. steelmaking capacity.

The plan to extend the life of the country’s largest and most carbon-emitting coal-fired blast furnace, however, has also heightened concerns from Northwest Indiana residents most affected by the facility’s air pollution.

“This is not acceptable,” said Susan Thomas, director of legislation and policy for Just Transition Northwest Indiana. “We now have technology for doing this much more sustainably.”

A study released Monday quantifies the public health threat highlighted by local clean air advocates, linking the Indiana plant to dozens of annual emergency room visits and premature deaths, as well as thousands of asthma attacks. 

Japan-based Nippon Steel is seeking approval from U.S. regulators for a $15 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel, the storied domestic steelmaker whose facilities include the Gary Works plant in Northwest Indiana, along with others in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, key battleground states where the proposed sale has been a subject of presidential campaigning. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump oppose the sale, as does President Joe Biden.

Much of the public discussion around the proposed sale has centered on its economic and national security implications, but those living near the plant have different concerns and demands. They say they’ve suffered for too long from steel industry pollution, and they only want Nippon as a neighbor if the company installs a new type of furnace that burns with lower or even zero emissions. 

“I would love to see Gary Works transform to green sustainable steel, bringing more jobs, cleaning up the area, that would be an amazing win-win,” said Libré Booker, a librarian who grew up near the mill. “The people have lived under these conditions for far too long. It’s definitely time for a change.”

Gary Works is the largest integrated steel mill in North America, employing about 2,200 people. Northwest Indiana is also home to two other steel mills — Burns Harbor and Indiana Harbor — and two coke plants that turn coal into the high-density raw material for steel. 

The populations in a three-mile radius of the Gary Works and Indiana Harbor steel mills are 96%-97% people of color, and almost two-thirds low-income people. The new study by Industrious Labs, a nonprofit focused on emissions reduction, used the EPA’s COBRA model to find emissions from the Gary Works plant likely are linked to 57-114 premature deaths, 48 emergency room visits and almost 32,000 asthma attacks each year.

The report cited the mills’ and coke plants’ emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and lead, all pollutants with direct impacts on public health. Gary Works is the number one emitter of PM2.5 particulate matter in the state, according to the company’s self-reported data analyzed by Industrious Labs. 

Industrious Labs steel director Hilary Lewis said the results bolster the demands of clean steel advocates, who want to see coal-fired blast furnaces replaced by direct-reduction iron, or DRI, furnaces powered by hydrogen made with renewable energy, known as green hydrogen. 

Booker was among 15 locals who participated in a recent “Sustainable Steel Community Cohort” run by Industrious Labs, attending five workshops learning about the science and policy of cleaner steel. 

Green hydrogen, green steel 

Green hydrogen is still not produced in large quantities anywhere in the U.S., and all the hydrogen currently produced in the country would not even be enough to power one steel mill, noted Seth Snyder, a partner in the Clean Energy Venture Group, at a recent conference in Chicago focused on clean hydrogen. 

But DRI furnaces can be powered by natural gas, which results in much lower emissions than coal. Cleveland Cliffs — which owns the Indiana Harbor and Burns Harbor mills — is transforming its Middletown, Ohio steel mill to gas-burning DRI with the help of a $500 million incentive under the Inflation Reduction Act. The company says the conversion will make it the steel mill with the lowest emissions in the world. 

With some modifications, DRI furnaces can burn a blend of natural gas and hydrogen or almost entirely hydrogen, experts say, meaning investment in a gas-burning DRI furnace could be a step on the way to “clean steel.” Lewis and other advocates, however, say gas-burning furnaces are not their goal, and they want the industry to transition off fossil fuels entirely. 

Hydrogen can be blended into fuel for traditional blast furnaces too, but the maximum emissions reductions that can be achieved that way are 21%, according to a paper on hydrogen-powered steel production in Europe by the Norwegian non-profit science organization Bellona. 

Nippon has announced it would invest $300 million in restoring the aging blast furnace at Gary Works, keeping it running for another 20 years. Installing a DRI furnace, meanwhile, typically costs over $1 billion.

“There is a gap,” said Lewis. “But these companies have the funding available. They have the money to make these decisions, they’re just choosing not to.” 

Incentives for change 

The IRA incentives tapped by Cleveland Cliffs are no longer available, but this summer California U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna introduced the Modern Steel Act, which would provide $10 billion in low-cost loans and grants, plus tax breaks and other incentives for new and revamped low-emissions steel mills, including hydrogen-fueled DRI.

Separately, lucrative tax credits soon to be available for “clean hydrogen” under the IRA could also make hydrogen-powered steel more financially viable. The specific rules for the tax credit — known as 45V — are still being finalized, amid controversy over what should qualify a project’s hydrogen as “clean.” 

“There are a number of different incentives in the IRA that can help steel companies build out their own green hydrogen infrastructure,” Lewis said. “Everything should be on the table. Steel companies would be such huge off-takers for green hydrogen, they can build their own economy here.”

At the BP Whiting oil refinery, 10 miles from Gary Works, there are plans underway for production of blue hydrogen, or hydrogen made with natural gas followed by capture and sequestration of the emissions. The plan is a marquee part of the Midwest (MachH2) hydrogen hub, one of seven planned hubs nationwide slated to receive $7 billion total in federal funding. Such blue hydrogen could be used to power a steel mill, with theoretically no resulting greenhouse gas or public health-harming emissions.

However, local environmental and public accountability leaders are strongly opposed to blue hydrogen production in the region, since carbon sequestration has not yet been done successfully on a large scale in the U.S., and it would entail pipelines carrying carbon dioxide from the refinery to a sequestration site. 

“The carbon capture component makes us very nervous, it seems to me they’re rushing into this without really taking the time to study it more seriously,” said Northwest Indiana resident Connie Wachala, another graduate of the sustainable steel program. “That might be because of all the money DOE is making available to industry. I wish our elected and industry officials would start thinking more creatively about how to make [green hydrogen] happen, how to make things better for the people in the neighborhoods and around the steel mills as well as for the shareholders.”

A different future 

All four of Wachala’s grandparents came from Poland to work in the steel mills. 

“Growing up in the 1950s, I remember my mom hanging the laundry up in the yard on a clothes line. If the wind was blowing a certain way, you’d get black particles on the clothes,” remembered Wachala, who worked as a creative writing teacher before retiring. “My dad’s car was always covered with that soot.”

Booker’s mother worked as a crane operator at the now-closed Bethlehem Steel mill in Burns Harbor, Indiana — among the first wave of women of color to be hired.

“I was proud she worked in the mill and took care of us, but I did not want [that job] whatsoever, seeing her come home every night after the swing shift, with the big old boots and jacket,” said Booker. “I wanted to go to college. It was a source of contention with my mom and I for some years.” 

That was in the days when locals largely believed, “if you want a good partner, you’ve got to get one that works in the mill,” she continued. “It was like a prestigious job and position. People looked up to people who worked in the mill.” 

Now, Booker laments, “Gary is like a joke,” scorned for its economic decline since the steel industry automated and shrunk — hemorrhaging jobs, and for the pollution that is still emitted. If the merger with Nippon does not go through, it’s widely believed U.S. Steel would eventually close the mill, as it closed its South Works plant in Southeast Chicago decades ago. At their height, the South Works and Gary Works plants together employed about 40,000 people in the Chicago area. 

Thomas wrote a frustrated rebuttal to the Chicago Tribune editorial board opining that the Nippon merger was crucial to Gary’s future. She and other local leaders say they don’t want the mill to close, but they can demand better than the extension of heavily polluting industry. 

“It’s just perpetuation of this as a sacrifice zone,” said Thomas. “‘This is what you’ve always been, this is how we’re going to keep you.’ But that’s not going to fly anymore.”

Steelmaker’s bid to buy U.S. Steel would extend life of Indiana plant — along with its emissions is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Increased activity in the solar energy space has generated the need for more trained and skilled workers. At the same time, disinvested populations are often shut out of these jobs. 

For people who have spent time in prison, it’s even harder to catch a break.

The Renewing Sovereignty Project — or RSP, based in Chicago — seeks to address both circumstances, not just with job training, but also financial and social support designed to lend substance to the phrase “returning citizen.” 

RSP draws seed funding from community solar developer Cultivate Power, which has pledged six years of financial support. Trainees are recruited through the Chicago Coalition for Intercommunalism, a collection of more than 70 grassroots organizations across the city working to achieve social change. 

Instruction is provided by training partner 548 Foundation, while job placement is achieved through multiple hiring partners, including Knobelsdorff Energy. 

RSP also provides referrals for possible sealing or expungement of past convictions, which can ease the transition process for eligible participants, according to Jacqueline Williams, Regional and Prison Program Director for Zealous, a social support organization that functions as a primary administrator for RSP.

