Green Giants – Episode 20

Bridging Divides: Julia McPherson of EDPR on Transforming Community Relations in Renewable Energy

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Transcript

Wes Ashworth (00:24)

Welcome to another episode of Green Giants, Titans of Renewable Energy. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Julia McPherson, the Community Relations Manager at EDP Renewables. Julia plays a critical role in building and nurturing relationships between EDPR North America and the communities where their wind farms, solar parks, and battery storage projects are developed and operated. She and her team focus on cultivating trust and open communication with local stakeholders from the earliest stages of development through the operational life of these projects. Julia, welcome to the show.

Julia McPherson (00:52)

Thanks for having me.

Wes Ashworth (00:53)

Yeah, of course. So we’ll start out. So you’ve been with EDPR North America for five years, currently serve as a community relations manager. Can you share just a bit about your journey in the renewable energy industry and then what really led you to focus on community relations?

Julia McPherson (01:07)

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always been passionate and interested in using language and writing to reach people and encourage caring about something they may not have cared about to begin with. And I started working at a pretty traditional PR firm, doing work for tech clients, food and bev, just regular consumer PR. And it wasn’t a solid fit for me just because I felt like I was helping sell widgets for selling widgets sake.

It was hard for me personally to feel all that invested in the work, so Renewable Energy caught my eye as something that was just, a true passion for me personally. And that made it so much more interesting and motivating for me to do the work. So I had an opportunity to join the EDPR team in the external communications department. This was, you know, five years ago, we were quite a bit smaller, we were organized differently. And external communications did absolutely everything external facing, marketing, media relations, PR, community relations, all of it.

Graphic design too, I was in graphic design for a while. Yeah, so was sort of wild, but it was a great sort of crash course in a whole bunch of different external facing facets of the industry. But it quickly became clear that my most interesting work that I was doing was when I was working directly with developers and local stakeholders about our projects and getting into the hairy, know, when it gets really emotional and personal for the stakeholders and they’re dealing with, more existential concerns about the future of their community and their farms and trying to make those relationships was way more interesting. So we had an opportunity to create community relations, which I was allowed to lead, and put it in government affairs. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few years now.

Wes Ashworth (02:32)

Yeah, that’s awesome. And I always love the stories, like combining passion with skill. And I think that’s really where you find your sweet spot in your career when that alignment is there. And I really view community relations, it’s like the unsung hero of the industry and is so important. And that’s why I love the focus of this episode. And this may be really obvious to some, but I love just getting to the why behind it, right? And why should someone care? Why should someone pay attention? But I would love to hear your perspective on this. So why is community relations so important to the success and the growth of the renewable energy industry?

Julia McPherson (03:06)

And I’m glad you asked because it is sort of a common misconception that community relations and sort of an older way of thinking about the business of community relations as like a nice to have, nowadays it really isn’t. It is critical to getting these projects permitted and getting steel on the ground, especially for a long term owner operator like EDPR where, you know, we develop it, we build it, and then we also are the company owning and operating in most cases for the decades long lifespan. We have to have a good relationship with the communities who are in our product areas. We can’t get it permitted without them.

And we can’t, you know, we don’t want to have a contentious relationship with our ops team and that community for 35 years. It’s a business case for us to be able to do it. A point that is a big point of pride for the company is that about two dozen of our projects are multiple phase projects, meaning we built one phase of the wind farm or solar park and then came back a few years later to add on another one. And we can’t do that without communities being happy with how the whole process went.

And that, you know, again, is a business reason for why this work is really important.

Wes Ashworth (04:01)

Yeah, and I think we’ve all heard those stories of a project where everything was done right, from start to finish, all those, you look at those pieces and they’re all there and the project fell apart because of the community relations element, you know, that not enough time was put into that, not enough investment, not enough, focus, as you said, it’s like some companies view it as a nice to have or some must to have. And I would agree, I think it’s an absolute must in today’s world. So yeah, I love that and I’d love to dig into it a bit further.

So when we spoke previously, you mentioned your passion between really bridging the rural urban divide and depoliticizing community relations as well. What are the biggest challenges you face in this area and how have you successfully navigated them?

Julia McPherson (04:43)

Yeah, I think it’s, you know, the moment that we’re at right now is the product of decades of very deliberate, you know, money and politics type issues and really politicizing renewable energy and having it be heavily, heavily, I mean, it’s no secret that’s heavily aligned with the left is the perception. And a lot of the communities that we’re developing in by nature, they’re, you know, they have to have a lot of big open land. So you’re usually in a more rural area, which on paper just factually is typically more conservative leaning.

And so that already puts us a little bit at odds there with that perception. And with people’s, the way that modern media landscape is segmented and people, you know, find their media channel and they kind of stick with it and then it gets more extreme, more extreme, no matter which segment you’re in, but in the rural communities are typically more on the conservative side one. And then when you have leaders of political movements deliberately articulating this misinformation, that certainly doesn’t help you, but at the end of the day, we all, regardless of your political alignment, we want the lights to turn on, we flick the switch, we want there to be power for our entire world.

