[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and true currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through freezing trees, strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find again.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello, K squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly K squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability, and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California, and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. You've probably never given the topic much thought, but who owns the solar energy that falls on the planet and all of its living inhabitants? Is it only those who are well enough off to afford solar photovoltaics? Or is solar energy a commons resource, accessible to everyone? This is an age old question. In 1754, the french philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, the first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders? What miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellowmen, do not listen to this impostor.
My guest today on sustainability now is anthropology professor Catherine Millen, who teaches at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She's the founder of the Solar Commons project at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and is deeply engaged in the search for ways to transform the sun's gift of energy from privatization through democratic community governance, especially in low income communities who may lack the capital to benefit from that energy. I'll leave it to Catherine to provide the details.
My guest today on sustainability now is anthropology professor Katherine Millen, who teaches at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She's also the founder of the Solar Commons project at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and she's deeply engaged in a search for ways to transform the sun's gift of energy from something that can be privatized to something that, through democratic community governance, can benefit the entire community.
And this is especially the case in low income communities who may lack the capital to benefit from that energy. I'll leave it to Katherine to provide the details.
[00:02:51] Speaker C: All right.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Katherine Millon, welcome to sustainability now.
[00:02:57] Speaker C: Hi, Ronnie. Thanks so much for inviting me today.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Why don't we start with some basic information?
What's your background? How did you get to the University of Minnesota and Duluth, of all places, and what do you do there?
[00:03:11] Speaker C: Okay, so I'm an anthropologist, and I'm just going to begin where I started my academic career, which is I started at Rice University in the anthropology department at a time when it was anthropology itself was being repatriated back into modernity, away from peoples without what they used to call peoples, without history and that type of thing. And it was a moment where anthropology was looking at modernity itself, the modern world, what were the assumptions, and what's been naturalized for those of us in the modern world. And so that's kind of where I started my career as an anthropologist. And I moved around a bit because I'm from Minnesota, originally from Minneapolis, but I ended up back here. I had three kids, wanted to get some help with that around family. So I did move back maybe about 15 years ago or so. And I'm here at UMD, which is University of Minnesota Duluth, on Lake Superior. It's an amazing, beautiful town. And then I do my. A lot of my research work is on the Twin Cities campus.
So, yeah, that is kind of how I got here, Ronnie.
But in terms of my work, how I got here, I would say that I've always been interested in commons and how people share stuff, and that's a whole topic in anthropology, as you probably know. So I started looking at that in terms of modern systems. What are modern commons? So, in urban areas, and then I started looking at that in international law. I looked at what the global commons are. So I've some books on that.
The global commons, the high seas, outer space, the Internet, biodiversity, these are all things in international law called global commons. So how are they governed? How are they, and then, of course, in particular, how are they figured? In other words, what are some of the key metaphors and assumptions that naturalize the way we govern? And see these comments in the modern world? So I was very interested in that. Are there patterns here for how we are viewing that? And I guess I would say we call that an epistemic imaginary in theory and social theory, which is my background. But just to explain to your listeners, not all of them are academics, that the idea of an epistemic imaginary means that it's a distinction between epistemology and ontology. And if, in order to explain that, I would say if you think about a net that you throw out into the ocean and gather up fish with, if you look at the fish in your net that you've caught and you think that, oh, I've caught what's there in the ocean, in fact, what you caught was what the holes in your net allowed you to catch, you probably missed a whole bunch of stuff that's smaller and everything. So in other words, what we know and what we throw our frameworks and our concepts in the modern world. We throw it out there and we bring back in things to know. That's epistemology and those are the frameworks. But what we don't know what's left there in the ocean, that's ontology. That's what's really there and existing. And I guess I'll just say that, of course, this is important for sustainability because right now we're thinking about the gulf current and ocean currents and all coral reefs warming and all these things which are happening, which we don't understand. Well, we don't know.
We need frameworks. We need new frameworks to understand them. And then not just expert understanding, not just science, but we need to have forms of understanding that often come with images and metaphors, so that general people, meaning citizens who vote and help make decisions about this, what we're going to do, so that they can understand what's out there. So we need new frameworks in the 21st century.
It's epistemology and we know stuff is going on. That's climate change and etcetera. So that's where I locate myself with my work and the kind of social theory behind it.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: Well, you put a lot in that, in talking about all of this. And I think maybe we should come back to some of these questions later. But, but in particular, when you use the term naturalize, what does that mean? Because I think we think about nature as being out there as opposed to naturalize, which is a social practice or a cultural practice. So just again, to clarify, how does that work? Maybe you can give some examples.