Opportunities created by the Illinois Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, or CEJA, earned high praise from Williams, who is determined to ensure those investments yield results.

“The worst thing that we can think of is that all of this money gets poured into these training programs … and then none of [the participants] actually get jobs in the solar field,” Williams said.

Reducing recidivism

While recidivism rates are dropping around the country thanks in large part to the 2008 Second Chance Act, job training and reentry programs for justice impacted people have had mixed success.

According to the findings from a 2023 report from the National Institute of Justice, or NIJ, intensive, individual-focused programs are more effective in reducing recidivism.

For instance, Mt. Tamalpais College, housed within San Quentin Prison, allows enrolled inmates to earn an associate’s degree transferable to four-year institutions. Each student receives an individual education plan — including intensive tutoring. Only 5% of its graduates ever return to prison. 

Likewise, on average 96% of those who complete the JUMPSTART Prison Ministry program, currently active in South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio will never return to prison. This peer-led program works with individuals while they are incarcerated as well as after their release.

Specifically, the NIJ report emphasizes that a holistic approach to reentry employment training programs — like RSP — is essential to maximize the chances of a justice-impacted individual actually getting hired.

Williams said that often includes addressing fundamental needs like housing, food, child care and transportation.

“Anything that you can think of that would prevent someone from being successful in a really intensive 13-week program, we’re going to assess that barrier and we’re going to provide it. And those needs do change throughout the course of 13 weeks. And so we’ll be responsive pretty much immediately to those changing needs,” Williams said.

RSP’s results track with the findings of the NIJ report, and justify its intensive wraparound services. According to the RSP website. the first cohort of 12, which completed the program in 2023, achieved a 100% placement rate in solar and related industries. The current cohort of 18 graduates is on a pace to achieve similar levels of success, Williams said. 

“There are a lot of workforce training programs. We didn’t need to add another training program. What we needed to add was the intensive wraparound services and the barrier mitigation and the alumni support that really allows people to go from truly one completely different aspect of their life to through this training and into a long-term career in green energy,” Williams said.

Doing well by doing good 

Cultivate Power has committed $1.75 million over six years to support RSP, while also furthering their own mission of developing a more inclusive solar workforce in Illinois. Over the past two years, Cultivate Power has funded more than $500,000 in support of the current cohort of 18 graduates and the previous cohort of 12 graduates. 

Noah Hyte, managing director and co-founder of Cultivate Power, said the partnership with RSP is “one of the bigger commitments we’ve made” toward community initiatives.

“We’re in a situation broadly as an industry in Illinois where there’s simply not enough labor and construction companies to meet the demand associated with CEJA’s goals,” he said. “The state’s doing an excellent job of providing tens of millions of dollars of funding to workforce development programs to create workforce development hubs. And so we didn’t see a problem writ large with the scaling of workforce development. [Instead] we saw an opportunity for this specific group of people, and this specific profile that needed additional support, that needed a more thoughtful and wraparound approach to ensure that they would be as successful as possible in this endeavor.”

Along with funding, Hyte and fellow managing director and co-founder Brian Matthay lend their business know-how in advising the administration of RSP, while leaving the work of providing training and support services to 548 Foundation and Zealous, Hyte said. 

Inclusive vetting 

Programs like JUMPSTART, Mt. Tamalpais College — and RSP — operate on the principle that justice-impacted individuals are not throw-away beings. This recognition extends to the intensive selection and preparation process for prospective cohort members that takes place before they are assigned to a training program.

The vetting process performed by organizations within the Chicago Coalition for Intercommunalism focuses on developing candidates so that they are prepared to draw the most benefit from the training. 

“We get each one of our individuals as a referral,” Williams said. “They have to be a part of a community organization. And the reason for that is it really provides another layer of support and another layer of safety net for individuals, most of whom are system impacted. The vast majority of our individuals are involved with the criminal justice system in some way or have been to foster care.

“They go through the whole year of the program where they work on conflict resolution and personal readiness and violence prevention and all those things before they enter the workforce space. Each organization has that same model. So by the time they get to us, they are more ready,” Williams said.

RSP also imposes a strict attendance requirement — which reflects expectations that trainees will face on the job. However, commitment to the wraparound approach often makes the difference between a candidate dropping out — or finishing the program and obtaining a good job. 

“If somebody hasn’t shown up three days in a row, we’re not just going to kick them out of the program. We’re going to send somebody to your house, probably somebody from your coalition partner and see if you’re okay. We’re trying to find out the whys and not be punitive and recreate the same systems that we are trying to overturn. We really bring people that support right to their door.

“You can have the best intentions in the world, but if the lights are out at home and the refrigerator is not running and you’re not able to feed the kids, you’re not going to be able to complete that program,” Williams said.

Getting job-ready

Candidates referred to 548 Foundation for workforce training must meet two specific requirements: the ability to lift 40 pounds and read at an eighth-grade level. Beyond that, actual workforce training involves more than specific job-related task instruction, said 548 Foundation founder and CEO AJ Patton.

“They’re intentional about picking folks from the toughest situations, not just, oh, kid just graduated, doesn’t know what he wants to do in his life. No, they’re talking, ‘You just came home from prison. You’re in a tough situation. Here’s your chance. We’re going to put our arms around you.’ 

“We spend the first two weeks of class talking about professional development and human development, conflict resolution, how to be a professional, how you present yourself and how to communicate on a job site. Those things matter way more before I ever teach you how to install a solar system,” Patton said.

This preliminary instruction reflects a recognition of the lived experience of training cohort members. 

“We know in the streets how you address those things. There’s a very clear protocol. You call me out my name, this is what you get. But on the job site it’s different. We’re professionals now. There’s a kind of recalibration of how we engage one another and how we engage our contemporaries and colleagues,” Patton said. 

That being said, frequently, it’s the “hard timers” who perform the best during training and in the job market, Patton said. 

“People want to work. If you’re willing to show up on time and commit to the effort and the cost, then there’s a marketplace for you… That particular subset of the community has been the group that’s probably been the most focused in the classroom. They’ve been the most attentive. They know what this opportunity means. They’ve been working hard. And they are almost overwhelmed at graduation when there’s a bidding war for their efforts… I’ve had guys that spent 17 years in prison come to my program, and at the end of the program, they had three job offers,” Patton said.

Ongoing wraparound support

The individualized, specialized guidance and support each participant receives continues for a full year beyond formal graduation. Drawn from what the program calls an alumni fund, such assistance can be anything from a down payment for a reliable car to get back and forth to work, referrals and resources for child care or providing funds for required tools and clothing, Williams said. 

“Anything can really knock you for a loop. I mean, somebody hit a coyote the other day and blew out their radiator, and we just immediately got the radiator fixed so they wouldn’t miss a day of work. It’s those sorts of [situations] that can just totally derail a person that we try to just mitigate by providing access to that fund as well as mentorship,” Williams said. 

Sometimes support takes the form of providing a sounding board, Williams said. 

“There’s a lot of just phone calls around, like,’ This is really hard, it’s really hard to be away from my kids and I don’t know if I want to do this.’ And then we think through different options. ‘Would you rather do rooftop solar closer [to home]? Is this just a bad day? Or, is this something that you really want to consider changing?’ So that’s sort of like, guidance and mentorship. We’re pretty much on call all the time. Just making sure that we are there and available for people,” Williams said.

For Williams, Hyte, Patton and their various community and industry partners, RSP is not so much social service as an investment in society, and beyond that, working toward achieving a true just transition away from a carbon-fuel powered economy.

“So really our mission is to try to make these careers viable and sustainable for people through all that additional support …The success is not graduating the program. That’s a milestone. That’s a really great important milestone. 

“But it doesn’t mean anything if people aren’t actually changing the trajectory of their lives and their family’s lives. And if we aren’t actually changing the face of what solar looks like in Illinois and across the country. It’s so important for us to be clear about what success is. And success is a long-term career in green energy,” Williams said.

Illinois program’s ‘wraparound’ approach helps formerly incarcerated people land solar industry jobs is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Ensuring that traditionally disinvested Black and Brown communities are not left behind is essential for a just transition away from carbon-based energy sources. 

At the same time, many of these communities have vast stretches of vacant or underutilized properties, which could present opportunities for clean energy development. 

For instance, in Detroit, city officials are working with DTE Energy to build 33 MW of solar arrays on vacant property around the city. Detroit’s mayor has touted the project as a way to deal with blight while producing clean energy, but neighbors are divided.

Meanwhile, in the West Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, a community-based geothermal project is intentionally bypassing vacant lots, focusing instead on placing the necessary loop fields in alleyways.

