A Preindustrial Idea That Could Help Decarbonize America

Sharing the profits from green energy projects with local residents can overcome the grassroots resistance facing renewable infrastructure.

Photo by insung yoon on Unsplash

When Seneca County, Ohio banned wind and solar development in all unincorporated areas of the county, the response from the community was joy. After the November 18, 2021 decision, a map posted to “Seneca Anti-Wind Union”, a Facebook page run by opponents of renewables, showed that this ban would affect more than 90% of the County. “That’s a beautiful map,” wrote one commenter on Facebook.

But wait, you may be wondering. I thought renewable energy was popular. So why are so many communities resisting it? 

If you ask local leaders of the opposition why they fight against solar and wind farms, you’ll hear a mishmash of arguments about “toxins”, “infrasound”, “shadow flicker”, “bird deaths”, and “eyesores”. 

I have trouble relating to people who consider wind turbines eyesores. Any time we would travel the Turnpike when I was growing up in Western Pennsylvania, I would watch excitedly for the first turbine blade to peek over the Somerset hills. The machines seemed graceful, elegant. How could anyone think they are worse than smokestacks?

If, like me, you have trouble believing anyone opposes a favorite local renewable farm near you, I suggest googling it. You will find op-eds, Facebook opposition groups, and anger almost anywhere you look. The reason your favorite wind farm got built isn’t because no one opposed it—it’s because the opponents lost.

Are there legitimate aesthetic concerns about solar and wind farms? How many of these objections are to be taken at face value, and how many instead reflect underlying anxieties about economic change? We have to better understand this phenomenon because, in many places, the opposition movements are winning.

Currently, huge regions in the country are covered by local laws banning or severely restricting renewables. The laws are usually designed to keep out utility-scale solar and wind farms, but sometimes even household rooftop systems get zoned out of existence. No climate legislation being seriously considered at the federal level would do anything at all to mollify local renewable opponents. And at the state level, many states are run by corrupt, openly pro-fossil-fuel governments that actively seek to block renewables. In Indiana and Ohio, a growing patchwork of local bans is likely to expand in coming years until both states are essentially impossible to build solar or wind in. This is because fossil-fuel-funded local and state lawmakers, along with anti-renewable community organizers, have begun training townsfolk how to kick out solar developers. (The new zoning restrictions, of course, do not apply to fossil fuels.)

Part of the problem is geography. Renewable energy takes up a lot of space compared to coal or gas power plants. You could (and should) put solar on every rooftop in Los Angeles, but it wouldn’t come close to supplying all the city’s energy needs. A lot of it must be sited in rural communities.

Rural communities are older, whiter, and more conservative than the rest of America. Over the last forty years, they’ve seen their young people leave, lost neighbors to opioids, and watched fields and forests bulldozed in favor of bland suburban enclaves. Developers have moved in promising jobs that never materialized, or leaving residents with environmental messes to clean up. Change, as far as they understand it, has generally disfavored them.

Even though clean electricity is a social good, solar and wind developers are primarily seeking to turn a profit. Sometimes, to the extent that they care about the project’s impact on a community, they only care as much as it takes to get the project approved. Local opposition leaders often note, correctly, that the benefits of solar and wind developments do not stay in the local community. The profits, and sometimes even the electricity, are sent to far-away places. Though some community agreements result in targeted local hires, generally speaking, the construction jobs come in on trucks, and leave the same way.

Rural opposition to renewables has little to do with “infrasound”, “shadow flicker”, or any of the other nonsensical reasons that opposition leaders claim. Yes, local opposition ringleaders themselves are often hardcore climate deniers, but the bulk of the people who show up to community meetings to protest against solar don’t really care much about climate change one way or the other.

Solar developers have been trying to square the circle without addressing the real problem. When locals complain of industry moving in, the solar developers point to the tax revenue they’ll bring with them. When locals say they mourn the loss of farmland, developers offer to plant pollinator-friendly plants. But while agrivoltaics, taxes on corporations, and pollinators are all cool and good, they don’t stop opposition movements because the opposition was never really about taxes, or the loss of farmland. 