[00:08:35] Speaker C: That's great. Exactly right.
Naturalized means how certain people at a certain time, in an era in history, in a certain context, a certain political and social location, it's how they share a view of the world that they think is just the way it is. They naturalize it, we would say. And so it's just like, well, that's just the way it is. It's just naturally so. And then, you know, other people at other times are simply in other geographies or with other political beliefs. They, they say, you know, they naturalize the world differently. So we're naturalized means the social and cultural, in particular, cultural assumptions that you bring to the world that have to do with, and their shared assumptions, not everybody shares them, but they're dominant ones. When something's naturalized, it's a dominant cultural viewpoint that says, well, that's not going to change, that's just the way things are.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: And often there are attempts to impose those dominant viewpoints on others who may not share the same kind of framework. Right?
[00:09:53] Speaker C: That's exactly right. And in fact, I guess I'd say in commercial culture, the. The culture we live in, which is dominated by images of photographs, things that people think, well, it's a photograph of the real. The real, the way things are. So. But actually, no, it's a perspective to sell you something, you know? And so we tend to, where do we get our images of the way things are? Why do we think that's a good view of reality? You have to be careful in a consumerist society where you're getting these views from all kinds of interests. And then I guess I would say this is one reason why I think it's so important that art, images and thinking about metaphors, why this becomes part of the work we do in sustainability, in all the complex systems we work with, including energy transition, that we have ways, through images, metaphors that are culturally accessible, to bring this complexity into some other form of understanding that's shared.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Again, going off track. I mean, it seems to me that one implication of what you're saying is that metaphors and the like are actually political.
And they're not just neutral, uh, images or. Or values or beliefs that. That, um, the society, you know, produces those things in a way, in reaction to certain kinds of, again, naturalized assumptions and in order to reinforce those. And then when you get, uh, heterodox movements in art, for example, you know, like impressionism or. Or modernism or abstraction. Right. People go crazy because it doesn't.
It's making a statement that undermines the convention. Anyway. That's just, again.
[00:11:57] Speaker C: Very important.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, your focus is on the commons. And in many ways, the commons is a kind of heterodox concept and practice, although it's been done historically. Maybe you could tell us what you mean by a commons.
[00:12:14] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to pick this up from where you just left off with this idea of, you know, that our assumptions and are, you know, political often when we naturalize something. So commons are not naturalized anymore, but they certainly used to be. And when did that stop happening in the modern era? Well, the way I've looked at this historically, and most people who look and study modernity, they understand that, you know, colonization, kind of european, western perceptions of what is a legitimate, legitimate views of land so that land can become property of some sort that before that, in order to also say that peoples living in places when colonized by Europeans, that those peoples had no right really to own and to have property on the land. So these colonial claims to sovereignty come at a certain historical moment, and that's the moment when the commons began to disappear. In other words, after the modern world gets established with however many nation states exist, you end up with two kinds of property. There's public property, which is what states can own, and then there's private property, which is what private entities, corporations, and individuals will own. And what happened to all the other kinds of properties or ways of belonging to the land, et cetera, that existed, or rather were legitimized and had legitimate cultural and political practices at smaller scales before that moment and persisting today, but delegitimized.
So those are, I'm going to call those commons common property, things that people collectively either owned or were considered to not be ownable at all. And so we have many, many examples of how local people at village scales and other things shared their water wells, shared their fisheries, shared their, you know, their energy commons in forests and other places, they had social rules to do it. They didn't have nation states. They didn't have, oftentimes didn't even have private property in the feudal era. So again, I'm thinking a little bit also about our own in the United States, the common law tradition that we're coming out of. Why did commons disappear? And rather, and also, how is it persisting in that legal tradition which legitimizes how who gets to have decision making power and authority over the world we live in? So, yeah, that's where comments are. They're persistent.
They exist in residual ways. I'm kind of using a historical framework of Raymond Williams, who said, you've got a dominant form, a view, a way of looking at the world that's dominant at a certain time, tries to present itself as naturalized, as natural, and then you've got residual forms, and they are persistent, and then you also have emergent forms. And I would say commons are emergent and they're residual in our world today. And I would say that the Internet, that's an emergent form that emerged with technology.