“Not every block in the neighborhood even has a vacant lot that could be leveraged,” said Andrew Barbeau, president of The Accelerate Group in Chicago, which is providing technical assistance for the geothermal pilot, in an email. “Further, communities often have other ambitions for that land, whether it is new housing development, parks, greenways, or other beneficial uses.” 

For Blacks in Green, the Chicago-based organization leading the geothermal project, recognition of the role of the project within a broader scope is central to an overall goal of generating economic development and a healthy environment within the community, said Nuri Madina, Sustainable Square Mile director, who serves as point person for the pilot.

“We know that the communities have been underserved. And underserved by definition means that we have not gotten our fair share of taxpayer investment in the communities. We know what our streets look like. And one of the major assets in the community, which is not really viewed as an asset, is our vacant lots,” Madina said.

The geothermal pilot 

Conventional geothermal systems require substantial plots of land to lay the subterranean loop fields that circulate both hot and cold water — land that is often scarce in densely populated urban areas. 

But while West Woodlawn has a number of vacant lots, they are not being utilized for the project. Instead, alleys provide a potential solution for constructing geothermal loop fields, along with allowing for connection points for houses and multifamily buildings within the pilot footprint, Barbeau said.

“The good news is that based on the system design, we have more than enough capacity in the alleys to serve the load of the blocks we have modeled. The modeling also so far is showing us that the shared network model would require 20-30%  less wells than if each home built their own system,” Barbeau said in an email.

Locating the bulk of the geothermal infrastructure in alleyways also sidesteps the underground congestion of existing gas, electric and water infrastructure on city streets, said Mark Nussbaum, owner and principal of Architectural Consulting Engineers in Oak Park, Illinois.

“There’s a lot of stuff happening out near the street. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible to coordinate it, but it’s just what’s nice about the alley concept is, it’s kind of unused for utilities typically,” Nussbaum said.

Blank slate versus bright future 

“White flight” and housing segregation have left many U.S. cities with sections of vacant or underinvested property, typically in communities populated by Black and Brown people. 

With roughly 60% of the land area of Chicago, Detroit nonetheless has a much larger proportion of vacant land — approximately 19 square miles. In some neighborhoods,  multiple blocks may only have a single structure remaining, if any at all.  

DTE Energy’s plan to build large-scale solar arrays on some of that land is supported by some residents and municipal officials as a means to reduce illegal dumping and other nuisance crimes while working toward meeting city climate goals — and reducing utility bills for residents. 

But there has also been pushback, largely focused on potential detrimental impact on property values in adjacent properties and limitations on future use of the sites themselves.

“Solar panels will disrupt and destroy entire neighborhoods. There will be no future affordable housing being built anywhere around a solar farm,” councilmember Angela Whitfield-Calloway said during a city council meeting in July, as reported by Planet Detroit. 

Whitfield-Calloway also questions why municipal buildings or sites outside the city limits had not been considered for the solar arrays.

In Chicago, a battery storage facility constructed as part of the Bronzeville Microgrid project administered by electric utility ComEd generated similar debate during an extended period of community input. ComEd officials said the location of the battery facility, in the middle of a stretch of vacant plots near the South Side Community Art Center, was strategic to the overall microgrid project. 

A 40-yard-long mural designed and created by local artists and mounted on the exposed long side of the battery storage facility not only serves to obscure the structure, but also to highlight prominent figures in Black history and culture. While reactions to the mural have been overwhelmingly positive, reception of the battery storage facility itself has been mixed. 

“There were thorough talks with the community and the art community in Bronzeville about what they wanted, what [ComEd] planned to do [with] that battery station, because they did not want it to be an eyesore … they did not want it to just be, you know, brick walls around infrastructure,” Jeremi Bryant, a resident of Bronzeville, told the Energy News Network in February 2021.

For Bruce Montgomery, founder of Bronzeville-based Entrepreneur Success Program and a member of the advisory council for the Community of the Future, the location of the battery storage facility precluded potentially more beneficial future development for the site.

“That lot in most communities probably would have ended up being invested in as more quality residential,” Montgomery told the Energy News Network in February 2021. “But now you’ve taken it up with this box car. … You’ve got big things sitting out in the middle of a vacant lot a couple of doors down from one of the most historic locations in Bronzeville.”

Creating ‘multiple benefits’

For Blacks in Green, what might appear to the casual observer as a vacant lot overtaken by weeds belies its ultimate potential — as an affordable, energy-efficient residential complex, small business owned by a community resident, a much needed basic amenity like a grocery stocking fresh produce — or a native plant garden to attract pollinators.

On June 17, 2023, Blacks in Green collaborated with the Delta Institute to hold a combined Juneteenth celebration and BioBlitz to identify potential sites for green infrastructure. Experts and community residents worked side-by-side to map and measure plant life, insect populations, drainage and other elements during a walking inventory of vacant lots in the area.

In the case of West Woodlawn, installation of geothermal loop fields in its alleys — versus locating them in vacant plots — presents an opportunity to promote climate resiliency through mitigation of persistent urban flooding, by utilizing permeable pavers to replace existing concrete or asphalt, said Madina.

“All of our programs are designed to create multiple benefits,” Madina said.

Projects like the West Woodlawn community geothermal project represent a drive to revive and reinvent Chicago’s Black Wall Street within what once constituted the redline-confined boundaries of the Black population drawn to the city during the Great Migration of the 20th Century.

“In most communities, the vacant lots are really indicative of a declining community. But what we have tried to do is take that negative and turn it into something positive. So if we can take those vacant lots with weeds and debris and turn them into beautiful gardens, that is a very significant improvement in the community,” Madina said.

“So [we] could improve the quality of life, improve the spirit of the people in the community… that vacant lot can provide more than just beauty. It can provide more than just comfort for the residents. It can also provide biodiversity, it can provide pollination, it can provide food for the residents.”

Correction: A 40-yard-long mural was mounted on the side of a ComEd battery storage facility to obscure the structure and highlight prominent figures in Black history and culture. An earlier version of this story misstated its size.

Vacant urban land poses complex questions for clean energy siting is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This story was originally published by the Arizona Mirror

When Hualapai Spiritual Leader Frank Mapatis visits Ha’Kamwe’, the tribe’s sacred spring, to conduct any type of ceremony, the area must be completely quiet so that he can hear the water and connect with the land.

Mapatis said that as part of his traditional ways of life, when he is in prayer at Ha’Kamwe’, he hears the water sing, and when it sings, he connects with the creator to conduct ceremonies.

He has provided purification, healing and coming-of-age ceremonies at Ha’Kamwe’ for decades and visits the spring at least twice a month. The spring is also utilized for tribal members’ funeral ceremonies.

Not being able to hear the water, conduct ceremonies or provide traditional teachings to the Hualapai youth who join him during his visits to the spring are among Mapatis’ top concerns for the proposed exploratory drilling lithium project in the Big Sandy River watershed near the tribe’s sacred spring.

“It would stop me from doing ceremony,” he said about the drilling project as he testified in federal court on Sept. 17. He believes drilling in that area will traumatize the earth and water, and he would not want to use that area for ceremonial purposes due to that trauma.

Mapatis said he could continue his ceremonial practices in other places, but they would not have the same impact as doing them at Ha’Kamwe’ because of the water’s healing properties.

“It wouldn’t be as effective in other areas,” he added.

Ha’Kamwe’ is featured in tribal songs and stories about the history of the Hualapai people and their connection to the land. According to the tribe, the historic flow and spring temperature are essential for its traditional uses.

Mapatis was one of several Haluapai tribal members who testified during the Sept. 17 preliminary injunction hearing at the U.S. Federal District Court in Phoenix, where the tribe is fighting to extend the pause on drilling for the Big Sandy Valley Lithium Exploration Project for the duration of the tribe’s lawsuit seeking to block the project entirely.

The project allows a mining company to drill and test more than 100 sites across BLM land surrounding one of the Hualapai Tribe’s cultural properties, among them Ha’Kamwe’, a medicinal spring sacred to the tribe.

Tuesday’s hearing came after a federal judge granted the Hualapai Tribe’s request for a temporary restraining order against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, temporarily freezing the exploratory drilling project. 

The restraining order was granted weeks after the Hualapai Tribe filed a lawsuit against BLM, following years of the tribe actively voicing its concerns about the mining effort.

Ha’Kamwe’ is located within the Hualapai Tribe’s property known as Cholla Canyon Ranch, and the boundaries of the Big Sandy Valley project nearly surround the entire property. Only one portion of the tribe’s land does not border the drilling project.