So energy really shouldn’t be a partisan issue and trying to get back to that base of like, as Americans, we all want a reliable, diversified, stable energy grid that works when we need it. And clean energy is just a part of that equation. So, you know, trying to overcome that divide, it’s sort of…

two main avenues there. Building trust, we have to do that first. If we don’t have any trust at all, we’re already coming in with not a whole lot of trust at the outset because of our entrenched differences. And so we need to establish a modicum of trust and good faith so we can have a conversation. And then in that conversation, it’s more about getting outside of the political rhetoric and unnecessary flashpoint language and trying to get it back to the base of, you know, this is an energy project that’s going to bring a bunch of power onto your local grid, it’s not going to pollute your air, water, or soil, and it’s going to bring some revenue to your community. And getting outside, don’t typically talk about, we never say green energy, just because that’s a flash point for communities, rhetorically. We don’t ever talk about climate change, because we just don’t need to be. That’s not really the point of what we’re doing. We’re building a project. And it’s just erecting unnecessary barriers to building trust and having good conversations.

Wes Ashworth (06:50)

Yeah, I love that and I love just the entire focus on depoliticizing it and I don’t know, it’s one of these things that came up, doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s like we all need energy. And regardless of your motive behind that, right? Some people genuinely really do care about decarbonization and the environment and building a sustainable planet and all those sort of things. And it’s cool, there’s 100% a place for that. But even if you don’t, it’s okay.

It’s okay to support renewable energy, we still need the extra energy, we still need these clean sources coming online and all this sort of stuff. Again, excited to hear your perspective more on this as we go, but I think this is such a cool area and I think a message that needs to be out there. Like it doesn’t matter which side of the fence you’re on. It’s okay to support it and we need to, and there’s reasons behind that. So kind of furthering that, thinking about maybe some of these specific issues are really how do you approach that challenge of depoliticizing renewable energy projects in some of those areas, as you said, where maybe they are more rural areas, maybe there is a bit more skepticism there, a bit more opposition already walking in. I guess what messaging strategies have proven most effective? And you shared a couple there, but if you can expand on that would be great as well.

Julia McPherson (08:08)

Yeah, definitely. And I think an important piece just beyond the messaging is also the showing up. It’s critical to spend time in the communities face to face and show up. There’s not a shortcut for that, you know, the years of this era and development where allegedly we could kind of sneak a project through, that’s not how we wanted to be doing business and we also just can’t do it that way anymore and we absolutely have to show up and talk to people, and that’s how you figure out your messaging strategy.

You know, they’re generally on paper, like of course we have polling data and we kind of have a general assumption of how things probably are going to resonate the best in certain communities, but they’re all a little bit different. They all have their own history, their own cultural touch points, their own inherent concerns based off of their economic histories and different things like that. And so it’s really critical to spend time in the communities before you really start doing a whole bunch of external messaging. Before we start talking, we have to be listening is kind of what I’m getting at. So to figure out what we’re going to say and how we’re going to connect the best, we have to just spend time learning from folks.

So learning from your landowners are really great resources to begin with, local officials, local economic development people, but even project neighbors and just regular people in the community, who don’t have an inherent stake in the project. Developers sometimes have an instinct to jump into a selling mode off the bat. And that is kind of getting over your skis. And you need to take a step back, listen first, establish yourself as a good faith, you know, it’s okay that obviously, yes, we are different, we come from different worlds, we don’t know how your life is, but we are showing up really caring and trying to learn that. And that piece is really, really critical. And it informs what your messaging is gonna be.

So, you know, of course there’s the asterisk of communities are all different and they have their own interests and their own priorities. So that’s why that in -person piece is really, really critical. But, back to the, there are some general assumptions that we can make based on polling data and our own experiences and what we’ve seen work really well. And typically, you know, it’s finding what aspects of renewable energy align well with what we know on paper the general values of that community to be. Typically, we’re in rural areas, typically, they’re more agricultural, so typically, there’s more of a deeper value of tradition, history, a lot of pride in feeding the country, empowering the country and tying what our clean energy projects can provide to that value. It’s also really patriotic, really proud to be American communities and pointing to how our projects can connect to strengthening the country because we’re really powering America.

And in these areas, I mean, I’ve heard from some of our landowners, directly, some in Ohio, some in Texas, that they take an immense amount of pride of being, a seventh generation farmer whose their whole family legacy has been feeding the country, and now they get to feed the country and power the country by having a solar or a wind lease. So finding those kinds of opportunities where you can really connect with what’s important to them and what the projects can bring is really important.

Wes Ashworth (10:43)

Yeah, no, I love that. Are there some other things? So you mentioned you go into these communities, right? And you’re listening first, you’re hearing their thoughts, maybe their concerns or their values, You mentioned a few things that you don’t say. And I think that’s interesting in terms of the things like you’re walking into this community.