Opposition to wind and solar is about fear of change—and about who profits. If we understand opposition to renewables as being driven mostly by justifiable anger about being left out of the profits, and misplaced resistance to change, a potential solution emerges.

A Citizen’s Dividend

Many Indigenous peoples of the Americas (and elsewhere) have long believed that the land belongs to everyone. It exists to benefit the community. Land cannot be “owned” by any one person who intends to exclude others from benefiting from its riches.

In Western thought, the concept of common property was used by Thomas Paine as the basis of what he called a “Citizen’s Dividend”. The idea is that the resources of a place belong to all of its people, and all residents should get a share of the profits. It’s not uncommon to see this principle espoused by American institutions, at least in theory. The Pennsylvania Constitution states: “Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come.”

Other states have put the idea into practice. The Alaska Permanent Fund is the most prominent citizen’s dividend in America. It shares the wealth created by oil drilling in the state with every resident. Everyone in the state receives an annual check varying in amount, but usually around $1,000. They deserve it—because the land and its resources belong to all of them.

The Alaska Permanent Fund is tremendously popular, to the point that no politician in Alaska speaks seriously about any policy that might be perceived as threatening oil revenues. If solar and wind developments granted citizen’s dividends, it could transform renewables from something a community would resist into something it would welcome.

Just Pay Everyone

If a solar developer moved into town promising that every resident would get $250 a year for 25 years, you might still see some local opposition movements. After all, some anti-renewable zealots exist in all communities. But they would probably have less success in persuading their apolitical neighbors to join their cause if material benefits are on the line. The neighbors might say to the zealots, “Wait, why are you trying to take away a month’s worth of groceries from my family?” 

Counterintuitively, it could also be cheaper for developers to just pay residents than to stick to business as usual. Solar and wind developers pay premiums to law firms for years to navigate town and city approval processes, as local antagonists pile on delay after delay. The possibility of receiving payments might encourage residents to urge their elected officials to speed the projects along. And paying residents, say, $250 per year would not swamp the operating budget for a large utility-scale solar farm. For a 200 MW farm in a town of 1,000 residents, $250 a year would only represent about 4% of the profits. That 4% is not money on top of money that's already being spent; it's taking the place of money that's already being spent on law firms, marketing, and administrative costs piling up over delays that can drag on for half a decade.

Although paying residents is not general practice in the industry, it is not a completely new idea.

“Community solar farms” are midsize solar installations—bigger than a rooftop, smaller than Ivanpah. They’re similar to “consumer supported agriculture” arrangements, where someone buys a share in a farm and has its product delivered directly to their home. Community solar is a great way to increase energy equity, especially for renters. Although a landlord can control what goes on their tenants’ roofs, they can’t stop their tenants from buying shares in a solar farm.

In other words, community solar uses a co-op model of ownership, similar to a community land trust. Community solar supplies have grown 121% per year since 2010, but they’ve still only reached 3.2 GW out of 97.2 GW of America’s total solar electricity; most comes from for-profit utility-scale developments. Some of the limitations to community solar have legislative solutions: there are still states where it isn’t legal to build. We should fix that. And in the meantime, because most of the megawatts added to our grid will be utility-scale solar farms, we should seek ways to make utility-scale solar more like community solar. If solar will benefit the communities it’s in, the opposition will melt away.

Some developers have already begun looking at citizen’s dividends—or things very close to being them. New York State is now requiring renewable energy developers to offer electric bill credits to ratepayers in the communities where they site their projects. That is almost, but not quite, the same thing as cutting all residents a check. It means that anyone who gets a bill sees a line item informing them of their financial benefit from the renewable project. In Canada and Australia, it’s common for developers to give Indigenous nations a 25% share in projects in their communities, thanks to Indigenous land rights. In rural Illinois, one wind developer granted a community benefit that is similar to a citizen’s dividend when they donated $250,000 to expand local broadband internet access when they built a 302 MW wind farm.

But Would It Work?

It must be said: rural communities are so used to being exploited that they might react with skepticism about anything being offered for free. “What’s the catch?”

We should be conscious of the psychological effects at play in negotiations between hostile parties seeking compromise. One such effect is that a party may be willing to offer a symbolic gesture, such as admitting to fault, if it’s reciprocated by a similar symbolic gesture from the other party. But if the symbolic gesture is to be reciprocated by money, it feels like a bribe, and is more likely to be rejected.

