Why do so many renewable projects stall?

Kara Miller: From the MIT Energy Initiative. This is What if it works?—a podcast looking at the energy solutions for climate change. I’m Kara Miller.

Robert Stoner: And I’m Rob Stoner.

KM: So we talk a lot on this show about different technologies that can be used to create or store or distribute clean energy. But we probably don’t talk enough about the fact that in order for any of that science to take effect, a thing usually has to be put somewhere in some community. And that involves discussion. It involves negotiation. And not infrequently, it involves Larry Susskind.

Larry Susskind: I am in the middle. Quite often I play the role of mediator.

KM: Susskind is a professor of urban and environmental planning at MIT and he’s the publisher of the Public Interest Technologist. He says the story tends to go something like this: A developer has an idea for a renewable energy project. He thinks people are going to be thrilled about this project. And he’s got a business plan.

LS: Mostly he’s aiming at getting a permit from the state siting agency. But he does usually have to go through some local review. So he needs to have all the answers that are going to come to the questions that he’s asked at these hearings. So he hires really expensive consultants, many of them not from the country that he’s from, who are working from air photo materials. I mean, the consultant may never have been to the site, but they’re preparing a detailed plan for how on that 3,000 acres, they’re going to be a wind farm or a solar facility.

KM: I’m guessing you can already see the problem and the clash that’s about to come.

LS: Somebody locally will stand up and say, “Did you guys look at a map when you picked this site? Do you know that you’re proposing this in an endangered habitat that’s on a map that EPA caused us or the Department of Interior caused us to put together? You had several thousand acres that you were considering and you proposed to put this there?” And the developer turns to their consultant. They raise their shoulders, “I don’t know what they are talking about.” And at that point, who was ever running the local or state review process says, “Uh, we need a break.”

KM: So you might have hundreds of people sitting in a room, Susskind says, just waiting. And the business people have quietly already bought land because they didn’t want the price to get bid up in anticipation of a big industrial project.

LS: In Europe, the government has a plan for where energy production needs to be located and increased, and it’s related to where you’re going to hook the local facility into the larger energy system. Here, these are all private, individual, private judgments. Someone says, “I think I’d like to do a wind farm. I think I’m going to need about 3,000 acres. I guess that means it won’t be in the suburbs. I’ll probably be more in the rural area. I certainly won’t be in the city. I need a lot of acreage.” And so they shop around. They talk to some people. They come up with a plan in detail so that they can assure their investors that we have a legitimate plan and we’re going to get a license or a permit. And we’re following all the rules. And we’ve commissioned an environmental impact study. And environmental impact law says you’re supposed to have a public discussion about what aspects of impacts you’re going to study and how. That doesn’t always happen with energy facilities because, once again, there’s really no interest in letting the community know.

RS: So you’re setting this up in the context of what sounds like a first public encounter, where the developers trying to get this done.

LS: Everything’s been secret until then. Or it’s been controlled by a communications company that they’ve hired and they’re about to announce this and they announce how wonderful this new facility is because it’s going to help with the energy transition. And we promise, they say, we will meet all the minimum requirements, environmental and otherwise, by local law and state law and federal law.

KM: And what percentage of the time would you say that this kind of thing comes up at your local town meeting or whatever, and they say, “Here’s the plan. We’re going to have a whole bunch of solar panels out in this field here. And we haven’t really talked about it before now because, as you said, we don’t want to drive up the price of land. But this is the plan and it’s going to be great.” What percentage of the time do the people in the town meeting say, “Sounds good to us?”

LS: Never.

KM: Okay.

LS: Because they haven’t been given enough information.

KM: Right.

LS: The one thing they say, above all else, is let us see the plans. They’re not for or against anything at that point. They’re just saying, “It’s kind of weird that you’re talking about something at a scale that’s going to change our whole community, and you haven’t shown that to anybody. Have you shown it to the elected officials and not the public?” And conceivably they have, but mostly they use someone as trying to go in between to talk to the head of whatever board, the local zoning board, and say, “You guys aren’t against renewable energy facilities, are you?” So they say,”Well, it looks to us and we looked online and we heard that there’s all kinds of problems for people who live near wind farms. Like, the shutter effect thing is going round and round and at night they hear it and they can’t sleep and they have headaches. We’ve read this. We know this.” Because you can find whatever you want on the Internet. And the developer says, “We’ve chosen a distance that’s best practice.” And they said, “Well, like, what if it turns out that this really makes our house unsellable if we want to move?”