Are there any other sort of blanket rules of kind of like, yeah, we tend to not go in heavy with this, we phrase it this way or that way? Like are there any other kind of tried and true things that you’ve found?

Julia McPherson (11:18)

Generally it’s just anything that’s heavily aligned with the more controversial or opinionated political stuff.

Of course, you know, it almost goes without saying, but avoiding any references to any direct politicians. And this isn’t just like us trying to obscure parts of the industry because it’s not what it is. It’s just these things aren’t relevant to what we’re talking about. And sometimes, you know, very super well-intentioned, fresh out of college, really enthusiastic developers typically get into this industry because they really care about climate change and decarbonization. And that to them is what’s the most important and interesting and so they wanna talk about it, but that’s kinda coming out backwards. So you’re not listening first, understanding what they care about, and so that just kind of further emphasizes how different you are and can really make it hard to make that connection.

Because there’s some baseline things that we’re always gonna be different. A lot of us are, it’s rare for us to be working in a community anywhere close to where we live. I’m based in Oregon. Technically I live in Portland, Oregon. I generally don’t mention that I live in Portland, Oregon because Portland specifically has become so heavily, it was a subject a few years ago, quite a bit of media attention. I have family, I’m from North Carolina originally, and I have family still in North Carolina, and they were saying, they were seeing, you know, they saw Portland on the news and was I okay? So I was looking outside like, yeah, everything seems fine. So just, you know, trying to get past all of that unnecessary, like politicized emotional clutter that it’s just distracting from what we’re actually trying to work with here and positioning it. Everything we’re doing is community and stakeholder led.

And so it’s not putting yourself first, not putting your own priorities first. It’s figuring out where their interests, concerns, anxieties are and working from there.

Wes Ashworth (12:53)

Yeah, absolutely. And kind of like that basic rule of knowing your audience, right? Like you’ve got to know what’s important to them and you maybe coming in and thumping about the environment and, know, green this and green that and sustainability and everything else, that may not speak to them. So you have to take a different angle,

Julia McPherson (12:57)

Yeah, and if you do, if that is, you know, whether you are a developer who wants to preach about green energy and how much you love combating climate change and decarbonizing our energy landscape, or we also have plenty of employees, I mean, we’re headquartered in Houston, Texas, and we have quite a few employees who came from oil and gas, or they have spouses who still work in oil and gas. So they personally aren’t that motivated necessarily by climate and the environment.

No matter which developer you get, the end result that we’re going for is turbines in the ground, solar panels in the ground. So just trying to make it less personal about where you’re personally coming from, make it more about the communities you’re trying to work in.

Wes Ashworth (13:40)

Yeah, cool. No, that’s fantastic. So you went into this a little bit and I would like to expand on it. So there’s often a misconception that renewable energy is at odds with traditional industries like farming, as you mentioned. How do you counter this narrative, I guess, specifically and maybe demonstrate the economic benefits of renewable energy to local communities, you know, with farming or a similar type of industry?

Julia McPherson (14:02)

Yeah, think kind of two, going to talk about two things here. There’s the on paper benefits that are important and tend to be very statistics driven, know, things like our tax payments, our landowner payments,  a lot of developers will do kind of the first level of that communication of, know, this project is going to bring $35 million into your tax base over the life of the project. It’s going to pay landowners $50 million of left product, whatever, those numbers are kind of too big to be, they’re important, but if they’re articulated like that, it’s too big and also nonspecific to be very tangible. Like you don’t really know what that means. There’s also not as much faith in local government as there used to be, and so we’ve incurred some skepticism with seeing if they’re even gonna get that money in the end.

And so it’s much more effective to, you know, we do economic impact studies. It’s pretty easy for us to look at the tax code and figure out where our tax payments are gonna be going, not to diminish the work for our tax team, I’m sure it’s complicated. They give me a very neat and tidy chart, and I’m very appreciative. It’s much more effective to be able to say, you know, yeah, over the lifespan of sort of $35 million, but what I can also tell you is your kids’ school district in the first year is going to get $1 million, which is equivalent to like 10 teachers. Just trying to make the data that we do have much more tangible and understandable. And then when it comes to farming and agriculture, you know, we aren’t farmers, generally.

Most of our employees aren’t farmers in the renewable energy industry, and so being very humble and aware of where your knowledge limits are, but also relying on, know, we at this point have been doing, the industry has been alive and kicking pretty strong for a couple of decades now. And we know how farmers can work with our projects. We’ve heard anecdotes from farmers, we know how it works. I mean, for wind energy, it’s a pretty simple pitch because once construction’s over, they can just keep doing it as they were, aside from the turbine pad, can farm, grow crops, they can graze cattle right at the base of turbine.

