By Daniel Walton for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Rows of photovoltaic panels glimmer placidly in the winter sun amid the fields outside Pendleton, North Carolina, a farming community in the state’s northeast Northampton County. The calming country scene is a far cry from the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But that’s where Ajulo Othow, who developed the solar energy installation through her company EnerWealth Solutions, traces the roots of the project.
After Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005, Othow explains, she helped to lead nonprofit economic development efforts across the region. She was struck by how many of the area’s jobs involved coal or gas production; Louisiana ships nearly two-thirds of U.S. liquified natural gas exports, for example, and New Orleans is the country’s third-busiest port for coal exports.
The carbon emissions from burning those exports, Othow knew, make extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina more common and more powerful.
“I could see how people’s livelihoods, tied to fossil fuel extraction, basically were contributing to their own vulnerabilities,” she says. “In thinking with communities about what other economic development opportunities they had, I got very interested in renewable energy.”
Othow went to law school to learn more about the financing and regulation of solar power, and after gaining real-world experience with Strata Clean Energy in Chapel Hill, she struck out on her own with EnerWealth in 2017. Based in Oxford, North Carolina, the company’s goal is to maximize the benefits of the solar boom for rural communities.
That mission drives every facet of EnerWealth’s development approach, starting with site selection. The firm specifically seeks out Black and small-scale landowners in North and South Carolina, including farmers, who want to lease some of their property for solar panels. In return, those landowners receive a consistent stream of income that far exceeds what they would earn by leasing to other farmers.
Although some governmental and nonprofit groups, such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Florida-based Black Farmers’ Collaborative, have worked to bring solar to rural communities of color, EnerWealth may be the Southeast’s only business specifically focused on that goal.
Othow admits that progress has been modest as her projects work their way through permitting and regulatory requirements. EnerWealth aims to start 100 megawatts of capacity in its development pipeline, all in rural areas, through 2024, enough to power roughly 12,000 homes; by comparison, a single solar farm installed in Northampton County to service Meta, the parent company of Facebook, generates 80 megawatts by itself.
Only two EnerWealth installations have so far been constructed, with a total capacity of just half a megawatt. The first conversations on those projects took place in 2019, and they won’t start producing power until later this year. But Othow believes the potential of her model has only begun to be tapped.
“There is a lot of opportunity to co-locate electricity production alongside agricultural production,” says Othow. “It’s a passive development model that can actually help to subsidize agricultural production and the cycles that farmers have to contend with by giving them some stable revenue over time.”
Dependable Harvest
What the EnerWealth model offers rural communities, Othow suggests, is a way to benefit from development while retaining land ownership and agricultural use. Her projects are generally smaller in scale than other agrivoltaics arrays. The Pendleton site, for example, covers just 2.6 acres of a 65-acre property, and the developments she’s seeking to start this year will range from 6 to 30 acres.
Many farming advocates have raised concerns about utility-scale solar, which can require hundreds of acres, displacing current forests and cropland. Othow hopes EnerWealth’s more distributed projects will spread opportunities more broadly while being less disruptive to farming.
Landowners agree to host EnerWealth’s solar panels for at least 35 years, earning annual payments from roughly $500 to $750 per acre. Those rates are about five to seven times higher than the $115 per acre rate that landowners earn for renting Northampton County cropland to farmers, reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2023.
Because they’re locked in a long-term contract, solar lease payments aren’t subject to the ups and downs of the commodity crop market. And because the panels are concentrated in a single part of the farm, rather than integrated with crop production, they don’t require farmers to make big changes to their practices.
By providing a solid foundation for a diversified income portfolio, says Othow, solar leases can help landowners build wealth without having to sell their property. That’s the case for Marion Mitchell, whose family has owned the Pendleton farmland since her grandfather acquired it in the early 1900s. She remembers visiting as a little girl and later moved to live on the land herself.
Mitchell says she and her family had been leasing the property for cotton and soybean farming when the Roanoke Cooperative, the electric distribution company that partnered with EnerWealth on its first projects, approached her about installing solar panels on a small portion. The extra income was very attractive, she says, and will help her family keep the land into the future.
“I’m excited about it, because I’ve never had anything happen to me like this,” Mitchell says. “It’s something new and something different.”
Reliable income is particularly important for Black landowners such as Mitchell, who as a group have seen massive losses of land in North Carolina and across the country.
Black agricultural land ownership in the U.S. peaked in 1910 at about 16 to 19 million acres according to the USDA. But due to racially discriminatory lending practices and legal challenges over property inheritance, many of those landowners were unable to keep their property in the family over the following century. A 2022 study published in the American Economic Association’s Papers and Proceedings reckoned that Black farmers lost about $326 billion in land from 1920 through 1997.