The spring is recognized as a traditional cultural property and is eligible to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the tribe’s lawsuit claims that the project’s approval violates the National Environmental Protection Act and the National Historic Preservation Act. 

The lawsuit asks for full compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which includes having the BLM take a “hard look” at the exploration activity’s environmental impacts and consider the implications of its actions on historic properties.

The lawsuit claims that BLM approved the mining project without appropriately considering a reasonable range of alternatives or taking a hard look at water resources under the NEPA and moved forward with the project without providing mitigation measures under the NHPA for Ha’Kamwe’ and other resources essential to the tribe, thus violating both acts.

Out of concern for Ha’Kamwe’, the tribe submitted multiple public comments, sent several letters of concern, and participated in tribal consultations with BLM throughout the Big Sandy Valley Lithium Exploration Project planning phase. 

Big Sandy, Inc., a subsidiary of Australian mining company Arizona Lithium, leads the project and has sought approval since 2019.  Arizona Lithium is not a direct party in the Hualapai Tribe’s lawsuit, but it filed a motion to intervene in the case. Humetewa granted the request in August, allowing the company to defend against the tribe’s efforts to stop the project.

BLM’s approval of the Big Sandy Valley Project allows the mining company to drill and test up to 131 exploration holes across 21 acres of BLM-managed public land to determine whether a full-scale lithium mining operation could be viable. 

‘How we connect to our ancestors’

Throughout the hearing, several Hualapai tribal members and supporters sat in the courtroom listening to the hearing while others sat outside the Sandra Day O’Connor courthouse holding signs backing the tribe.

Hualapai tribal member Ivan Bender, 60, from Peach Springs, showed up to the courthouse in support of his community, carrying a flag that said, “Protect Ka’kamwe’. No lithium mining.”

“That spring has a life of its own,” Bender said. “The water source we’re trying to protect is part of our sacred waters.” 

The preliminary injunction hearing lasted more than six hours, during which Judge Diane Humetewa heard witness testimony from all parties involved in the case as she weighed the tribe’s request to keep the drilling on hold. 

Testimony surrounded the way the project would directly or indirectly impact the Hualapai Tribe’s ability to carry out their cultural and traditional ways of life at Ha’Kamwe’, and whether the drilling that will take place as part of the project will harm the water that feeds into the hot spring.

Ka-voka Jackson, the director of the Hualapai Department of Cultural Resources, was the first witness, and part of her testimony focused on how the Hualapai Tribe utilizes the area for cultural and traditional purposes — and how drilling can directly affect those practices.

Jackson told the court that tribal members often visit Ha’Kamwe for traditional practices or to gather and harvest culturally significant plants from surrounding public lands.

“That is how we connect to our ancestors,” Jackson said.

The tribe’s lawsuit states that the lithium project will create noise, light, vibrations, and other disturbances that will degrade Ha’Kamwe’s character and harm tribal members’ use of the spring for religious and cultural ceremonies.

Jackson said the project’s impacts could cause irreversible damage, affecting the water supply to the sacred springs and destroying the land.

“(It can) create a lot of negative energy and create a hostile environment,” she said.

As part of its environmental assessment, BLM listed several short- and long-term effects, including the temporary disruption to cultural practices at or near Ha’Kamwe’ and an impact on native wildlife and vegetation of up to 21 acres.

But even with these effects included in the assessment, BLM concluded that Phase 3 of the Big Sandy Valley Lithium Exploration Project would not significantly negatively impact the quality of the area, so an environmental impact statement was not needed.

“Visual, noise, and vibration effects from drilling activities would be temporary,” BLM wrote in its final report. “Coordination with and providing notice to the Hualapai Tribe of drilling activities in the vicinity of the Ha’Kamwe’ may reduce impacts to cultural practices at or near the hot spring.”

To provide the court with perspective on the distance of the drilling locations near Ha’Kamwe’, Ivan Martirosov from Navajo Transitional Energy Company testified on behalf of the defendants. 

Martirosov is the project manager for the Big Sandy Valley Lithium Exploration Project with Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC), a mining and energy company owned by the Navajo Nation. 

NTEC entered into a mining agreement with Arizona Lithium in March. Under this agreement, the Navajo-owned company is responsible for permitting, exploration drilling, mine design, environmental assessments and development for the Big Sandy Lithium Project. NTEC has worked with Arizona Lithium since December 2022.

Martirosov is in charge of overseeing and executing the Big Sandy Lithium Project. He told the court that he walked all approved drilling sites on foot and described the site’s proximity to the Hualapai’s cultural property.

Of the 131 drill sites approved for the project, Martirosov identified 22 with a line of sight to Ha’Kamwe’, a majority located on the north side. 

Martirosov said that he was restricted from accessing Ha’Kamwe, noting that the drill sites that do not have a line of sight of the cultural property were due to distance and terrain.

BLM: Concerns are ‘overblown’

At the end of the day-long hearing, Humetewa ordered all parties to file briefs outlining their arguments for why the injunction should or shouldn’t be granted. She said she would issue a ruling in the near future. 

During the hearing, Humetewa said that she was tasked with determining what process BLM took in connection to NEPA and their Section 106 process.

The Section 106 process seeks to accommodate historic preservation concerns through consultation among an agency official and other parties interested in the undertaking’s effects on historic properties. The consultation aims to identify historic properties potentially affected by projects and seek ways to avoid, minimize, or mitigate any adverse effects.

The process is usually conducted in four steps: initiating it, identifying historical properties within potentially affected areas, assessing any potential adverse effects on any eligible historic property, and seeking to resolve any adverse effects.

Humetewa said in court that she wants to know where in the records she can find BLM’s engagement in those processes so she can fully understand the discussion about either approving or denying the project. That way, she said, she can understand what considerations went into the final environmental assessment and the NEPA assessment.

Earthjustice Senior Attorney Laura Berglan, who is part of the team representing the Hualapai Tribe, said she feels positive because their team presented all the points they wanted.

“I think it went well and we’ll see how it turns out,” she added.

BLM’s attorneys told Humetewa that the impacts this project will have on Ha’Kamwe have been “vastly overblown,” noting how their expert clearly testified that the water and temperature will not change due to the drilling in the project.

The tribe had its own expert testify. Winfield G. Wright, a certified hydrologist and president of Southwest Hydro-Logic, said he produced a report for the tribe about the water sources that feed into Ha’Kamwe’. Wright said his analysis found that the groundwater system that flows into the hot spring is very fragile, and any disturbances around the area can disrupt the water, the chemistry and the temperature.

Wright said a mixture of shallow and deep waterways feed into Ha’Kamwe’, and the BLM’s environmental assessment simplified identifying where the water comes from by saying a confined lower aquifer feeds it.

“It’s not a confined aquifer,” he said, noting that the lower aquifer in the Big Sandy Valley is not the only source of water for the spring. “The whole valley is connected because of the fractures.”

But Peter Burck, a hydrologist with the BLM, testified that the lower fractures of the lower aquifer are a more likely source of water for Ha’Kamwe’. 

Burck said that Wright’s claim the water comes from multiple sources is not conclusive. He said he did not see anything in Wright’s report that would lead him to conclude that the spring water source is a mixture of multiple flows.

He said that the likelihood of the drilling from Phase 3 of the Big Sandy Lithium Project encountering water or affecting the temperature of Ha’Kamwe’ is low.

BLM also told the court that any visual and noise disturbances from the drilling does not qualify as irreparable injury and is instead temporary. 

But Jackson said her tribe made a good case that the project would cause irreparable harm because they had people testify who had already experienced it.

“This is irreparable; you can’t go back and redo ceremonies,” she said. “There’s no such thing.”

Jackson said she understands that the court wants more clarification on whether or not the BLM took the appropriate steps under the NEPA and NHPA policies before making a final decision.

“We believe that they didn’t take into consideration the effects on Ha’Kamwe’,” Jackson said, adding that it is eligible for registration on the National Historic Register and a traditional cultural property.

Jackson said it deserves a thorough process included in the NHPA and NEPA. 

“I am proud of our people for sticking up for what we believe in and asserting our arguments,” she said. “Now, we just wait.”

Hualapai Chairman Duane Clarke echoed Jackson’s sentiments about how their team and tribal members presented a good case in court, and said he prays that the court’s decision goes with the Hualapai people.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed an amicus brief before the hearing supporting the Hualapai Tribe’s request for the preliminary injunction. 

“The sacred Ha’Kamwe’ spring has sustained the Hualapai people for generations, and its protection is critical for the Tribe,” Mayes said in a written statement. “The failure to properly evaluate the impact of this project on such an important water source is unacceptable.”

The amicus brief urges the court to take action to protect Arizona’s water resources from potentially irreversible damage posed by exploratory drilling near the Hualapai Tribe’s sacred spring.