I’ve spent plenty of time on some of our cattle ranches in Texas and their cows like to line up in the shade of the turbines because in open Texas prairies, not a whole lot of shade. And they just kind of follow the turbine shadow throughout the day like a little sundial, it’s really cute. And for crops, I mean, they can just keep farming right to the base of the turbine. So it’s just an additional revenue source on the same piece of land. So it’s very simple, just, you know, it’s guaranteed reliable. It hedges against the ups and downs of agriculture.

For solar, it’s a little bit different because the land use is different. There are some really great innovative opportunities occurring in the agri-voltaics realm, but generally for most of the big utility scale projects, it is still the more traditional, largely fenced off panels on some land where the farmers aren’t actively farming that area anymore. But, the land, they’re just panels on steel piles in the ground, so at the end of the project’s lifespan, all that can come back out, it can go back to farming again. But during the farming, you know, during the product’s lifespan, it’s also very uncommon for a landowner to be leasing all of their lands to a solar park. It’s much more common for them to be leasing a small portion of their land. And so they keep farming their other area, but then this one stable area of the solar park is just generating consistent, reliable, constant income, which gives them a huge insurance policy for the rest of their project.

It helps hedge against the ups and downs of ag, like I mentioned, it also gives them, I’ve heard from a landowner in South Carolina that he was able to use the revenue from his solar park lease to buy a tree farm. So he was able to expand his agricultural footprint in the area. And we’ve heard from some where they can upgrade equipment, they can put a kid through college. So it just gives them more opportunities for their ag operation and helps it be more sustainable when there are some unforeseen challenges with weather, crop prices, input prices, all of those things.

Wes Ashworth (17:11)

And I think something you hit on earlier in that was the tie to how it personally benefits that person. And I think that’s people as unselfish as we try to be. think your first thought is like, what’s in it for me? And so if you give some big, huge number, it doesn’t always mean much, right? But when you hear the school getting money and how that’s affecting your child’s education and how they can provide more teachers or technology or the things that they need, or that landowner that can put their kid through college. Those are the things for me that, those are really powerful. And I think that’s a key component where some people stay really high level in those messages. And here’s the benefit to the overall community, breaking that down a little bit further. What is it for that individual? And I think that’s really, really powerful.

Julia McPherson (18:01)

And if I can add one thing on that point also, it’s much more effective also when we’re able to have our own landowners be the ones telling those stories. We understand that we’re not going to be inherently baseline as trustworthy, because clearly we have a financial stake in the game. We have a really great track record to point to of us being a good faith company who does great work, but of course people are going to be skeptical. But if we have landowners who can, it’s their story to tell, if they’re the ones who can put a voice to how it directly impacted them, how it went for them, of course, there are probably some headaches in construction that they can talk about, but they can also talk about how it worked really well with Ag, because they’re the farmer, speaking farmer to farmer, and that always works so much better.

Wes Ashworth (18:47)

Yeah, love that. Get them telling the story, right? And I do want to transition a little bit to addressing some of the concerns out there and misinformation. I think this is a great avenue to be able to do that. So just some overall health and environmental concerns. You hear these popping up. What are the most common health and environmental concerns that you hear from communities? And then how do you address these concerns effectively and maybe sort of like, give the concern and then here’s how we address it or here’s how we may overcome that concern.

Julia McPherson (19:12)

Yeah,these do vary a bit from the different technologies, but I think that wind and solar have their own challenges and the industry likes to just kind of debate amongst themselves which one’s harder to develop. From a community relations standpoint, people like wind projects have a reputation for being really hard to do from a community relations standpoint. I personally have a sort of a slight preference for wind because its connection with agriculture is stronger and it works better. But also a lot of these folks that we’re dealing with in communities, it’s just on paper. They tend to work with their hands and are more mechanically inclined in general. So it’s easier for them to wrap their head around how a wind turbine actually works.

They get it, they understand how the rotors work, they understand how it’s generating electricity and that helps demystify it. Whereas with solar, it’s very rare for people to have a solid grasp as a lay person outside of the industry of how a solar panel is actually working. And that’s where a lot of the concerns come from is this lack of familiarity with like, what is it even doing?

And so that can just make it inherently a bit scarier. So for wind, a lot of it is more concern around the sound and the visual impact. And same for solar for visual impact, I guess for any of the technologies. And there’s not a whole lot we can do if you just don’t like what it looks like. For solar, we can do some visual screening and with sighting, you know, with the topography of the land and how we’re sighting it with setbacks we may be able to kind of disguise it a bit. Wind turbines, they’re not exactly discreet, and so if you don’t like how they look, there’s not a whole lot we can do about that, unfortunately.

But when it comes to sound, we often hear, and I think a lot of it is fueled by online videos and just, you can’t tell how loud something is in the world when you just see a video of it online. I’m sure you’re well aware of this because you edit audio with podcasts, but I was at an open house a couple months ago in Wisconsin where people were showing me, they found videos on YouTube of hearing wind turbines and it sounded like a garbage disposal or like a plane taking off. It’s like, well, it’s a video on your phone, so the person could have cranked the audio up. That’s, know, you might not believe me, but I can assure you that I have been in the middle of like one of our 1000 megawatt projects in Indiana and it just doesn’t sound like that. So what’s really powerful for wind turbines is trying to, if people haven’t been to a site before, take them to an operating site and let them see it, hear it, listen to our technicians, talk about how they work. And that can really help demystify it.