The country’s proportion of Black farmers has also dropped precipitously since the early 20th century. While Black producers made up about 14 percent of all farmers in 1920, more than their share of the U.S. population, they represented just over 1 percent of the total in 2017, the latest year for which data is available. In North Carolina in 2017, less than 3 percent of the state’s roughly 74,000 farmers were Black, compared with over 12 percent of the general population.
Spreading Sunshine with an Electric Cooperative
By letting landowners directly profit from modest solar installations, Othow says, she has been able to overcome the skepticism that rural communities often show toward utility-scale projects, which disrupt the landscape without an obvious immediate gain for those living in the area. Because EnerWealth’s first projects were done in partnership with an electric cooperative, she can point to broader community benefits as well.
Roanoke Cooperative provides about 60 megawatts of power across six rural counties in northeast North Carolina, including Northampton. It’s a minnow compared to the state’s major electric utility, Duke Energy, the power provider for over 4.5 million people in North and South Carolina. But the organization’s size, says President and CEO Marshall Cherry, means that even small solar projects represent meaningful contributions toward its power demands.
And as a co-op, Roanoke is beholden to its customer-members, not shareholders like Duke. That means the dollars it saves by using renewable energy go directly toward reducing electricity bills.
Cherry points to the battery system placed alongside the solar panels at the Pendleton project, able to pump out 500 kilowatts for about two hours when fully charged. By charging the battery when the sun is out, then delivering power during high-demand situations like cold winter mornings, he says Roanoke can avoid buying expensive energy from the wholesale market to meet customer needs. This benefit makes the project economically viable despite its modest footprint.
“It helps us pretty much guarantee that we will have some level of reliability or capacity to operate during our peak periods,” Cherry explains. “That reduces some of our capacity purchases, thus saving dollars.”
If the co-op can reach its goal of six megawatts of battery storage, Cherry estimates the total annual savings to Roanoke’s roughly 12,000 customers at $150,000 to $200,000. With about 30 percent of those customers making less than $25,000 per year, he adds, any reduction to the power bill is welcome.
Solar development also means added jobs. In addition to her work with EnerWealth, Othow chairs the board of the nonprofit B.O.S.S.—Black Owners of Solar Services. Earlier this year, the group received a $6.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to help North Carolina’s minority- and women-owned businesses scale up and tackle renewable energy projects.
And bringing solar capital investments to rural areas, says Executive Director Matt Abele with the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association, can provide much-needed tax revenue for local governments to serve their residents.
“Solar and other renewable resources are some of the best energy solutions available to reinvest in local communities across our state and region,” Abele says. “EnerWealth Solutions has been a pioneer in developing a model that focuses on community-scale projects that reinvest in the landowners and communities that are so integral to North Carolina’s economic success.”
Clouds and Silver Linings
Although the smaller size of the EnerWealth projects theoretically makes them easier to approve, Othow says some have still run into issues that plague larger facilities. At one pilot site, local land use regulations demanded that solar be installed a substantial distance from the property boundary, a rule that had been put in place to reduce the impacts of big installations on rural communities. Taking that setback into account, there wasn’t enough space left to build the project.
“I think these zoning ordinances are not one-size-fits-all,” says Roanoke’s Cherry. “We still have some room to operate and maybe improve some of the permitting there.”
One difficulty unique to EnerWealth is the complicated landscape of ownership that’s often associated with Black farmland. Because many of the land’s first Black owners died without leaving a will or other plan for their estate, their heirs often took possession of the land without having a clear legal title of who now owned what.
This “heirs’ property” is thought to represent about a third of Black-owned land in the South, including close to $1.9 billion of land in North Carolina. Such situations can make it very difficult to identify the legally correct signer of a lease, says Othow, and when a project needs to be financed, banks often refuse to get involved if the land lacks proven ownership.
And North Carolina’s political leadership has shown some worries about farmland being used for solar power in the first place. Steve Troxler, the state’s Republican commissioner of agriculture and consumer services, says protecting agricultural land from development threats is one of his top priorities.
“As we continue to focus efforts on farmland preservation, the loss of farmland and forestland to solar panel installations remains a concern,” Troxler says. “I support farmers’ rights to do what they want with their land, but I wish we could have a do-over when it comes to solar panels, with more of a strategic placement of these installations on marginal farm and forestlands instead of prime farmland.”