“The BLM must fulfill its obligations under NEPA and fully evaluate this project’s impact on local water resources,” Mayes said. “I am proud to support the Hualapai Tribe’s efforts to protect their precious cultural and water resources.”

The amicus brief highlights the risk of irreparable harm to Arizona’s water resources if exploratory drilling is allowed to proceed without a comprehensive review. It also requests that the court grant a preliminary injunction to stop drilling activities while the case is being heard to protect Arizona’s water sources from potential compromise.

Hualapai Tribe fights to extend ban on lithium drilling it says jeopardizes a sacred site is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Illinois has $30 million in incentives available for solar installations on multi-family buildings. 

So far, though, the state program has not received any applications for such projects, according to Jan Gudell, Illinois Solar for All associate director at Elevate, the organization tasked with running the state program. 

In urban areas like Chicago, residents of environmental justice and lower-income neighborhoods are highly likely to live in multi-family residential buildings where it is extremely difficult to install rooftop solar. 

There is little incentive for a landlord to invest in solar that will provide cost savings to the tenants, and rooftops may need significant upgrades to handle solar. In condo buildings, homeowners association bureaucracy and other concerns must be navigated.

There’s also a lesser-known logistical and structural barrier — if solar is to be channeled to individual residential units behind the meter, a separate solar system is essentially needed for each unit — with separate inverters and wiring.

“That’s a lot of hardware, space and cost,” said Aliya Bagewadi, US director of strategic partnerships for Allume Energy, an Australian startup company that says it can address at least this part of the puzzle, by sending energy to individual units with only one inverter and system. 

The company has served thousands of customers in Australia, New Zealand and Europe with its SolShare technology. Now it is rolling out in the U.S., in sunny southern states as well as Illinois, because of the state’s robust solar incentives. 

“It’s inherently an energy equity issue,” said Bagewadi, who is based in Chicago. “We know [multi-family building residents] are much more likely to be lower-income, longer-term renters. We want to make sure those savings flow to people who can really benefit the most.”

Direct benefits 

Illinois isn’t alone in the lack of multi-family solar arrays. Solar developers and advocates have long noted the challenge nationwide, especially for affordable multi-family rental buildings. A 2022 study by Berkeley lab noted that in 2021, about 3% of solar installed in the U.S. was on multi-family buildings, mostly owner-occupied condos. 

“Solar may be a non-starter in a rental multi-family property because the owner may be looking at a complex, expensive and time-consuming process, where they would have to consider the design, permitting, installation, interconnection, and cost for multiple systems,” said Gudell. “For many property owners, this may be unaffordable and unmanageable.” 

A 2018 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that the majority of potential capacity for new solar serving low- and moderate-income customers is on renter-occupied multi-family rooftops. California passed a law in 2015 specifically to address the dearth of solar on multi-family buildings, promising to invest up to $1 billion by 2031.

There are typically several ways to handle rooftop solar on multi-family buildings. 

In rental properties, the building owner can own the array, and use the energy to power common areas, like hallways, a pool or gym. Owners can also allocate a portion of the energy savings to tenants, by charging an amenity fee or otherwise collecting some revenue themselves. 

Alternately, the energy can all be sent back to the grid, in areas with viable net metering policies, and the compensation can be shared with tenants or among condo owners, often referred to as virtual net metering. Community solar offers a similar situation — where the solar isn’t onsite at all, but residents can subscribe to partake in savings. 

Solar advocates, developers, lenders, and policymakers have all been working at state and federal levels to improve opportunities for virtual net metering and community solar. 

These arrangements, however, can still be unattractive or impossible depending on state and utility policy. Community solar isn’t even legal in some states, and virtual net metering depends on utility participation. 

The California law requiring solar on new multi-family construction up to three stories high exempts areas served by utilities that don’t offer virtual net metering.

SolShare avoids these challenges by sending electricity directly from the solar array to individual users, without involving utilities or the grid.

“You can do behind-the-meter with direct benefit to tenants,” said Bagewadi. “We’re physically pushing the electrons to multiple meters.”

Possibilities 

Allume partners with solar installers and developers to help deploy rooftop solar on multi-family buildings, including by working with landlords to design financial structures that benefit both the building owner and tenants. In some cases, Allume acts as the solar developer itself. 

With SolShare, a building owner or manager can allocate energy from a shared solar system, based on unit square footage, in equal amounts, or however they choose. 

Where the technology is deployed in Australia and the UK, energy can be sent to different units on demand, Bagewadi explained. In the U.S., the rollout in Florida and Mississippi is being done with preset amounts that can be changed with 24 hours notice. 

An Allume case study from a 64-unit Orlando apartment building with SolShare notes that a 392-kilowatt rooftop system resulted in savings of almost $100 per month for each unit, with electricity purchased from the grid reduced by almost 60%. While the idea is for residents to use solar behind the meter, excess solar can be sent to the grid. Adding an on-site battery to the mix lets residents use all the power on-site behind the meter, and makes solar power available when the grid is down.

Solar advocates hope the EPA’s $7 billion commitment to the federal equity-focused Solar for All program — separate from Illinois’s state program — will “further unlock multi-family solar,” in Bagewadi’s words.

Gudell said Elevate and other experts know there are many Illinoisans living in multi-family rental buildings that would qualify to have solar installed through Illinois Solar for All. They hope policy and technology evolve to match the available funding. 

“We’ll need a solution that addresses the split incentive problem for rental situations, where the building owner cannot or will not subsidize solar for tenants; and the complexity of bringing solar to multiple electrical accounts at one building,” Gudell said. 

“Adoption of a technology that allows for a single system to be split into shares, for use by multiple electrical account holders, could help in that it would simplify the design, permitting and installation process.”

Startup pitches new model to unlock solar for multi-family buildings, in Illinois and beyond is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Editor’s note: Miles Braxton’s company is Okovate Sustainable Energy. A previous version of this post misspelled the company’s name.

Agrivoltaics — co-locating solar arrays with farming operations — is generating enthusiasm among both farmers and clean energy advocates as a way to promote sustainability in agriculture. 

When implemented correctly, agrivoltaics provides a vital dual income stream for farmers — in solar energy generation, but also as a means of providing an optimal growing environment for compatible crops and herds. The added revenue may allow more farmers to retain their land for themselves and future generations. 

While pilot projects around the country are identifying best practices, not all have been successful, and practitioners say that advancing the technology will require an equitable approach that centers farmers’ needs first.

A discussion during the recent Solar Farm Summit in Rosemont, Illinois, directly addressed the issue, featuring a majority-Black panel of practitioners and service providers. Three major themes emerged during the discussion: maximizing compatibility of solar arrays with existing land use, demonstrating the financial benefits of agrivoltaics, and addressing how solar power can help BIPOC farmers hold on to their land.

“I think one thing that, through our work in this technical assistance, has become very, very clear [is] that people don’t just want to build an agrivoltaics project for the sake of building an agrivoltaics project,” said Jordan Macknick of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), who also served as moderator for the discussion. “How does agrivoltaics enable you to take that next step and focus on things like succession planning or farmer training?”

Benefits for farmers

Miles Braxton started his company, Okovate Sustainable Energy, to work exclusively on “farmer-focused” solar development.

Braxton said after several years of developing community solar projects, he “really saw the inefficiencies” of taking farmland out of production for solar projects. “That’s a problem that is just going to keep piling on top of itself until it gets to the point where we can’t develop anything.

“We target crop farmers who are growing a very specific suite of crops that we know works well with our design,” Braxton said.

Cetta Barnhart, owner of Seed Time Harvest Farms in Florida, also cultivates her own plot of fruits and vegetables, and cited her background in food and wellness in promoting the compatibility of solar and agriculture to benefit the bottom line for farmers.

“This is more hands-on of what a farmer can really do in their current practices. If they’re raising cattle, there’s a way that they implement solar with that. If they are having bare land, the pollinator is another way that they can benefit from that,” she said. “So how these solar projects are developed and created for real farmers is still a big conversation to be had.“ 

Ena Jones, owner of Roots & Vine Produce and Café, and president of Community Partners for Black Farmers, cited her dual role as a working farmer and an advocate as an advantage in promoting the potential compatibility of agrivoltaics and cultivation — especially for Black farmers.

“We advocate and we also lobby for farmers at the state level for the state of Illinois and the state of Georgia. And I’m here to kind of segue to help farmers understand … how different solar opportunities can help them with production on their farms, and be an asset to the production on their farms. And also, to help solar developers understand farm[ing],” Jones said.