KM: It’s our single biggest investment in our lives buying this house.

LS: “Are you going to buy it at the current market value before the horrible things happen that you’re causing?” “Well, no, we’re not required to do that.” And then somebody else says, “Well, like how many jobs are going to be created during construction and after construction in terms of this facility?” And they have an exact number. And they said, “How many of those are reserved for people who live in the town now?” “Well, we will consider all good applicants.” “No, no. But you’re not going to guarantee that these permanent jobs… or how many people are going to move here during construction or after, and how many kids are they going to add to the school system? And what taxes are you going to pay anyway? Like, are you going to pay an industrial property type of taxes?” And they say things, if they’re in New York State, they say things like, “Well, we’re going to make a payment in lieu of taxes. Those initials are PILOT. We’re going to have a PILOT agreement and it’s going to start with we don’t owe anything because it’s great for us to be building this here as part of your economic development. They said, “How is that help our economic development? You’re putting this thing out here in the rural area so the people in the city can have green electricity at maybe a few cents a kilowatt less, right? What do we get out of it? Do we get free electricity in our community?” “Oh, no, no, no, we don’t do anything like that.” “Well, why should we support this? What’s one reason? It stands to create environmental impacts, because we have no evidence that it won’t. It’s going to affect property values in the area in various kinds of ways, and we might lose all the value of the largest investment that we have. What water are you going to use during construction or after? Does that come with the land?”

RS: I’m never going to be a developer again. So how do you resolve this? I mean, you’ve got all these people that are going to buy all the houses… electricity…

LS: So, I don’t feel like making the whole list. It’s a very long list of potential costs to some people.

KM: Right. The big rigs on their local roads and all this.

LS: It’s a long list of potential adverse impacts. And the developer’s not responsible for those impacts unless they somehow exceed minimum state, not local, state standards. And you can’t know that. So you have a study done, a forecast, and the forecast doesn’t have the data that it really needs. You know about making models. So you plug in some realistic numbers from some other counties nearby and you make a model and you forecast and you say we’re doing everything possible to agree to meet minimum standards. Now, all of that story says that the prevailing view and policy in America is: if the gains to the gainers outweigh the losses to the losers, it’s good public policy. You should go ahead. Too bad for the losers.

The whole region is going to have stable, renewable energy, stable price, renewable energy for at least 30 years. And so it’s a small amount times a million people in the region. There’s like 30 landowners in this tiny rural hamlet. One of those bad things might happen to them. But hey, you got to break some eggs if you want to bake. And they say, “But, that’s not fair. Why should we bear the cost for the region?” “Well, we’re not breaking any minimums.”

KM: So if you step back here, it sounds like you’re describing a situation, obviously, that you see a lot. But is it also a situation that ultimately ends in things falling apart often? That the right person comes in and says, I want to do this, and it does not happen?

LS: We last year did 58 case studies of community controversies over renewable energy facilities in the last five, six, seven years across from Hawaii to Alaska to Maine to Puerto Rico. I would say right now we’re down about 20% of the megawatts that could be running if the projects that had been planned and financed had been able to go ahead, all of them. And there’s energy to do it. Except that people in the group that are adversely affected and people who will side with them because of the unfairness, not letting them know until after the decisions are basically made, not compensating them for likely losses, not mitigating adverse effects as long as you meet minimum standards that the state sets. People side with them and say, “Well, I’m in favor of renewable energy. I want to do something about climate change, but this is not fair.” They’re right to say it’s not fair. Now, very quickly, fast forward to what gets this problem resolved. Very simple. Hold harmless anybody local who’s adversely or likely to be adversely affected as part of the cost of planning and implementing the facility.

RS: What does that mean? Pay them?

LS: It means offer contingent compensation should… buy property value insurance for them. You won’t lose your property value.

KM: So you have a $200,000 house. They don’t know what’s going to happen. It does fall to $100,000. It’s okay. They’re protected. It’s like the property value never fell.