And there are many interesting emergent forms of commons, and they all involve, of course, if it's a commons, from my perspective, it involves social rules that people will share so that they can share that, you know, some people call it a resource, so you could share the resource of the Internet. There was a protocol placed called net neutrality at the center of those who invented it, which is a set of social rules that says it's going to be shared and you're not going to privatize it. You can build private property on top. You can build state public property on top, but it is a shareable resource. So that's an emergent form. But residual, there's so many interesting forms of residual and persistent commons and also forms around the world that we can go to to find out what's a good way at local scales to start sharing things better and have, you know, collectively and be decision makers and set social rules to share it better than what we get in our dominant private, neoliberal marketplaces or even regulatory states that have been captured by these markets. So these are important issues for sustainability, certainly for energy transition.
So that's, I guess I would throw that idea of commons out there. You know, what got buried after colonization and the rise of the modern state, the division into public and private, you know, all these other forms of sharing property and sharing land, water, etcetera, delegitimized in that act.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't want to go to my lecture mode, but it may be useful to make one more distinction, because you talk about emergent commons and residual commons, and one of the features of the residual commons was that ownership really did not exist. It was use rights. Right. It was what's called usufruct, that people had and not even a right, but people could use some portion of that resource.
Right. Had to follow the rules. Right. Today, of course, we still, you know, who owns the sun? I started this out with the introduction I used that sort of conception, right. The very idea that someone owns solar energy or owns the sun is a modern concept. So it's an important distinction, I think, that at least the two of us need to make.
[00:18:25] Speaker C: Absolutely. You might have to go into professor lecture mode. Well, I'll stop in this. No, it's good, because Yusuf writes, is key and absolutely key. And they were natural, naturalized in other areas because, of course, who can own the sun? And lots of people would say, well, who can own water?
Who can own a forest, really, and biodiversity? Who can own that? So, yeah, let's see what these user rights are and what are the social rules that made them successful at one time, and how are they instructive to us now? So true.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is anthropology professor Katherine Millen from the University of Minnesota Duluth, who is a researcher into various kinds of commons and is the founder of the Solar Commons project at the Twin Cities campus of the University of Minneapolis. And we've just been talking about what commons are before we go on to talk specifically about the solar commons project, I wanted to bring up one more point, and this one is probably familiar to those of our listeners who went through environmental studies, and that's the tragedy of the commons, which is, I regard as a kind of a myth, but one that has been naturalized. And it's based on an article written by Garrett Hardin, a population biologist at UC Santa Barbara back in 1968, in which he made the argument, and he was very concerned about the so called population bomb notion. And basically, he used a metaphor based on the english commons to argue that the only way to save the world was to privatize the right to have children. I guess by issuing permits.
You know, that one was never very clear. And the idea was that if you have a commons, an open access commons, and there are no regulations, no social rules on use rights, that inevitably it will be destroyed. His example of the english commons was wrong. It's less clear about the overuse of the resource.
But let's go on. That was also in lecture mode.
Let's go on. So you're the founder of the solar Commons project. What exactly is that, and what are its goals?
[00:21:10] Speaker C: Okay, I'm just going to pick up one thing first about Garrett Hardin is that when I said, you know, in modernity, we are left with private and public options for property. So Garrett Hardin, he thought he had two choices. And he said, when you've got a commons open access, which is like what solar energy is, you could say that you've got two options. And privatizing was what he thought was best. He was super ahistorical. Or rather, he was really locating himself in. In this modern vision that naturalized only two kinds. So what's the solar Commons project? Well, the solar Commons project goes back historically to the moment in our legal system when we had usufruct rights, when we had.
And we knew how to, in our system, hold land or agricultural fields or forests or fisheries and things like that, when we knew how to hold them with social rules for use that were managed and locally by people that knew each other. They had relationships with each other, and these social relationships helped manage people. Not taking too much. There were absolutely, absolutely all kinds of ways. And it wasn't just signing a contract, you know, this was, you know, shaming somebody or, you know, kicking them out of the village or, you know, doing a number of other things that would be, you know, graduated, to get people to behave in ways that worked well for everyone. And so, you know, there were all kinds of ways to do that, and not so good. And also good. So.
So anyway, I go back for the solar commons and I think about what residual forms do we have in our legal system that would allow us to start using the sun's radiance with the technology we have today in photovoltaics, and to start using that in a way that involves a common property right. So a right for everybody to use and access this, and then a right to claim even a property interest, a common property interest in it. And we have this residual form that english peasants used very effectively when our legal system was just beginning after the norman invasion.
And all these local village rules and things like that were delegitimized because you have a new king who said, I own all the land. Nobody else can own land but the king. And so the king then starts in a whole kind of way of distributing some of that land to different people under different rules. And peasants very cleverly created this form when they had no.