Because of course, it’s big, it’s different, it’s going to look different. And it represents a very big change to a community that typically hasn’t seen a whole lot of change in a very long time. And especially in a community that really values history and tradition, that is a really tough sell. So giving them just also some processing time to kind of wrap their heads around what’s coming can make a huge difference. There’s also patently bunk science around wind turbine syndrome, which has been disproved for decades, but we do still see that come up pretty frequently, this idea that the sound of wind turbines is going to have these negative health effects. These health effects that are reported do directly align with the health effects of anxiety disorders and being constantly stressed, so, and it’s, you know, if you are constantly stressed and upset, that has negative health effects. So there’s that when it comes to wind.

I won’t tell you that you don’t feel worse when you look at wind turbines, but it might not be the turbine itself. For solar panels, it tends to be more concerns around heat island effect when it comes to the environmental aspect, and I think this is getting back to just not as much widespread understanding of how a solar panel works and trying to apply concepts that they already do know and applying to a solar park, like solar panels are dark in color, and we know in general that dark things get hotter, which with the solar panels is a little bit true, but it doesn’t extend beyond the solar park. And so it’s applying ideas of urban heat island effect and imagining that being what’s going to happen in this field in your rural community, and that’s not the case. There’s been studies and they’ve looked at the heat island effect, there is a slight, slight variation in temperature with the solar park.

It mostly just kind of stabilizes it versus day and night where it would be a higher spike and then a lower drop, it kind of more stabilizes it, and it doesn’t extend outside the footprint of the solar park. So it’s not creating some heat dome effect or anything like that. That’s what we hear a lot.

Wes Ashworth (23:10)

Yeah, any other ones just commonly like you sort of hear day in and day out or kind of these major concerns.

Julia McPherson (23:17)

Some of the other concerns that we hear, and mostly it’s when something happens in one, like a really extreme weather event happens near a solar park. For example, several months ago at this point, there was a really crazy tornado hail storm situation that happened in Texas, and it did create some pretty horrifying images of solar panels shattered across a huge area in Texas, and so people experience hail all over the country, and so they heard it was a hail storm and then are concerned that, we get hail here, so that just gonna completely chop up all these solar panels in our area? And it’s missing that original context, right?

And that’s usually what’s happening is something happened in one place, like with a lot of misinformation stories we hear in all kinds of different industries and topics today. There’s a small grain of truth somewhere and then it gets taken way out of context and blown up in a different way. And that’s what’s kinda happened here, is that yes, extreme hail can damage solar panels. That storm in Texas, it was so strong, it had also ripped off the roofs of nearby houses. So that’s not like a regular hail storm, so it did damage some solar panels, it damaged a lot of stuff in that area, not just the solar park. And what is actually kind of cool is that a lot of solar panels, I mean, it’s baseline required for them to be tested for hail resistance. They have to sustain a certain number of like two inch, roughly two inch sized hail balls. And like a two inch hail stone is pretty big, and EDPR’s panels have to withstand, believe, nine strikes of a two -inch hailstone.

So if you think about, just on a single solar panel, nine strikes of a two -inch hailstone, that’s extremely heavy hail. And we’re talking about a utility -scale project, that’s across thousands of solar panels. And so for it to be that much hail concentrated that heavily, that’s an insane storm. there’s not storms like that, typically. And of course then also they’re insured, they have an operations crew to maintain them, if anything does happen, they’ll fix it, all that stuff. But it’s one of those situations where, you know, like a lot of hot button topics today, it started with a real thing and then it got taken out of context and blown up in sort of a crazy way.

Wes Ashworth (25:10)

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, and it’s like, don’t make, you know, I guess blanket assumptions just on one isolated, you know, very rare event, right? At the end of the day. So yeah, that’s cool. And I want to go back to something you touched on earlier, which is the importance of that face -to -face interaction. I know we talked about this previously. This was really interesting in the approach but you really have emphasized the importance of that face-to-face interaction in community engagement. Can you share some examples of how this approach has made a significant difference in the projects that you’ve been a part of and why is that so critical?