LS: Actually, you get what would have happened if this facility had not been built in that market. That’s just one example. They could say, we’re going to make you 5% owners of the facility, this town, and you’re going to get less expensive electricity as long as you live in this town. This much below what everybody else in the region is being paid. You could make them part owners and then they would be represented amongst the stockholders, not just the stakeholders, at the annual meetings if they didn’t think the place was being run properly and they would bring that local perspective. You could have, and this is my primary focus these days, a community benefits agreement signed with the local government after there was a facilitator or mediated negotiation with representatives of all the relevant parties, not decided by the developer who was relevant. And they negotiate and reach an agreement that becomes a binding contract when it’s signed by the municipalities and submitted by the developer along with their application to the state regulatory agency.

RS: You’re describing a process that’s very different from what you set out for us initially. This initial consultation.

LS: There is nothing required. But what we found is in the places where projects were stopped and the developer went bankrupt and they sold their right to build the facility to a next person, what’s the first thing the next person did? Let me sit down with all the people who were upset with my predecessor and make sure I tend to all those problems and then that project can go forward.

KM: Let me fix this process in the way… Bankruptcy had to have happened first.

LS: It’s not a mystery!

RS: Have the discussion before you have the confrontation.

LS: Yeah.

RS: Rather than make the confrontation the occasion.

LS: Have the regulations changed to require it.

KM: And also, it sounds like even though initially developers might be reluctant to say, “Well, I’ll help you get insurance on your home or I will make you a part owner. I’ll help this community benefit.” It sounds like in general, you must not think that extra $100,000 here or there is going to bankrupt the developer because you’re saying like, “Hey, get out in front of this.” And saying like, “Let me give you some percentage as the town or let me help you to allay your concerns.” And this is going to cost some initial money from the developer, but it doesn’t sound like…

LS: It’s going to save them money.

KM: But, it’s going to save them money. Okay.

LS: It’s the cost of contention.

KM: It is the opposite of the pennywise pound foolish approach.

LS: You’re going to be in court for five years. In that five years, interest rates are going to change. Competition is going to move in in the next town over. All kinds of uncontrollables that your investors are going to say, “Uh-uh, we’re out because this happened while we were waiting around dealing with the disastrous reaction.” And what has happened in the last three years, which is exactly the opposite of what I’m saying, is California and New York and Michigan have changed the sighting law and said, “No more local review of these decisions. It’s going right to the state.” We’re preempting any conversation at the local level.

RS: So they’re putting into law this sort of decision about…

LS: They have. They’re saying, my God, we’re being delayed. People at local levels are opposed. Let’s exclude them from the conversation because we all know the gains to the gainers outweigh the losses to the losers. And the projects really ought to be going ahead.

KM: Like California saying we’re sick of these little towns saying like, no, you can’t have…

LS: And New York.

KM: Yeah, yeah, New York.

LS: New York and California and Michigan. Okay, and now my own state here, Massachusetts, the governor created a commission to streamline the siting process. What she meant was she heard from her pals…

KM: She, the governor?

LS: The governors of New York and California, that this is what you should do. Just exclude local. And what you have in Michigan, when they change their law like California and New York, is the developer should talk to local interests. And if it makes a sincere effort and can’t succeed in finding anyone to talk to, then it should make a contribution of a couple thousand dollars to that town. Honest to God.

KM: That’s not going to go very far.

LS: That’s what they’ve taken out of everything that’s happened. And this was last year. And I’m trying to say that we know a lot about community benefits agreements and how they should be structured and who should be part of negotiating them. And the one thing we know most of all is that they are informal agreements that are not binding and enforceable on anybody if they are made between townspeople, landowners, and the developer. Because those townspeople do not have legal standing to join in the contract. And so unless the municipal government signs it and unless the state is willing to see that it’s enforced, you can have any conversation with anybody. You can promise anything you want and then ignore it. And that has happened. And that is why community benefits agreements, which were made previously, have a bad name.

KM: So, this is fascinating to me. So what is going to happen in a situation like California where there’s some renewable energy project? They go in to some small farm town or ranching town or whatever. What, they’re just going to be like, we want it here. And the State’s going to be like, yeah. And the township is going to be like, No.

LS: They’ll sue.

KM: They’re going to sue. And then what happens?