Noting that solar projects can help cut energy costs, Jones said “Energy use is one of the farmer’s [major] expenses outside of diesel, and of course seed. So, if they can reduce that cost dramatically, even by a third, that would impact their bottom line in revenue extensively. It is very important, especially for BIPOC farmers, to be ushered into this technology so that they won’t be left behind in the process.”

Making connections

Agrivoltaics can be a valuable tool to reduce overall costs, expand potential revenue – or both – as a means of promoting optimal use of farmland. A both-and approach can work to address what is often an inherent tension between the best use of large, flat plots of land for large solar arrays – parcels that also frequently comprise some of the richest soil for cultivation. 

For example, the 180 MW Madison Fields project in Ohio represents a test ground for large-scale agrivoltaics – farming on 1,900 acres between the rows of a utility-scale solar array. One of the project’s focuses is determining which crops and herds are the best prospects to coexist with large-scale solar developments.

“People have a lot of questions with regard to energy development going forward in this state … Finding a balance where you can do a number of things on the same ground — in this case energy production as well as agricultural production — is obviously huge,” Dale Arnold, director of energy policy for the Ohio Farm Bureau told the Energy News Network in July.

Macknick highlighted another project where NREL and Clean Energy to Communities (C2C), along with the Black Farmers Collaborative, worked on a proof of concept project which incorporated solar panels on a demonstration farm cultivated by Barnhart that features citrus trees, leafy greens, and other produce.

“I had already looked into doing solar on my property and was just looking at it to have solar as the backup,” Barnhart said. “But when we started talking as a team and then we found out about the agrivoltaics portion [and] how that can be incorporated into farming, it really brought forth a bigger and better opportunity to not just benefit by having it but also sharing that with other farmers,” Barnhart told NREL in 2023.

Mike DellaGala of Solar Collective said taking a farmer-centered approach can also be beneficial to product and service providers.

“I think a lot of the conversation … has been the difference between farmers and developers, and how we are or [are] not communicating and getting projects over the finish line or not. And I think… if you’re farmer-first or farmer-centric, I think that’s the way to success for everybody… allowing [farmers] to dictate a lot of the project details has been really successful for us. And it makes our job easier, frankly,” DellaGala said.

A farmer-centric and collaborative approach is especially vital in ensuring equitable access to the benefits of agrivoltaics for BIPOC farmers, Barnhart said.

“I stand in the gap somewhat between having conversations with [BIPOC] farmers and having conversations with project developers because you need someone in the middle. I’m a community advocate. I hope there are more of us in the room than not. They have to be in place in order to bridge the conversation as to how this really works well in real-life time,” Barnhart said.

Braxton cited the need to rein in the power of utilities, which he says frequently raise roadblocks to community-level projects to protect their own interests. 

“Utilities have too much power. They have too much money to lobby. They don’t want you to sell power back to your community because [of the impact to] their own rates that they can control. So that’s a risk. The root of those problems is that here in the U.S. … we have 50 little countries [states] that make up their own policies and do their own thing… I think there needs to be a policy to incentivize solar to be developed innovatively. I don’t think policy makers at the state level understand the importance of that,” Braxton said.

Jones noted that policy change will likely be driven by farmer demand, which by extension benefits the larger community.

“In my opinion, once the farmers understand [how solar can] help them on their farms, I can’t say this enough, they will force politicians to comply. The money will be there; the funding will be there. But the engagement needs to happen. It desperately needs to happen,” she said.

Land retention for BIPOC farmers

Loss of land –through racism and other factors, has long been a contentious topic among BIPOC farmers – and Black farmers in particular. According to a 2022 study, discriminatory federal policies contributed to Black farmers losing roughly $326 billion worth of acreage during the 20th century. In July, the Biden-Harris administration announced a distribution of $2 billion to thousands of Black and other minority farmers, created through the Inflation Reduction Act as a means to begin to address this inequity.

Agrivoltaics may not intuitively track as a relevant strategy for land retention; but Barnhart touted its value, especially for Black farmers. 

“[Black farmers] have lost a lot of land because we just couldn’t afford to keep it… We didn’t just lose land because it was confiscated… What solar does is add an income stream or a reduction in your expenses so that there’s more you can do on your farm and create an opportunity for the next generation. 

“It gives us a reason to keep the land going, and it gives us, in our community, resiliency we are experiencing through our climate change storms. For the families that can have that piece of land, that builds a resiliency to protect them in their neighborhoods, protect their own backyard, and protect the future generations, give the future generations something they can look forward to that makes sense to them. Then we build into something that takes care of our wealth building opportunities, our succession planning, and our look into the future to make a change,” Barnhart said.

How a ‘farmer-first’ approach could lead to more successful agrivoltaics projects is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The World’s Resource Institute Electric School Bus Initiative published a 68-page on the geographic distribution of school buses, fuel types and their emissions control technology.

WRI said the goal of the analysis released last month is to understand what school districts and populations are exposed to emissions from the oldest, most polluting school buses as well as which socioeconomic characteristics of districts are implementing electric school buses (ESB).

The research found that the most polluting buses in the U.S. — those that are older and lack modern emissions reduction technology — are operated in school districts with higher shares of low-income households and residents of color. But, WRI notes these districts are also at the front of the ESB transition. Rural school districts are also more likely to have older buses, however their fleets are also smaller overall.

WRI identified Oklahoma, Idaho, Oregon, Kansas and South Dakota as the top five states with the greatest number of pre-2010 diesel school buses in operation. The analysis found that 75 percent of all Oklahoma buses are pre-2010 diesel buses, followed by Idaho at 55 percent.

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Related: Second Installment of Zero Emission School Bus Funding Available in N.Y
Related: 2024 Green Bus Fleet Awards Announced at STN EXPO
Related: WRI Releases Comprehensive Electric School Bus Dashboard
Related: Electric School Bus Commitments Nationwide Rise Significantly

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Meanwhile, the report states, “As of Dec. 31, 2022, there were 5,612 committed ESBs across all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.” The figure includes 21 ESBs in five tribal schools and one private school operated by a tribal nation. States with the most committed ESBs are California with 1,852, followed by Maryland at 361 and New York at 310.

Aas of June 2024, the Electric School Bus Initiative website shows ESB adoption has grown to a total commitment of 12,164 buses, two-thirds of which were funded by the EPA Clean School Bus Program. Of those buses, the Electric School Bus Data Dashboard says 4,502 are in operation nationwide with 5,977 awarded ESBs and 1,717 ordered ESBs

Read the full report.

The post Low-income Areas Need Electric School Buses the Most, WRI Analysis Indicates appeared first on School Transportation News.

Darryl Moton is ready to “get on a roof.”

The 25-year-old Chicago resident is among the latest graduates of an intensive 13-week solar training course that’s helping to connect employers with job candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

Moton was referred by another job readiness program meant to keep youth away from gun violence. He “never knew about solar” before but now sees himself owning a solar company and using the proceeds to fund his music and clothing design endeavors.

He and others interviewed for jobs with a dozen employers assembled at a church on Chicago’s West Side on August 1 as part of the fourth training cohort for the 548 Foundation, which is partnering with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on a recently-announced $30 million initiative to create 1,000 solar jobs in Chicago’s South and West side neighborhoods.   

The 548 Foundation is part of 548 Enterprise, a suite of renewable energy and affordable housing development projects, launched in 2019 and named after the public housing unit where co-founder A.J. Patton grew up. 

The idea is to help keep housing affordable by using solar to lower energy bills, while training people left out of the traditional energy economy to supply that solar. 

“When you invest in a community, the biggest question is who benefits, who gets the jobs?” asked Patton, during the job fair. “This is as good as it gets,” he added, about the recent state investment. “We just have to keep advocating for quality policy.” 

Employers at the job fair said such training programs are crucial for them to find workers in Illinois, where robust solar incentives are attracting many out-of-state companies eager to hire and hit the ground. Mike Huneke, energy operations manager for Minnesota-based Knobelsdorff said he has hired 18 employees from previous 548 cohorts, and he expected to make about six job offers after the recent interviews. 

“Illinois is on fire,” said Huneke. “We’re not from Illinois, so finding this new talent pipeline is what we need. We have a ton of projects coming up.” 

Lisa Cotton, 30, has dreamed of being an electrician since she was a kid. She had received two job offers at the August 1 fair before the group even broke for lunch. 

“A lot of times you go through a training program, get a certificate, and that’s the end of it,” said Jacqueline Williams of the Restoring Sovereignty Project, a partner which administers the wraparound services for the training program. 

The 548 program makes sure to connect graduates with employers, and only companies with specific openings to fill are invited to the job fair. 548 and its partners also stay in contact with graduates and employers to make sure the placement is successful. 