Julia McPherson (25:46)

Yeah, definitely. I mean, in these communities, they’re typically pretty accustomed to, you know, they’re tight-knit, they’re small. Usually it’s the same people that you’ve known your whole life, and then when outsiders come in, of course you’re going to be a little bit like, who are you? What’s your deal? And so just giving them time to get used to us and we can learn from them and demystify and kind of debunk some of the assumptions that they might be making about us as outsiders, but also through those conversations, if we’re able to establish a good rapport early on with landowners, with local community leaders, with local officials, and figure out what their community needs are, we can figure out really cool opportunities of how we can collaborate. You know, for example, in Indiana for a project, there was a beloved historic amusement park, Indiana Beach. And it had quit operating because of finances, and they were looking for a new buyer, but it seemed like the park was going to go away just because they couldn’t find somebody to invest and buy it. But because of our wind farms and development at the time and we had a really good relationship with the county officials, we were able to use some of the wind turbine funds that we regularly give to the county through our tax structure and our benefit agreement to go towards incentivizing a buyer for Indiana Beach, and it worked out. So because we, you know, had this good relationship and good dialogue, we could figure out what they needed and how we could shape what we’re offering to align with what they needed.

So not just assuming we know what their needs are and finding creative opportunities to do that. Kind of similarly in Randolph County, Indiana, we through good relationships and conversations with local leaders figured out that utility assistance funds were really desperately needed in the area. And so we structured a community benefit agreement that it’s sort of a pilot of a payments in lieu of taxes structure. We still pay taxes, but it was slightly different, and so we set aside those funds that go every year, six figures go into this utility assistance fund paid for by the solar park to help local residents in the area who are having trouble meeting their utility bills.

And so it’s only through establishing those face-to-face community relationships can we have, that baseline trust that’s critical, but then also figure out ways we can make it even better and make it a better long -term harmonious partnership with these communities and our company since we’re going to be neighbors for like decades.

Wes Ashworth (27:32)

Yeah, no, I love it. And one thing you mentioned is implementing the CRC program, which is Community Relations Coordinators, to strengthen those local ties. Can you tell us about what that is, how they came about, and then how has it been received, and what impact has it had to your projects?

Julia McPherson (28:01)

Yeah, definitely. This is something that I started a couple years ago at this point. It’s been slowly scaling up, but we’ve always recognized the critical role that face-to-face, I’m a broken record now, but face-to-face interaction has in the community. And we also recognize that even if we are spending quite a bit of time in these areas, we’re still never going to understand the community as much as a local resident will. They are going to have the real, unfiltered, clear-eyed understanding of what their community cares about, is worried about, needs, all those things, so we started trying to find some early supporters of a project. Kind of the only real requirement is that they want to see our solar park or wind farm come to their area and that they are well connected in their community. They have a really good pulse on the community and they become our local liaison. So we’ve contracted a few CRCs across North America. We have some throughout the Midwest, we have one in Arizona right now.

But their job is to tell us what’s going on in the community, what opportunities are coming up that we could participate in and collaborate in, they attend local meetings for us and tell us what their key priorities are. So it helps us fill in the gaps that we can’t always be there all the time in these communities. And they help us fill in the gaps and also have a better, more transparent understanding of what locals are feeling and talking about and what their anxieties are. And it also, it’s, these CRCs are people that they know in their community. So we’ve been with a project in Michigan, we have a really great CRC working for us there. And with it, he has a good relationship with his neighbors and his neighbors want people to know that the CRC is affiliated with us. It’s your local guy that you know, but he is now working for us in this project and he is the local touch point. And so people, know, if they feel uncomfortable or unsure how to get ahold of us, they know they can reach out to their local guy and say, “I’m not really feeling the solar park, I’m worried about X, Y, and Z.” And then the local guy can tell us, well, I’ll let Anthony know and Anthony can talk to you. Tell me what your concerns are, we can talk about it. I’ll tell you why I like this project, that’s just my opinion, and I’ll connect you with Anthony and he’ll help you go through your concerns and how we can make this work best for you. And so it helps just establish a little bit of familiarity and trust and just a more unfiltered understanding of what’s happening in the community.

Wes Ashworth (30:02)

Yeah, I think it’s such an innovative idea and having somebody that is a local, part of that community, but be your advocate, be a part of discussion and be your liaison. I think it’s innovative and a great idea and I’d love to see how that continues to scale and grow as well.

Julia McPherson (30:19)

Yeah, it’s just been a great way for it’s they’re advocating for their community with us and it really helps both sides kind of, yeah, be a mediator liaison role.

Wes Ashworth (30:28)

Yeah, cool. I want to make sure we cover it all and if we missed any of those. So any other kind of major misconceptions or conspiracy theories or other things that you work to address and to correct. You know, and I love, you know, kind of debunking some misinformation and some of the things that are probably holding us back that people are hearing. But any other big ones that come to mind and how do you answer those?

Julia McPherson (30:54)

Yeah, I think a big one, this might be a little bit more meta than you were looking for, but I still think it’s important. Going back a little bit to the, especially solar and how it can work well with agriculture, there is often this idea that solar is bringing the elimination of agriculture in a community. And like we talked about, that’s typically not the case, it might be not having active cultivation on this one parcel of land, but typically it is strengthening agriculture by giving those farmers more resources, more options, more security and stability.