LS: It’s happening now. After the law was passed a year and a half ago. They’re going to be in court for at least a decade. We have tribes in the West who are suing because the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Land Management told the developer, “Here’s some land. We hold this land for the tribes and it would be great.” If they didn’t consult with the tribe. There’s a law that says you have to consult with tribes if you’re doing anything on their land. I mean, there’s U.S. law and federal law. No matter, they didn’t consult. They proposed it. And as soon as this proposed and the tribe sees it, they said, “That’s sacred land. You got 6,000 acres, you pick the spot that’s a sacred burial area. If only you had talked to us the way you are legally obligated to.” And they said, “Well, we talked to somebody. I know we did. And we can’t change this now because the financing is all in place and duh duh duh duh duh.” And then you’re in court and those projects don’t go forward. There has to be a conversation. The worst case is projects that go ahead and the line from the electricity producing facility to the transmission system goes over the tribal land and they still don’t have electricity for the tribal properties.

RS: Man is that a problem throughout Africa and other developing countries…

LS: I know, but if you said from the beginning, we’ll make sure you have electricity and you’re not going to have to pay for it because we’re using your community’s resources for at least 30 years to make this solar facility, wind facility, whatever it is. But there’s no discussion of this sort. And so the tribes have litigated in many of the Western states saying, “If you had talked to us, we would have told you. We’re not saying we don’t want any change.” And I want to come to this nickname for this whole problem, NIMBY, that people are talking about.

RS: Not in my backyard.

LS: Not in my backyard. And, you know, NIMBYism is about upper middle class folks saying we don’t want change. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the inevitable distribution of adverse effects on a small number of people who, in my mind, in terms of fairness, ought to be held harmless. They not necessarily have to make money out of it, but they at least should be held harmless in terms of the environment, the social impact, the long term cost of electricity to them, and so on. And the regs are not based on that. They’re based on gains to the gainers outweighing the losses to the losers, minimum environmental standards reviewed. Everything else, it’s too bad. And what’s happening is the people for whom it’s too bad are winning the sympathy of the people who are nearby who are saying, “You know, I’m not against this facility at all, but I’ll be damned if I will let my neighbors be treated this way. This is undemocratic.”

But the reason to be optimistic is if you look at the cause of the contentiousness, it’s painfully obvious what needs to happen to eliminate that contentiousness and that cost, which is somebody if it’s the private developer, then so be it, but though I hope they are regulated by the state or even better, the federal government, and they have to talk with the people who might be adversely affected before they make the siting-technology-development-related decisions. And I know that threatens to raise the price of the land that they have to secure the rights to. That forms part of the cost. I also think they could turn what I’m saying back the other way and say, “You know, if we look at prevailing prices in the area, you’re telling me that you want me to pay you that much? That’s twice what you could get from any other source.” And the person says, “Yeah, well, I don’t have anybody else. And you’re sitting here and you’ve got a lot of money.” And then that person could say, “You know, you’re going to make it necessary for me to move to the next county and your community is going to lose the following. And I’m going to make it clear that it was you who lost all that benefit to your community.” So if there were really benefits that had to be negotiated, I think it could be used by the developer as a counterweight to what they worry about, about revealing things early.

RS: So this is, you know, we’re talking about energy infrastructure. And, you know, ultimately, as you say, they can move to the next county if they can’t strike a deal with the county that they’re initially interested in. Stuff can be resited. There are other sunny places, other windy places. What about mining? It’s, you know, it’s really, really central to the energy transition. We need a lot more copper. We need a lot more aluminum and iron for steel. Mines can’t be resited so easily. What’s happened? How do you deal with that?

LS: Same principle. Whoever is in charge of giving the license away for this subsurface mining, which is usually in the capital somewhere, and then some private developers show up with a bunch of equipment and nobody’s talked to the locals and they take out their guns. And they say, “You can’t just come here and start digging. Get out of here. And we mean it.” And then the developer in their comfortable headquarters back in the capital calls the person that gave him the lease for a vast amount of money that goes into the federal kitty and said, “You need to send the army.” And that’s what’s happened.

RS: Is it really?

LS: Absolutely.

KM: Where?

LS: Pick a country where you’ve had mining. You had to have the federal government impose its will on the locals.

KM: Is this largely in Africa that we’re talking about?