But Othow believes that if landowners can benefit from having smaller solar arrays on a bit of their land, as with the EnerWealth model, they’ll be more likely to keep the rest of it in agriculture rather than sell the whole property to a developer. (She also points to a 2022 study by the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association, which found that less than half a percent of the state’s agricultural land hosted solar panels.)
Other political trends have Othow more excited about the future. The federal Inflation Reduction Act provides additional tax credits for solar projects in low-income communities, including the areas EnerWealth is targeting, and establishes a $7 billion “Solar for All” grant fund she hopes to tap with innovative project design.
At the state level, a law signed in 2021 commits North Carolina to cutting its carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production 70 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Othow believes solar has a critical role to play.
“This is a really good time to be in this industry,” she says. “I’m excited about the opportunities ahead for rural communities, landowners, and farmers in this space.”
Daniel Walton wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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By Seth Millstein for Sentient Climate.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for Connecticut News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
We talk a lot about carbon emissions in the context of climate change, but some of the most dangerous emissions aren't carbon at all. They're methane - a colorless, odorless glass that's primarily produced biologically and warms the planet much faster than carbon dioxide. The Biden administration took some good first steps to reduce America's methane emissions - but will President-elect Donald Trump build upon these steps when he assumes office, or claw back the progress that's been made?
Understanding Methane Emissions
Methane is one of the three main greenhouse gasses, along with carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. The Earth and its various ecosystems produce methane naturally; freshwater lakes, wetlands and permafrost are the primary natural sources of methane. It's also the main component of natural gas.
However, a 2021 United Nations report found that currently, roughly 60 percent of methane emissions are anthropogenic, or the result of human activity. Agriculture produces more methane than any other sector around the world, and around 90 percent of anthropogenic methane emissions come from one of three sources: agriculture, fossil fuels and waste.
The line between anthropogenic and naturogenic (naturally-occurring) methane emissions can be blurry. For instance, a major source of methane is cow burps (and, to a lesser extent, farts). While cows are obviously "naturally-occurring," animal agriculture is not, and neither is the amount of cows we've brought into existence. The sheer amount of methane produced by cows is the result of our domestication of them, not any sort of natural process.
Similarly, methane is the main ingredient in natural gas, and natural gas existed long before humans came around. But it's the extraction of natural gas that actually causes this methane to enter the atmosphere, and natural gas extraction is a human activity.
Semantics aside, one thing is certain: There's a lot more methane in the atmosphere than there would have been had humans never existed. And that's not good.
Why Is Methane a Problem?
Like other greenhouse gasses, methane contributes to climate change by warming the atmosphere and the planet. But it works a bit differently than carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas.
Carbon dioxide makes up almost 80 percent of all greenhouse emissions, whereas methane constitutes just over 11 percent. In addition, methane dissipates rather quickly; it only sticks around in the atmosphere for around a decade, whereas carbon dioxide can linger for up to 1,000 years.
This might have you thinking that methane isn't that big of a deal, at least insofar as greenhouse gasses go. The problem is that methane traps much, much more heat than carbon dioxide - so much so that, over a 100 year period, methane has 27-30 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Over the course of 20 years, it has 80 times the warming potential.
In addition to warming the environment, methane also makes the air dangerous to breathe, because when sunlight interacts with methane, it forms a pollutant called tropospheric ozone. Although tropospheric ozone only stays in the air for a few weeks at most, it can be fatal; it's estimated that up to a million people die every year from respiratory diseases caused by ozone pollution, and methane is a major contributor to this.
How Do Farms Contribute to Methane Emissions?
Around one-third of all anthropogenic methane emissions come from livestock. There are two main reasons for this.
First, there are the burps. A number of animals produce methane as a natural byproduct of their digestive systems; these animals are known as ruminants, and they include not only cows but also sheep, goats, yaks and more. When ruminants burp, they release methane into the air. These are called enteric methane emissions.
The other main source of livestock-related methane emissions is the animals' manure - or, to be more precise, the manner in which farmers store the animals' manure.
Manure management is a significant component of livestock farming. One of the more common ways of storing manure is to put it in large lagoons or pits; this prevents it from leaking into nearby soil and waterways, and also allows farms to more accurately monitor and track their farms' manure output.
Over time, however, the top layer of manure in the lagoon hardens, which prevents oxygen from reaching the manure below. And this is a problem, because when manure is placed in an oxygen-free environment, the microorganisms that produce methane thrive and proliferate, thus increasing its methane emissions. That's exactly what happens in manure pits.