And we’ve also heard from plenty of local landowners that they’re able to keep their farm in their family because of the solar payments. Typically, statistically, farmers are skewing older and older, and we’ve heard from many landowners that they’re getting a little bit too old to keep farming it themselves. Maybe their kids didn’t want to farm, but their grandkids do. And this lets them hold the land in their family, keep generating a profit like they always have with their land, and they’re able to keep it for their grandkids, for the next generation.

It also eventually kind of becomes a property rights discussion, right? Where it’s, do we still trust farmers to decide what is the best use of their land and how they should be able to generate a profit from their own land? And I think, most Americans, most people who understand American values would agree, yeah, that is a baseline fundamental American right, is to know how to use your land and to be trusted to make decisions for your own property and for your own family, and that’s really what is a key part of the solar conversation when you’re talking about agriculture, is trusting farmers to continue to make decisions that they’ve always been trusted to make.

Wes Ashworth (32:15)

Right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then some of other things too, and just thinking about the industry as a whole, right? If you look at the entire renewable energy industry, I would say the community relations topic, some do it really well, some are maybe struggling, right? If you were thinking about the overall success of our industry and the growth of our industry, any advice or tips that you would say, hey, from a community relations standpoint, these are the areas that we need to do better as an industry. Are there any of those that really come to mind for you?

Julia McPherson (32:47)

Yeah, I think across the board, there’s a couple different, two immediately come to mind. One would being, and this is something that EDPR admittedly is very good at, and it’s been a really key distinguishing factor for us, but I wish it wasn’t a distinguishing factor. It should be just a baseline across the board for the industry, if you say you’re gonna do something, following through on it. Which in other words is also, don’t make promises you can’t keep.

And that’s something that developers, they’re trying to build support left and right, they’re in a process of trying to build, get as many people onboard as they can. But we don’t want that to turn into, making campaign promises that they can’t fulfill. And so it’s really, really critical to developers because it gives the whole rest of the industry a bad rap. I understand why locals would make a big distinction between this developer and that developer. And typically, if it’s a good place for EDPR to build a solar park, it’s also a good place for companies X, Y, and Z to build a solar park too. Sometimes they’re choosing between which companies, but typically we’re kind of painted with a broad brush, and when other companies in the industry are doing things that we don’t necessarily agree with, it makes it harder for everybody. So, only making promises that we can definitely keep and following through on those, and if we fall short, being accountable and owning up to when we made a mistake and explaining, you know, here’s what happened, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way, but here’s how we’re fixing it, is really critical for the industry.

And the other, I think the other important piece is also just thinking about these projects from, it sounds very basic, but I still see developers, kind of fumbling it, is thinking about the projects from a local’s point of view and what their values and priorities are. It can even be something as simple as, the industry tends to love using, and this is going to sound very like trivial, but I don’t think it is. The industry tends to love to use aerial photographs of solar parks, which when you’re looking at it from a bird’s eye view, yes, practically speaking, that lets you see the size and scale of a solar park. On the industry side, we think, wow, that’s so impressive and cool, we were able to build all of this clean energy to a local. That is a terrifying sea of panels. It looks very industrial from the aerial view, and it’s not helpful either because you’re not seeing it from the aerial view in your day-to-day life. So it’s unnecessarily creating this really industrial scary impression when that’s not actually gonna be what you’re seeing.

If you use primarily like, ground, like street view type photos, you can see, the panels are like 10 feet apart. They have like three feet of clearance. It’s green space with panels on top. That is so different than seeing from a bird’s eye view, just a sea of glass and metal. And just little choices like that can make a huge difference, and so what feels impressive and cool for the industry people is not resonating with locals. And so kind of understanding, making sure that they’re getting a proper representation of what the product is going to actually look like, and especially when it comes to things they’re most worried about showing. Here, no, here’s what it’s going to look like. There’s space, it’s green, it’s set back from the roadway, like those kinds of little things.

Wes Ashworth (35:21)

Yeah, I think oftentimes it’s the little things that make the most difference at the end of the day. And that’s a great example of that. Just one small tweak, small change. And I think that’s what we need to continue to, grow acceptance, continue to grow, continue to scale, continue to have success. That’s a lot of those small changes and tweaks. I love that. Before we get close to concluding, so we’re getting there on time, but I want to cover a couple quick things. So one of the things that I was impressed by is your involvement with Stanford’s uncommon dialogues on energy and community engagement. Can you tell us a bit more about this initiative and its potential impact on industry practices as a whole?

Julia McPherson (36:02)

Yeah, absolutely. The Stanford Uncommon Dialogues is a really cool initiative that came up last year. Stanford organized representatives from different stakeholder groups involved with utility scale solar, so bringing together industry, land conservation, agriculture, local governments, and community-based organizations. And they agreed and signed on to an agreement committing to through an extended working group process, establishing a set of best practices for developers.