LS: No, Latin America. Because the right to take anything below the surface, you need a license and a permit from the national government. The national government makes the deal, gets a whole bunch of money. The developer thinks they can now go start work. Right. Nobody talked to the local community because it’s not required. Again, because the gains to the gainers, in this case, a small number of wealthy government officials, gainers, outweigh the losses to these peasants locally.

KM: Can you give an example of, whether you’ve been involved or not, of this happening in some specific place?

LS: Most of the work that we do as mediators is confidential. We don’t want the press and the media around. We want people to be able to speak without worrying what their compatriots are going to say about them. The agreement is informal. And then when that informal conversation is done, then it moves into a formal context where the developer now makes another proposal to the official regulators. So Chile, they don’t have minerals. They don’t have oil. They don’t have gas.

RS: They have lithium.

LS: They don’t have coal. And it’s a big, long country and the capital is at the top. And a lot of the stuff that they may want to build and make and do is in the south. And they have to run huge country-long transmission lines. And when the government changed three governments ago, they said, “Maybe we should be asking in each region, what’s their idea of how they can contribute to meeting energy demand and need in the country?” And that, of course, comes on the heels of many years of dictatorship where the market made all these decisions. Now, you had several administrations trying to do that. They chose to produce renewable energy in each region in a different way, and they chose to have the regional councils that were set up with multiple interests involved deciding where, when, and how, and what percentage of the benefits, including the sale of the electricity, would go back to the people in that region.

KM: What’s the country that approaches this in a way that you think, I really like that approach? This is my of all the countries I’ve heard about and thinking about where you put a wind facility and and how you do this the right way and how you get buy in…who does it well?

LS: Almost every Scandinavian country.

KM: Okay. And tell me what they do. So. All right. So I land in Finland, what do they do?

LS: They draw the line between public and private in terms of aspects of decision-making. And they have more overall planning, long-range planning, ensuring fairness at the national level. And then they decentralize to local or subnational units—for us, would be states or counties—responsibility for doing the stuff. It’s not socialization in terms of taking over the doing of this stuff. It’s nationalization and more emphasis on public and public/private partnership for planning. We don’t believe in planning in the United States. We don’t have planning. Having to teach in the planning department…but that’s another story. And then if you plan, then you can say, “Sustainability is the outcome of a lot of stuff happening separately. We have to look at how all those things relate.”

KM: Okay. So, you know, we were talking before about little towns or like what you want to put what here and like that could affect that. How if you live in a little town in Finland, how do you feel better with the same kind of wind facility right nearby? How do they do it?

LS: There are two parts to the answer to that. The first is what people expect to happen in their lives is they expect to be treated fairly. And they believe, if you say, what’s your attitude toward the government right now? You would have in the U.S., the majority of people saying, “We don’t trust the government. We don’t think the government operates fairly. We don’t like it.” Because we polarize that discussion and it’s lost trust and faith in government. That trust and faith exists in those places. So there’s starting with a comfort level about, well, if something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen because the decision was made in a transparent, accountable way designed to maximize the public interest. We believe that. We know that. I’m not arguing there’s no corruption. I’m not arguing they don’t make some mistakes because they lean in one direction or another at the moment because of political benefits or gains. But in general, the public starts with an expectation that when government does something, it’s done in a fair, accountable, transparent way aimed at maximizing the shared or common interest of the public.

KM: Okay. So part one: expectations.

LS: Then the processes that they rely on are to create citizen advisory councils for everything. And they don’t pick, it’s not a blue ribbon committee chosen by the mayor. It’s ensuring that all the different interests…I work with indigenous groups in Scandinavia, they have lots of concerns that they are not being treated fairly, right? But they’re in a discussion. They’re in a dialog. They’re at the table. They may not be happy with the balance of what’s happened and they certainly have good arguments historically, but contemporaneously, there’s a public advisory process at the local level which is taken seriously. And the law in the EU, the law about public engagement is really clear. We don’t have any laws about public engagement in America.

KM: So I think you told me you’re an optimist, but I feel like a lot of what we’ve talked about worries me because, you know, we talk so much to scientists sort of moving something out of the lab and then we have to think about how do you manufacture something, you know, at scale. But then there’s obviously this whole other piece of it, which is then you have to put it into practice somewhere and somebody lives near there wherever there is. Don’t you worry that at least that the U.S., we just like, we just don’t have a decent process for doing this? And you mentioned before, like we’re maybe way below capacity on the energy we could produce because of basically fights between the people who live here and there and the developers.