These two factors - enteric emissions and manure (mis)management - account for 80 percent of agriculture-related methane emissions. The other 20 percent comes from rice farming. Rice is a semi-aquatic plant that requires a layer of standing water to grow; this water prevents oxygen from reaching the microbes in the soil, allowing them to reproduce and create methane in a manner similar to manure in a lagoon.
The problem of livestock-related methane emissions is exacerbated by the fact that global meat production has been on the rise for the last 60 years, on both an absolute and per-capita level. This makes reducing these missions all the more important - but how?
How Can Farmers Reduce Their Methane Emissions?
A number of solutions have been proposed, and in some cases implemented, for reducing methane emissions.
Many of these involve new or emerging technologies. There are feed additives that reduce the amount of enteric methane production in ruminants' stomachs, for instance, and manure aeration systems that allow oxygen to flow into stored manure on farms. One company is even developing a methane-trapping mask for cattle to wear while grazing.
Other methane reduction strategies are decidedly more low-tech, such as selectively breeding animals to produce less methane. Simply making livestock farms more efficient on the whole can also have an impact, as this results in increased output with no corresponding increase in methane emissions.
All of these solutions, however, face obstacles. Fernanda Ferreira, Director for Agriculture Methane at Clean Air Task Force, tells Sentient that one of the biggest challenges in methane mitigation is the simple fact that production facilities and logistical operations vary wildly from farm to farm.
"Let's look at the U.S.," Ferreira says. "When you think about goats, sheep, beef and dairy farmers, you have a little over a million farmers. So we're talking about one million different ways of managing these animals. Even if you zoom in into one specific region - let's say the West, or a state like California - there will be variation."
This variation, Ferreira says, complicates efforts to implement methane mitigation technologies on a wide scale, because every farm is a unique operation with slightly different needs, capabilities and restrictions.
"When you zoom in, you have a lot of variation of how farmers handle these animals," Ferreira says. "And this is directly linked to the challenge of adopting [methane reduction] technologies."
Another major challenge is cost. Many of these solutions are expensive, and the cost of implementing them falls on the farmers themselves. But while methane reduction benefits all of humanity in the long run, it doesn't offer farmers any benefit in the short run. As such, farmers largely aren't incentivized to adopt these technologies.
Lastly, there's the simple fact that a lot of this technology is still in the research and development phase. As of this writing, only one synthetic methane-reducing feed additive has been approved by the FDA, and that approval only came six months ago. Other proposed additives are prohibitively expensive, not very effective or come with other drawbacks. The methane-trapping cow mask also has several logistical issues, and has been criticized as a potential form of greenwashing.
What Has President Biden Done About Methane?
In 2021, the Biden administration unveiled the U.S. Methane Emissions Action Plan, a 20-page document with various initiatives and proposals for reducing U.S. methane emissions. They include incentives for farmers to reduce their methane emissions, new regulations aimed at doing the same, and the formation of an interagency task force to collect methane and use it for "on-farm renewable activities."
"The U.S. Methane Emissions Reduction Action Plan provides the framework for the work on agriculture methane emissions," Ferreira says. "The most important outcome that it supports is the deployment of climate smart-initiatives, such as the use of methane-reducing feed additives and the implementation, more broadly, of manure management practices."
In 2023, the Biden administration announced The National Strategy to Advance an Integrated U.S. Greenhouse Gas Measurement, Monitoring, and Information System (yes, that's the official name). This set of policies is geared at improving the tracking, monitoring and reporting of greenhouse emissions, both inside and outside of the government.
These two action plans, Ferreira says, are important first steps in tackling the methane problem-head on. In addition to all of this, the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022, contained funding for a selection of "climate-smart" agricultural practices, including some aimed at reducing methane emissions from farms.
The Inflation Reduction Act also expanded the EPA's authority to regulate methane emissions, and created the Methane Emissions Reduction Program for the purpose of doing so. The Biden administration allocated $1 billion to this program in 2023, and in December, introduced new limits on methane emissions via the EPA.
However, these initiatives only apply to the oil and gas industries, so they won't have any effect on agricultural methane emissions.
What Will Trump Do About Methane?
Methane emissions weren't a central focus of the 2024 campaign, or even a tertiary one, and President-elect Trump made no policy pledges regarding methane. However, actions that he took as president during his first term strongly suggest that he'll seek to undo the Biden administration's progress on methane reduction.
During his time in office, Trump withdrew or weakened a number of federal regulations aimed at tracking and reducing methane emissions, including Obama-era rules that required oil and gas companies to monitor and fix methane leaks at their facilities and take steps to reduce methane emissions on public and tribal lands.
After Trump's 2024 victory, the Biden administration finalized a rule that fines oil and gas companies for their methane emissions, and there's been widespread speculation that Trump will scrap this rule once he assumes office.
