How does renewable energy impact local communities — especially those in rural areas? Sarah Mills, research scientist at the Graham Sustainability Institute and lecturer in the School for Environment and Sustainability, is dedicated to understanding those localized impacts, the positive and negative.
Mills joined Michigan Minds for a special series focusing on sustainability research and efforts at the University of Michigan. She talks about her work looking at rural communities in Michigan that are often the hosts for large-scale wind and solar projects.
Some of Mills’ work is focused on answering questions regarding why some communities want renewable energy projects, like wind solar farms, while others opt not to have them. She also strives to understand the interaction between state and local policies, and how that facilitates renewable energy development or hinders renewable energy development. She explains how she looks through a lens that keeps her asking: How do rural communities that would host this infrastructure see those policies?
She starts her work by figuring out what is important to communities and what questions they are asking.
“I have a grant from the State Energy Office, which is within EGLE — that’s the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy — to allow me to go to communities and talk about the pros and cons. I draw upon the research that already exists, but regularly get questions from communities where no researchers have started to look.”
One of the questions that is often a part of these conversations is: how many jobs can actually be expected from a solar farm?
“In that situation, this takes calling, looking at the solar farms that are already built in the state to understand how many employees they had in that host community, not the solar industry, in general. There’s a bunch of jobs in construction and in the engineering side, but keeping that solar plant operational, there’s fewer jobs. That’s done by case study and triangulation across a couple of different projects. In my work on understanding, one of the things that is being asked right now is, particularly when we’re thinking about solar farms in rural communities, the average footprint of a project that’s coming is one and a half to two square miles. So communities are wondering: What impact would taking 1,200 acres out of corn or soybean production, what impact does that have on our agricultural economy in this area?” So, I have a grant right now to research that,” she says, adding that she is interviewing local officials to determine what the tax difference would be and how that money would be used.
Mills explains that she examines these impacts on rural communities specifically because that is where the land is that is required for wind and solar projects.
“The reason that I look at rural communities is because those are the places that have the land required to host wind and solar projects. When you look at the amount of land required for energy technology, electricity generation, often you should be thinking about the whole life cycle,” she says, adding that the places that have the amount of land needed are rural communities.
Misinformation also plays a role in renewable energy conversations, which can cause additional challenges. Community members need to make cases for why wind or solar projects should be allowed, Mills says.
“There’s a whole bunch of information out on the internet about either anecdotes or just straight-up falsehoods about the impacts that wind or solar can have, and people bring those to local government discussions about these projects. And first of all, if it’s only written in an academic journal, people don’t necessarily have access to it. You have to have subscriptions to those things. So it’s difficult for them to go to the literature and figure out: what are the actual impacts? What is true and what is not?”
Community engagement is crucial in these processes as residents should be involved in the discussions and decisions, Mills says. She also emphasizes the importance of acknowledging that there are positive and negative impacts to each energy source.
“At the community level, I encourage communities to figure out which are the impacts that fit with what their community is about. Where it gets tricky is when you have people in your community that live there for different reasons. So, what you want to see, what impacts seem awful to you may not be the same as your neighbors. But I also think that that gets into how we think about combating misinformation. I think that there’s certainly a role that science, that scientists, can play in these local conversations, in being experts about what are the reasonable impacts or the realistic impacts, what is fact from fiction.”
LISTEN TO THE FULL CONVERSATION
More from Sarah Mills:
