How to Make Friends and Build Solar Farms

This week I got the chance to speak with Stephanie Loucas of Renewable Properties, one of the fantastic subject matter experts who joined me this week for a panel on local renewables conflicts at Intersolar. After revealing herself to me as someone in the development space who clearly cares about community engagement, I asked if I could bring her on the record to chat about her approach to getting buy-in on projects. She’s not someone who often works in utility scale – all her projects are under 10 megawatts – but the conflicts she deals with are the same.

Here’s an edited version of our chat outside the conference as we overlooked the San Diego bay:

I guess to start, what’s the approach you’d like to see the renewables development sector adopt when it comes to community engagement?

I would like to see developers collaborate a little bit more so messaging is similar and we can have more engagement sooner. I don’t think that some of this is some sort of secret sauce. We could be a little bit more together.

Okay, but what’s your approach?

Our approach is early and often, listen empathetically and try to answer the questions clearly and try to build trust.”

If there is no secret sauce, what’s the best way to build trust?

I think the best way to build trust is to listen, to address the issues, to understand what the community is really asking. I think it’s easy for a person to sit behind a computer and write a long letter or email with 25 concerns but actually talking to the person, which is something that I think the younger people in the industry – more junior folks – aren’t as accustomed to talking to people. They’re more used to communicating in written form.

You’re able to suss out what’s actually important by talking to them. They’ll hit their one-to-five most important topics, as opposed to the 25 things they’ll write in their letter.

What does ‘early and often’ look like for you?

Early is… as soon as you talk to the authority with jurisdiction, talk to them about who in the community is actually important. Who should we be talking to? Do you think we’ll have opposition? Do you think we’ll have supporters? And it’s getting the planning department’s perspective. Then you start from there, to build who you’re going to be talking to and when.

Okay. So what’s often then? Do you have to be there every day? Is it about having an office in the community?

I think it depends on the comments you get and what’s going on specifically in the community. Sometimes you have to be in it for a while to really root out what’s going on. It might feel like you’re starting to talk for a year, a certain amount of time before you submit your permit, but you don’t get to the root cause of what’s really bugging people until you’ve had more conversations and they’re trusting you’ll show back up. Answer those questions.

Let’s say you provided a report from a third party consultant addressing “X” and then they bring up “Y.” Then you address “Y” and they bring up another thing. It’s about listening and responding. That’s how you build trust.

So I’m often told I tell too many negative stories of conflict in this newsletter. Do you have any examples in your work where you really feel like you got community buy-in?

To be honest, one of the best is a recent case study. It’s a project coming online in New York where we were in the community for a long time, a lot of public meetings and there was a ton of opposition. Part of the opposition was confusing our project size. There was a huge project – a several hundred megawatt project – going on too. They kept using the same opposition talking points. And we said, we’re not that. We heard the community and talked them through it. We wanted to make sure they were evaluating the project for the appropriate level of impact it was having.

We had opposition and we overcame it in that town. And then really flipping the mayor, having him come around. We did a ribbon cutting ceremony. We made sure we had the right number of local people benefiting from a community solar program – we ended up with a 20% number [of local subscribers].

Does having local use of power – using power from the solar project near their backyard – help with getting buy in?

Absolutely. I think so. The electrons aren’t just in their viewpoint getting on the grid and they’re never knowing where they’re going.