LS: When, not if, when the university redefines its role the way we have as providing a neutral space and joint fact-finding capabilities and teaming up with not-for-profit providers of facilitation services, the question of who’s going to help make this happen in each locality is solved.

KM: You think universities are the place, like the neutral place that, you know…

LS: We’re not used to thinking about the university in that role, but over the last three years, I’ve been part of an effort to create in universities cybersecurity for critical urban infrastructure training programs. And we just started one at MIT. We said we’ll teach students to facilitate cybersecurity improvement at the local level and will offer our services free to any municipality that doesn’t know what to do or doesn’t know how to proceed. And we’ve been doing that for five years. And Google came along and said, “That’s a really good idea. I see you’ve formed an association of 12 universities that are now doing the same thing in cybersecurity, offering not for profits and communities assistance in dealing with their vulnerabilities to cyber attack, which are growing dramatically and which raise huge financial loss possibilities.” And they said, “Here’s $20 million. Find another 20 places.” Which we’ve done. So now there’s an association of all this. This is in less than five years. There’s the possibility for any municipality to get free assistance from a university that has technically capable people. But cybersecurity adjustments are not primarily technical problems. They’re primarily local political decisions about who’s going to have control over what. What’s the change in the chain of command when you’re attacked? Who’s going to be in charge? What money are you going to spend to staff security? It’s not IT. It’s a whole new line in the budget. “My God, we don’t have any money to do that.” And it’s very controversial to make the obvious improvements that are going to protect. And we go to communities that have been attacked and had to pay huge ransoms because they were victims of ransom and they didn’t do anything after. They’re absolutely every bit as vulnerable as they were the day they were attacked.

RS: Because they still don’t have the resources.

LS: They don’t have the capacity.

KM: But the idea is hire education…

LS: A university. I view what I’m doing in training these folks as the same thing that a law school does when it creates a legal clinic or a medical school does when it creates a medical clinic. We’re creating cyber security clinics. Now we’re doing a renewable energy clinic. We need to formalize and allow the process because it isn’t normally in this hyper-politicized context where nobody trusts the government or vast numbers of people don’t trust the government. They don’t trust the university either. Vast majority of people do no longer trust university. And when I say we’re going to play a neutral role and provide a neutral space and make our scientific and technical stuff available equally to all sides. “Oh yeah, right.” And we have to prove it.

KM: Right. It’s funny, I mean, rulemaking, improving process, it’s like the least sexy part of government stuff.

I have an MIT question for you. So you work alongside all these technologists, many of whom are very interested in trying to create clean, renewable energy. Do you think people are aware of, you know, what that sort of last mile, so to speak, looks like? Like here they are really hard at work at trying to change the planet and they’ve come up with something and it’s going to be great. Do you think they know what implementation is going to look like or are they very disconnected from that?

LS: I think they have been disconnected. I think they are becoming more aware because they’re hearing from the sponsors of their work. “You got anybody over there that can be part of your team on how to build a better wind turbine who could figure out how the hell we get permission to build the facility once we have the better turbines?”

And we now have a new climate initiative with the new president that I think is going to ensure that a work on a fair transition or a just transition is what happens. Not just do we have the latest model for forecasting what the adverse effects are going to be if you don’t do what we say. I have confidence because I see in the hiring of new staff, even in science and engineering, when you look at the bios, which, you know, 15 new people just hired in the engineering school, you look at those bios, two thirds of those people have, in fact, as part of their background, done work where they could be part of a collaboration. That’s new.

KM: We had talked in the beginning about a really interesting example in the U.S. of, you know, sort of factionalism and whatever. I mean, I think a little bit about the Cape Wind thing, because it’s here, it’s in the Massachusetts area. But do you want to talk about an example that might be really interesting about, you know, looking at how there’s this sort of factionalism when some sort of energy project comes to town?

LS: I have to be careful because all of my interventions guarantee anonymity. But imagine a place that’s real in Massachusetts. On the shore. And it has a newly elected town government. And the town government is really concerned about the future of offshore wind and what it means to this town. Big cables have to come across their land to get connected to the transmission system. Will all the tourism that they currently have be lost because all the views out the hotels are going to be obstructed by floating turbines?