Trump, who once said that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China to make U.S. manufacturing less competitive, withdrew or weakened over 100 environmental regulations during his first term. Nothing he's said or done indicates that he's changed his tune on climate matters since then, so it seems likely that he'll continue rolling back environmental protections, including those aimed at reducing methane emissions.
While this would be unfortunate, Trump is just one person, and America is just one country. There are plenty of other leaders around the world, both in the private and public sectors, making efforts to curb methane emissions.
Canada, Mexico, Japan and several other countries have made significant investments in methane reduction as part of the Global Methane Pledge, for instance. In addition, almost 100 mayors around the world have pledged to reduce their cities' emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement, which Trump withdrew the U.S. from. Meanwhile, Bill Gates has invested millions in a feed additive company aimed at reducing enteric methane production in livestock.
There are, in other words, plenty of opportunities for global action on methane that don't involve the U.S. president.
The Bottom Line
Reducing methane emissions is no easy task; there are technological, financial, logistical and even dietary hurdles. But given methane's rapid-fire warming potential, overcoming these obstacles isn't optional, but necessary.
Our planet won't remain liveable for future generations without a sharp reduction in methane emission. The Biden administration took some good first steps in bringing about such a reduction, and hopefully, more steps from other world leaders will follow, even if the Trump administration rolls back progress on the issue.
Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.
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Connecticut is the subject of an offshore wind study which aims to identify supply chain opportunities for the state and the Northeast region.
Connecticut is committed to creating 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2040. So far, it has procurements for 1.5 gigawatts of offshore wind. The state's first offshore wind farm will be operational next year.
Kristin Urbach, executive director of the Connecticut Wind Collaborative, said the study can explore many offshore wind priorities.
"To pinpoint areas where supply chains currently fall short to propose actionable items to strengthen it," Urbach explained. "Also to boost our local economic growth with the support of local manufacturers for its infrastructure development while promoting job creation and sustainable growth in Connecticut."
Urbach pointed out the state can fill supply chain gaps by utilizing the 12,000-person shipbuilding and repair industry. Some experts believe tapping into this workforce can build up offshore wind development.
Connecticut's offshore wind future is strained. Gov. Ned Lamont paused a multistate deal, delaying Connecticut's ability to reach its 2030 goals. The study's findings will be released next spring.
Similar studies are underway in Louisiana, Maine, and South Carolina. Like them, Connecticut can generate sizable amounts of offshore wind power.
Courtney Durham Shane, senior climate mitigation officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, said offshore wind has quickly become a lucrative business nationwide.
"The United States has already seen $25 billion in offshore wind supply chain investment to date," Durham Shane noted. "Projections are showing that there could be upwards of $100 billion in private investment and nearly 50,000 jobs that are up for grabs domestically."
The New London State Pier terminal became the first East Coast offshore wind marshaling terminal with unobstructed ocean access. It can speed along the staging and assembly of several states' offshore wind projects. New York State's first offshore wind farm created 75 jobs at the facility, a number which is slated to double.
Disclosure: The Pew Charitable Trusts Environmental Group contributes to our fund for reporting on Endangered Species & Wildlife, Environment, and Public Lands/Wilderness. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
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Major electric grid operator PJM Interconnection estimates it'll cost more than $14 billion to provide electricity for 2025-2026, up from $2.2 billion last year.
That price tag has advocates worried about rising utility bills and public health impacts, partly because of PJM's continued use of gas and coal.
Marcia Dinkins is the founder and executive director of the Black Appalachian Coalition and a member of Black Women for Change.
She said people in the company's 13-state region - including West Virginia and the Ohio Valley - have higher rates of cancer, developmental delays, premature birth, and death from the continued reliance on coal.
"We're seeing high rates of asthma and chronic illness," said Dinkins. "Families are already struggling with access to affordable health care."
PJM says increased usage, power plant shutdowns, and increased operation costs are all driving up the cost of electricity.
Mountain state ratepayers saw a 90% increase in average residential electricity bills between 2005 and 2020 - higher than all states except one, according to Conservation West Virginia.
Dinkins explained that grid operators use the capacity auction process to make sure there's enough power available to meet future demand.
"And so at the risk of the everyday citizen," said Dinkins, "this increase through their process becomes a burden to the people living in West Virginia or along the Ohio Valley."
A Pew Research Center survey from last year found 67% of Americans say the U.S. should prioritize developing alternative energy sources, such as solar and wind.
But just 31% say they are ready to phase out the use of oil, coal and natural gas completely.
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