“We have a post-grad program where they can call us any time, and an alumni fund. If an employer says, ‘This guy can’t come to work because his radiator is busted,’ we’ll take care of that,” said Williams. 

Achieving equity   

After Illinois passed an ambitious clean energy law in 2017, multiple solar training programs were launched in keeping with the law’s equity provisions. But employers and advocates were frustrated by a seeming disconnect in which many trainees never got solar jobs, and employers weren’t sure how to find the workers. 

Since then, the state has passed another clean energy law – the 2021 Climate & Equitable Jobs Act, with even more ambitious equity mandates; and non-profit organizations have developed and honed more advanced workforce training programs. To access incentives under the law, employers need to hire a percent of equity-eligible applicants that rises to 30% by 2030. The program prioritizes people impacted by the criminal justice system, alumni of the foster care system, and people who live in equity-designated communities. 

548 affiliates help employers navigate the paperwork and requirements involved in the equity incentives. Several employers at the job fair said this is a plus, but noted that regardless of equity, they are desperate for the type of highly-trained, enthusiastic candidates coming out of the 548 program. 

“This is a great way to bridge what the state is trying to do with its clean energy goals, and connecting under-represented people with these opportunities,” said Annette Poulimenos, talent acquisition manager of Terrasmart, a major utility-scale solar provider. “We came here ready to hire, and I think we’re going to walk away with some new talent.”   

Member organizations of the Chicago Coalition for Intercommunalism do outreach to recruit most of the training program participants. 

Nicholas Brock found out about the training thanks to a staffer at one of these organizations who noticed his professional attitude and punctuality as he walked by every morning to a different workforce program. 

“Whatever I do, nine times out of 10, I’m the first one to get there, before the managers,” said Brock, 20. “He noticed that and asked me, ‘Have you ever heard about solar panels?’” 

Brock knew little about solar at that point, but now he aims to be a solar project manager. 

“I’m so glad I came here,” he said. “They bring out the best in you.” 

Full service 

Wraparound, holistic services are key to the program’s success. During the training and for a year afterwards, trainees and alumni can apply for financial help or other types of assistance. 

“There are so many barriers, it might be child care or your car is impounded,” said Williams. “We might be writing a letter to a judge asking to ‘please take him off house arrest so he can work.’ It’s intensive case management, navigating the bureaucratic anomalies that arise when you’re system-impacted.”

Moises Vega III, 26 – who always wanted to work in renewables because “it’s literally the future” – noted that his car battery died during the training program, and he was provided funds to get his vehicle working again. 

While ample support is available, the program itself is rigorous and demanding. Classes meet from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, and trainees are required to check their phones at the door and be fully focused, notes instructor and 548 workforce strategies director Michael Thomas. During the hands-on boot camp week, the day starts at 6 a.m. 

“That’s when the trades start,” noted Thomas. “You need to figure out how that works, how will you get child care at 5:30 a.m.?” 

Sixty-one trainees started in the first three cohorts, and 46 graduated, the first group in July 2023. The fourth cohort started with 25, and as of the job fair, 18 were on track to graduate. Eighty-five percent of graduates from the first three cohorts are currently working in the field, according to 548. 

“Even though I wish the graduation rate were higher, the people who commit to it, stay with it,” said Kynnée Golder, CEO of Global HR Business Solutions, which has an oversight role for the 548 Foundation. “It’s monumental, it’s life-changing for a lot of people.” 

Comprehensive curriculum 

The curriculum starts with life skills, including interpersonal relationships, resume-building, financial planning and more. Each day begins with a spiritual reflection. 

The students learn about electricity and energy, and soon move into specific instruction on solar installation and operation. Rooms at St. Agatha’s church served as labs, where students connected wires, built converters and eventually mounted solar panels on a demonstration pitched, shingled roof. 

Terrance Hanson, 40, credited Thomas as “the best instructor ever.” 

“I’m not a young kid, my brain is no longer a sponge,” Hanson said. “He made sure I got it all. Now I feel like I know so much, I’m confident and prepared to get out and show what I can do.” 

He added that people in disinvested neighborhoods have ample untapped potential to be part of the clean energy workforce.  

“You see a lot of basketball players in my community because there are a lot of basketball hoops,” he said. “If there were golf courses in the hood, you would see more golfers. It’s about opportunities. And this was the most amazing and empowering thing I’ve ever been through.” 

Jack Ailey co-founded Ailey Solar in 2012, making it the oldest still-operating residential installer in Illinois, by his calculations. He noted that there can be high turnover among installers, and intensive training and preparation is key. 

“You’re out there in the sun, the cold, it’s heavy physical labor, wrestling 40-pound panels up to the roof,” he said. “You have to know what you’re getting into.” 

“Some training programs vary in quality,” Ailey added, but he was impressed by the candidates at the 548 job fair. 

Trainees test for and receive multiple certifications, including the OSHA 30 for quality assurance, and the NCCER and NABCEP for construction and solar professionals, respectively. The program is also a pre-apprenticeship qualifier, allowing graduates to move on to paid, long-term apprenticeships with unions representing carpenters, electricians, plumbers and laborers – the gateway to a lucrative and stable career in the trades. 

Thomas noted that most trade unions still don’t have a major focus on solar. 

“We’re ahead of the unions, and our graduates bring real value to them, and to the companies,” he said. “The students might know more than a company’s foreman knows. It’s a win-win situation. Solar is a nascent industry, there’s so much opportunity in this space.” 

When Tredgett Page, 38, connected with 548, his auto detailing work and other odd jobs were not going well. He had always loved science and been curious about photosynthesis and the sun’s power. 

“I had been in the streets before, and I was leaning back toward that, but God brought me here,” he said. “Now I have the confidence, I know what I’m talking about, I know about megawatts and kilowatts, net metering, grid-connected, pretty much anything about solar.” 

He sees metaphorical significance in his new trade: “Energy is life, and it teaches you balance, it’s all about negative and positive ions.” He feels like “the sky is the limit” after the training. 

“I have so much skill that they gave me, now I’m hungry to use it,” he said. “I’m a little nervous, but optimistic, excited, very exuberant!”  

‘The sky is the limit’: Solar program opens new opportunities for Chicago trainees is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Growing up in Southern California, Saxon Metzger and his brother Ayda Donne — now 29 and 26 — didn’t think much about their Indigenous heritage in Oklahoma. Their great-grandmother’s family fled the reservation after her aunt saw her mother murdered during the Osage Reign of Terror, when locals brutally attacked tribal members over oil resources, as the brothers learned while researching the family history.

In the past decade, the brothers began exploring this history, including the fossil-fuel linked violence and exploitation recently showcased in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Today, the Osage Nation is home to the country’s highest concentration of abandoned, uncapped oil and gas wells, which continue to leak methane and other dangerous pollutants. 

Now, Metzger and Donne are seeking to connect with and give back to the Osage Nation and other tribal communities by making sure clean energy does not leave its own legacy of abandonment or disinvestment. 

Eighth Generation Consulting, an organization Metzger founded, aims to provide solar decommissioning workforce training and project management, as well as promote solar installation. 

“Tribal nations, along with many other historically disenfranchised communities, are justifiably skeptical of development that doesn’t fully acknowledge its potential shortcomings, having been bearing the brunt of fossil fuels,” Metzger said. 

Osage Nation Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear has officially pledged support for the brothers’ vision. In March, Eighth Generation won a U.S. Department of Energy Community Energy Innovation concept phase prize, meaning a $100,000 grant, mentorship and the chance for more DOE funding. Metzger was also recently awarded a Grid Alternatives Tribal Energy Innovators Fellowship, which comes with $50,000 and mentorship, and he is a finalist for MIT’s Solve Global Challenges Indigenous Communities Fellowship program. 

Family roots 

Metzger studied economics at Southern Illinois University and the University of Utah, then returned to Southern Illinois to help facilitate the deployment of solar in the largely rural, lower-income region. 

He was program director for the nonprofit Solarize Southern Illinois, then worked as a project developer for StraightUp Solar, a residential and commercial solar installer focused on underserved areas in Illinois and Missouri. Metzger got an MBA with an emphasis in sustainability from Wilmington University, then worked for a decommissioning company in California. 

Striking out on his own, he co-founded a company called Polaris Ecosystems that does solar decommissioning project management and consulting. Polaris is under contract to support commercial and utility-scale repowering in California and Texas, Metzger said, declining to give more details because of confidentiality clauses in the contracts. 

The company collaborated with a Georgia solar waste management company called Green Clean Solar, whose founder, Emilie Oxel O’Leary, said she plans to partner with Polaris on more contracts. Her company has found ways to reuse solar packaging and components – for example, using thousands of cardboard boxes from solar delivery as mulch for a tree nursery in Hawaii, where landfill space is especially scarce. 