So this town is saying we don’t want to wait around and see what happens. We want to have some way of being in conversation with offshore wind developmers. We have no power over offshore wind developers, but we want to be in conversation with them. We want to be in conversation with the state that’s ultimately going to give permissions and the federal agencies that are going to have to give permissions. And we want to be able to draw together people from all across our town. And have them be involved. It isn’t going to be one meeting and it’ll be an extended task force and we want to be able to do it in a way that’s open to the rest of the public so that it can become excited about it and become part of this.

RS: So this isn’t a defensive play. This is a how can we be part of this in a way that we accept?

LS: Yes. I chose to take your question to model something that I know is real. And this leadership is interested in neighboring towns and how it could perhaps involve them subsequently in a collaborative discussion which might ultimately lead to representation of local interests in offshore wind in coastal Massachusetts.

So they’ve come to the clinic and we are in the process of not only negotiating with them about what we can do to staff and help them do this, but we’re trying to put them in touch with people at the appropriate federal agencies who also are concerned about what the future of conversations are going to be with local governments on offshore wind in New England. And we’re trying to say that the federal agencies should fund this locality’s efforts to staff and do all this work. It shouldn’t just depend on our being able to volunteer students in one course. Especially because I think based on what they’re proposing, we might be able to recruit at this early stage a whole slew of municipal leaders if this first one and what they’re doing could be presented in the right way and if resources for this could be coming from the federal government. And once the federal government expresses interest, I promise the state government is going to follow and want to be part of it and offer some funds, probably federal funds that it has to assist.

So even in the context we’ve been talking about, everybody’s out to protect themselves, reduce their costs. You have the opportunity for leadership to not be against or for anything, but to create a different kind of dialog aimed at consensus, facilitated appropriately, supported through joint-fact finding and maybe even intergovernmental from its beginning.

KM: And when a developer comes to this town, I assume they haven’t yet.

LS: They have.

KM: They have? So how is that going? Is it better because the town had sort of talked through, here’s what we are interested in?

LS: The old leadership of the town is the old leadership and the new leadership is the new leadership because the old leadership didn’t talk to the developers in a way that the majority of the community was happy about. I’m just going to leave it at that. Okay. There. Whichever stand they took, that’s why they’re not the leadership anymore. It was explicitly about this issue.

KM: So the new leadership has a more adversarial stance?

LS: The new leadership says, “We’re going to tend to the interests of the whole community.”

KM: Okay.

LS: And we are going to prepare ourselves.

KM: Okay. The new leadership is the people who are prepping.

LS: The old leadership just took a stand.

KM: And is that going to result in a more in…?

LS: I think it’s going to make the developer incredibly happy. Okay. And they’re not being asked to fund this process. That’s the last thing that we would want. But they can attend. They can be part of it, but there’s no discussion going to happen of their project at this time.

RS: This is the great example to conclude with I think. They are framing the future of how they’re going to have wind, if they’re going to have wind, in terms of the benefits that it will bring to the community in a way that works for the developer. And that seems to me this sort of recognition of costs and benefits and not winners and losers, but everybody winning.

LS: But I would also point out that because we’re looking at this subject, hopefully we’ll be looking at this subject in depth, in its entirety, there might be a possibility that wind energy would come to this in this municipality. Not just about what offshore wind means to them. What wind power means. Because, we do have examples. I mean, the city of Gloucester, Mass. 95% of all public electricity costs are covered by one turbine that is built on industrial land that that municipality built. It’s gigantic. And it was very controversial, but it was done in the way that I’m describing. And everyone in town is very aware that that affects their tax rates.

KM: Larry Susskind is professor of urban environmental planning at MIT. He’s the publisher of the Public Interest technologist at MIT. Larry, thank you so much.

RS: Thanks, Larry.

LS: Thank you both and I very much appreciate your doing the whole series. I think it’s terrific.

KM: What if it works? is a production of the MIT Energy Initiative. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes and a lot more at energy.mit.edu/podcasts and you can learn more about the work of the Energy initiative and the energy transition at energy.mit.edu. Our original podcast artwork is by Zeitler Design. Special thanks to all the people at MITEI and MIT who make this show possible. I’m Kara Miller.

RS: And I’m Rob Stoner.

KM: Thanks for listening.