And there’s six different areas. Community engagement is one of them, there’s also policy, siting, tribal engagement, environmental and data science working groups that I’m less familiar with. But I had the opportunity to co-chair the community engagement working group and so we have a little between 15 and 20 members from other developer companies, also community organizations. We have representatives from academia, from NC State and University of Michigan, and it’s just folks who have industry experience or stake in utility scale solar.

And we’re bringing our very different perspectives together to try and come up with a better set of best practices for the industry to abide by when developing solar projects. we’re still in the earlier days, but my hope is that this helps, kind of set us a standard that companies in industry can abide by. Because like you mentioning earlier, we are often painted with a broad brush, and so if we can get all the companies or a lot of the main companies to agree that this is how we’re going to engage, here are the parts of a project that we can ensure we’re getting, not just notification, but actual engagement and input. I feel like sometimes engagement information and input kind of get conflated and they’re different things. It’s important to notify locals, but if there’s moments where you can actually incorporate their input and feedback, that’s really important too. And being transparent about which parts we can and can’t why, and so this process is hopefully going to make that clearer and set more of a standard for how developers approach those conversations.

Wes Ashworth (37:50)

Which I think is incredibly important and critical and I would love to see more and more of those start to pop up and become more mainstream. And as you said, sort of getting a lot of different voices in the room from different parts of the industry, from different backgrounds, all those kinds of things, bringing those ideas together, trying to set some standards and I think that’s really, really needed. So kudos to you on being involved in that and I would love to see that continue to grow and go forward.

Very cool. So final thoughts in closing as we’re right up on time. Just what do you see as the future of community relations and the renewable energy industry? And then how can companies continue to innovate and improve their engagement with local communities?

Julia McPherson (38:30)

Yeah, I think the industry is on a clear trajectory of investing and prioritizing community engagement and relations more. And that’s a really great trend to see. There’s very few companies now who still try and operate under the like, try and sneak it through approach, and developer companies in general are getting a lot more comfortable with just engaging, not being afraid of the communities, like engage them early. The cat’s already out of the bag when it comes to there being local opposition, and so I think companies are becoming more aware and comfortable with the idea that you’re not going to like, kick a hornet’s nest necessarily by talking about your product early, they’re already gonna know.

Like these typically are very small rural communities, if you start signing land, they already know, people know you’re there, it’s not a secret. And so all you’re doing is like, looking kind of shady if you’re not acknowledging it upfront. And so I think that trend is starting to become more typical and part of the process. And I think that’s a good thing overall, because it does, you know, developers aren’t trying to be shady in most cases, but it is this idea of well we don’t have all the answers yet, so we don’t want to be talking about it yet because you have a bunch of unknowns, and I typically push back with like well that’s just, explain that, that’s okay, I don’t think they expect you to have all of the knowns or products not supposed to break ground for another three years. It’s reasonable that you would still have some things to figure out just like, tell them that, and that gives them a chance to wrap their heads around it to talk to you about it give you valuable input because they know the community in the land better than you do

And so it gives them a chance to weigh in and be a really good resource.

Wes Ashworth (39:51)

Yeah, I love that. And to your point, like they already know, and it probably even creates more skepticism when you sort of wait or avoid it or come in later down the line. So getting in early, not being afraid of that and how important that is, I think is critical. Any other sort of parting advice, words of wisdom, things that you would love for the audience to take away from this episode?

Julia McPherson (40:00)

I think just, it can be easy to get sort of in a negative head space or feel discouraged by when you see like, the political rhetoric or like, because of my job, do spend a decent amount of time poking around in opposition groups on Facebook. And sometimes it can be pretty dark and depressing and gloomy. But just remember that like it is part of what’s important about spending time in the communities face to face is that if you’re trying to just see from far away and look at what you’re seeing online, it’s always going to be so much nastier than what actually is happening on the ground in communities.

And yes, we have polling data. Yes, we have a general idea of the political leanings of these communities, but that’s not the whole story. And so just spending time talking to people, and they’ll surprise you. Even if somebody has a political ideology that on paper you would reasonably assume means that they probably hate solar and wind, they might not. And it’s just people are amazing and have different diverse inputs, they are multitudes.

And that includes our project landowners and stakeholders. And so just giving people a chance because they so often surprise you, and you can learn from them, just spending time in communities and talking to people makes you better at your job. Just full stop. And I think it’s important for everybody in the industry to talk to people and not just make assumptions from the outside.

Wes Ashworth (41:20)

Yeah, that’s so good and a great way to wrap up the conversation. So it really has been enlightening to hear about your pivotal work you and your team are doing to build strong trust-based relationships with communities across North America. Your insights on bridging rural-urban divide, depoliticizing renewable energy as well, and addressing community concerns have given us a lot to think about and some just great value And some of those simple advice things are huge.

To our audience out there as always, thank you for tuning in to Green Giants, Titans of Renewable Energy. And if you found this episode valuable, please be sure to subscribe, share it with your network, and stay tuned for more inspiring conversations with leaders shaping the future of clean energy. We’ll see you next time.