“Saxon and I find these solutions together. We find sustainability. We bring circularity to our conversations,” she said. “Very few [companies] do what we do. These billion-dollar companies have never stopped and thought about this.” 

Metzger now leads Eighth Generation and Polaris from Chicago, while also teaching a sustainable business class at Wilmington University. 

Donne is in charge of grant-writing for Eighth Generation, while pursuing his doctorate in English literature at New York University, with a focus on Indigenous literature and environmental justice. Donne also collaborates with NYU professor and toxicologist Judith Zelikoff, doing blood and urine testing and health workshops with the Ramapough Lenape Nation in New Jersey, who face serious health threats from a former Ford Motor Company illegal dump that is now a Superfund site. Donne hopes to further intertwine the humanities and STEM sides of academia in pursuit of environmental and energy justice for tribes.  

“My family is very scarred by what happened during the reign of terror. They tried to run” from that legacy, said Donne, who also works as chief librarian at the International Center for MultiGenerational Legacies of Trauma. “But repressing things like that rarely works, rarely protects you for very long. I like to think that Saxon and my work is kind of a departure from that history of denying our identity and running from the pain that’s in our family.” 

On visits to the Osage Nation, the brothers say they’ve recognized the cultural as well as economic importance that fossil fuels still hold for the tribe. They strive to acknowledge and respect this dynamic while promoting clean energy. The tribe currently has no large-scale solar on its land, and this year a federal judge ruled that a controversial wind farm must be removed because it failed to get proper permits a decade ago. The tribe has long opposed the wind farm, which was built on sacred land.    

“We’re trying to plug into the existing things that they’re doing, and not show up and say, ‘Hey, we know what the solution is,’” said Metzger. “This is my tribe, these are my folks, my culture, my people. But I am approaching it with the understanding that to a certain degree, I’m also an outsider from a market that they don’t have access to.” 

Metzger added that when he first visited the Osage Nation, “I didn’t see a single solar panel, on the entirety of the reservation. I looked for it. I was shocked. It was one of the few places I’ve ever seen that there were no Trump flags, and there were no solar panels.” 

Metzger said that it is still likely a long road to installing solar on the reservation, but he’s been encouraged by tribal leaders, and received a letter of support in July from Osage Chief Standing Bear. 

A growing need 

More than half of states have decommissioning policies that require financial assurances be put up in advance, according to a 2023 year-end report by the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center and DSIRE. Nineteen states have no state-level decommissioning policies at all, the report shows, including Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

“When it comes to assurance policies, you want to make sure landowners won’t be stuck with the bill at the end of the day, a dine-and-dash situation,” said Justin Lindemann, a co-author of the report and policy analyst at North Carolina State University’s Clean Energy Technology Center. “In most states, you have to have these finances in place well before the project decommissions.” 

Solar project contracts and permits typically include a decommissioning estimate. In states with financial assurance requirements, developers are usually required to put up incremental amounts of financing over time for decommissioning, so that there is not a major financial burden tacked on to the project’s startup cost. 

Metzger said that in his experience, estimates can be unrealistically low, a situation that in the near-term can benefit everyone, as the project cost appears lower. 

“The reality is that our industry doesn’t really want to have that conversation” about decommissioning costs and logistics, “because a developer, if they included the full cost of decommissioning, would not sell as many projects,” Metzger said. “No one really wants to hear that the project is going to cost more.” 

Lindemann said he hasn’t seen major problems with low-balled estimates, but there still have been relatively few large-scale decommissions. State laws and policies can try to ensure that estimates are accurate and large enough financial assurances are available. For example, Ohio requires that estimates be revised periodically, and if the estimate has increased, the required bond must be increased too.  

Ideological opponents of solar have stoked fears about solar panels filling up landfills and presenting hazardous waste. Those concerns are often exaggerated, as solar panels are made up primarily of steel and glass and the toxic compounds in the cells present relatively little risk, experts say. Even as solar farms expand exponentially, solar waste will still be much smaller than other waste streams, like construction debris and municipal garbage. 

Nonetheless, responsible and smooth decommissioning is crucial for the industry to thrive, experts agree. 

“We live in a social media environment where bad stories, singular bad examples do spread,” said Lindemann. “We need to make sure that relationships don’t get strained because of a lack of direction regarding deconstruction and decommission. Do people involved in or impacted by a project understand what’s in front of them 20 to 25 years down the line? That level of trust and transparency can be built, and comprehensive directives from states and other entities provide the first step.” 

In 2023, almost 33 GW of solar were installed nationwide, and solar deployment is only expected to keep growing. 

“In order to handle that, it’s important to make sure state and local governments have the right rules in place to handle mass decommissioning,” said Lindemann.  

Many challenges 

Metzger notes there are many costs and logistics to decommissioning that can be easy to overlook: the need to remove fences and drive over fields to haul panels off, lodging for workers, renting equipment like pile drivers, dealing with buried electrical conduit or other hazards. 

“If you look at a site, there isn’t one solution,” Metzger said. “Say you have 20,000 panels, that’s a bunch of metal. How heavy is that? What kind of tractor trailers are you going to need to pull it? What about the labor, how many 40-pound panels can someone lift in an hour?” 

Metzger and Donne are developing a decommissioning workforce training curriculum, and hope to eventually train Osage tribal members and others in various aspects of decommissioning work and project management.  

“We’re thinking about what this is going to look like for our tribe in 100 years,” said Donne. “Are these structural resources available when Saxon and I are long gone?”

That perspective is what inspired the name Eighth Generation, Metzger explains. 

“It’s often cited as an indigenous principle to think of an action through seven generations of impact, and that phrase always reminded me that some problems just won’t show up until the eighth generation,” he said. 

“And it feels like that is what’s happening here, as we’re staring down millions of panels annually needing decommissioning. It’s all solvable problems to an industry that genuinely is making the world a better place. We need to follow through on the promise we made as an industry to be meaningfully different than previous energy systems, and taking care of our legacy assets is a necessary component of that.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story described Eighth Generation Consulting as a nonprofit; it is a for-profit entity that is exploring nonprofit status.

Indigenous solar consultant works to ensure responsible development in communities scarred by fossil fuels is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This country’s heaviest polluters also rely on a workforce that disproportionately fails to fill good-paying jobs with people of color who are more likely to be affected by their emissions, according to a new study.

The research, from Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic — currently under peer review — finds that people of color are underrepresented in high-paying jobs in both the chemical manufacturing and petroleum/coal industry.

And Louisiana, with one of the largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities in the United States, is the only state where minorities were underrepresented in low-paying and high-paying jobs in both industries.

For advocates there, this new report is proof that the good jobs are going to white people while much of the toxic emissions and health risks are being endured by people living in the surrounding communities, which tend to be low-income or predominantly minority.

“The pollution versus jobs narrative is really oversimplified because the trade off affects different groups unevenly,” said Kimberly Terrell, director of community engagement and a staff scientist with the Tulane law clinic who led the research team. “Petrochemical jobs that mostly go to white workers can’t offset the harm of petrochemical pollution that mostly occurs in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.”

The research showed that people of color were generally underrepresented in high-paying jobs in both the chemical manufacturing sector and petroleum/coal industry and often were over-represented in low-paying jobs in the chemical industry, with results “mixed” for the same category on the petroleum side.

In another recently released report, researchers described a situation in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish in which local residents of color were unable to take advantage of construction jobs at a terminal that exports methane, also known as liquefied natural gas.

The Mississippi River ferry connecting the plant to the community did not run early enough to get the employees to work by 5 a.m., as required. And prospective workers — many without reliable transportation — had to attend weeks of training in New Orleans 55 miles away, according to researchers from Texas Southern University and the University of Montana.

Nationally, higher paying jobs in the chemical manufacturing industry disproportionately went to more white people in Texas, Louisiana and Georgia, where minorities represent 59%, 41% and 49% of their respective states’ populations but held 38%, 21% and 28% of the better-paid jobs within the industry.

In the petroleum/coal industry, people of color were underrepresented in higher-paying jobs in at least 14 states — including Texas, California, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Ashley Shelton, founder and chief executive officer of statewide lobbying nonprofit The Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, praised the study for proving what she and most Louisiana advocates have known for quite some time. Shelton said state leaders, and others across the country, are “selling out” fenceline communities to the petrochemical industry.

“We have to stop pretending oil and gas, which in Louisiana we are great defenders of, is gonna save us because they’re not and they never were and aren’t trying to,” Shelton said, noting that Louisiana is last in many quality-of-life indicators. “We are winning the race to the bottom.”

Study: Minorities ‘systematically’ underrepresented in US petrochemical workforce is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.