This dynamic may be at play in this situation. But based on my observations of dozens of local opposition movements spread across America, I don’t think they are objecting on principles. It seems instead like their objections are driven by fear of change and anxiety about their community being exploited. They might respond differently if their relationship to solar or wind didn’t feel like exploitation.

We can’t be sure without more data. It would be useful to run a pilot project to learn from. With solar and wind moratoria popping up everywhere, it’s hard to see how a citizen’s dividend could possibly go worse than the strategies developers are currently trying.

What is the worst case scenario? From a developer’s perspective, it may be one in which they don’t profit anymore. “What if,” a developer might wonder, “thousands of people move into town to claim the dividend?”

This has not happened in localities that have such dividends, like Alaska. Although the dividends we’re talking about are large enough to be noticeable, they’re not large enough to compel someone to move.

There is another flaw to the renewable citizen’s dividend approach which must be addressed. This kind of citizen’s dividend is localized to a specific community, and it is likely to benefit certain demographics more often than others. Though some rural communities are truly depleted, hollowed-out shells ravaged by the opioid crisis, others are among the richest communities in America. And they are whiter than the rest of America. A truly universal dividend would grant its wealth equitably.

I consider this to be a legitimate objection. But the solution is to apply the citizens dividend model to other projects. Urban communities of color are often the first places industry moves into. When that happens, the residents deserve to benefit, and should be paid.

Perhaps, by setting a norm in the clean electricity industry, we can show communities that a citizen’s dividend is a benefit they can demand when Amazon is looking for a place to drop a warehouse, or WalMart is scouting a site for a megastore. Maybe it would prompt local governments across the country to explore related concepts, like UBI. Every project that includes a citizen’s dividend might chip away at the toxic idea that change is usually for the worse.

A universal benefit received by a resident, regardless of age, or citizenship status, or means testing, or virtue testing, would make each recipient question why other industries don’t treat them this way. And maybe they’d start to think they should.

What’s Next?

There are two routes to making citizen’s dividends for renewables happen: government or industry action.

New York State’s new pseudo-dividend regulation, referenced above, is the best model currently being applied in renewables, and it’s new enough that awareness of its impacts and implications are not yet broadly spread. State Legislatures or utility regulatory bodies in other States should do similar things, though I would recommend they first fix the loopholes that prevent New York’s solution from becoming truly universal. For example, though the populations of residents and ratepayers overlap, they are not entirely the same.

While this approach would work in many blue states—and possibly Nebraska, which has pliable public utilities—red state politicians almost certainly wouldn’t bite. State and local governments in rural areas in red states are as likely to ban wind or solar than contemplate what they might gain from them. The Biden Administration, meanwhile, is currently just ignoring the issue and hoping it goes away. Anyone running for federal office on a Green New Deal should be including clean energy citizen’s dividends and overturning local zoning restrictions in their platform. But in the meantime, this lack of leadership leaves only one red-state actor who could implement dividends: the developers themselves.

I don’t hold out much hope for proactive action by big corporations when no one is forcing their hand. So instead of wondering whether developer CEOs might wake up one day with this idea, let’s instead consider how to organize to get developers to make these commitments.

The best playbook might be labor organizing. People working for wind and solar developers might be able to pressure their employers to consider the idea, similar to the way Amazon workers got their company to make some concessions on its sustainability plans.

With legislation unlikely to provide a complete solution, and sky-high stakes, it is up to developers to make their projects welcome, even in places where they currently are not. Developers could buy every resident a down payment on a rooftop solar system, or an electric hot water heater. They could found a local charity. But the easiest way is just to pay residents.

If you work for a solar or wind developer, or know someone who does, pass this along. It’s time to teach developers the lesson from the last few years: don’t try to outsmart the opposition. Don’t try to wait the opposition out. Don’t try to profit off of a community you’re not offering anything to. The solution is right in front of you, and it’s within your budget.

Just pay everyone.

Tom Pike is a climate activist with Sunrise and DSA. By day, he works for a PR company that helps site renewable energy projects. His opinions here are his own. He tweets at @StoryTom.