They had no rights to own land, but they created a form for using the land and even passing down the right to use through generations. So it was an intergenerational user right. And they used something called trust law for this. So trust law is really the kind of earliest property form we have within feudalism that allowed people outside the king to be owners in some way. Okay, I use that for solar commons. Solar commons is basically a community trust ownership structure so that you understand solar energy has two, let's say at least two benefits.
It has clean electricity benefit if you run it through this pv technology, and then it also has a financial benefit, because if you run it through that technology and you make solar electricity, you're going to have savings on your electric bills, and that's a financial benefit. So if you're going to have an equitable distribution system with solar energy, it belongs to everyone. It shines on everyone.
You can use a trust law mechanism so that everybody can access that, and especially the financial benefits. That's the, you know, that's kind of a historical, you know, kind of way to say what the solar Commons are, but it's community trust ownership and of sun. And then, you know, as an anthropologist, I've been working to, you know, apply this and to create demonstration projects. I work with lawyers and others so that we can actually do this.
[00:26:07] Speaker B: I want to come back and talk about the specific projects, but let me go back and ask a couple of questions about trust law, because I think there's a gap there, a potential gap there.
In what you were talking about, you said that the first applications of trust were under feudalism and in the Commons, if I understand you correctly.
Did I get that right?
[00:26:34] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: So what does that actually mean in that setting when you talk about a trust? What is the nature of the. Or content of the trust? Because it's not the same as we understand as a trust. Right, right. So, so, you know, so can you clarify that?
[00:26:53] Speaker C: Yeah. Right. Okay. So let's go. You have to go back into the feudal system, you know, and so everybody's got these feudal obligations to each other. And, you know, sometimes these feudal obligations are, you know, verified in crazy ways because it's in a also religious framework, you know. So with these obligations, what you could do is if, you know, there are certain, you know, certain people couldn't, people couldn't own land, but they couldn't even hold the land. So let's say, you know, in one way, trust law begins when a soldier is, you know, sent out into the, you know, into the, I'm forgetting of the word, the crusades, you know, and, you know, and the soldier is given a plot of land to use and then has to go off to another crusade and is going to be gone for another five years. What's going to happen to the land?
And so that soldier might pass that trust, a really good friend, to be the legal owner of their estate, you should say, or the obligation they have in the land, the obligation to respect that. So they give that right to a trusted friend, and they can't give it, say, to their wife or their kids unless for all kinds of feudal rules. So they give it to a trusted friend, and when they return, that friend gives it back. So that mechanism to trust was set up in that way. And it also worked for, with women who couldn't own property. So you can't, if the male head of the family dies and the youngest male son, who's going to be the inheritor of that user right in the land, they're not old enough to take advantage to take it on, then they will entrust the land to another male adult.
And that way, the beneficiary of that trust, the one who's going to benefit from that trust, is going to be the family that continues to live there and own it, and they can then pass it on, which the law allows. So that's this kind of trust relationship. And had it breaks up law, the property, into a legal, a legal obligate, a legal obligation, which is you have to pass this on. And then there's another, there's a beneficiary to a trust right. Beneficiary is named and you and is also that. So there's two kinds of, you call the. I don't want to get too much into this, but it's called an equity law issue. In other words, the beneficiary owns an equitable title. And I like that for sustainability reasons. What is equity? The law, feudal law, wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to people because soldiers couldn't keep their land, women couldn't own, and all these other things. So you had to have an equitable solution. And that's where the invention of equity courts and equity law came. And so trust was one of these first forms of what we call equity law. And let me just throw one other thing that's really important for how we use it in solar commons is that if your grandmother, when she dies, she writes on the back of a napkin who she wants her money to go to, and she says, it's going to go to my granddaughter, you know, and then the granddaughter takes that napkin into a court of law, and the court of law determines, yeah, that was written by the grandmother, okay. There's no contract, there's no other kind of business of Claire, of registering or anything like that. It's just the napkin, you know, and it's legitimate. The court will uphold it because it's equitable. So this idea that, you know, trusts, wills, and some very unsorted, very ancient forms of, they give people rights to do things, pass on property and do other things, and it's protected by law. So it's residual, you could say. It's still effective. We can be creative with it. And that's what we tried to do with solar comets.
[00:31:31] Speaker B: So, I mean, a trust is literally about trust. Oh, yeah, right.
And social obligations to the community. I had one question I wanted to ask, because, you know, these are the rules that govern a commons, or a trust in medieval times may be difficult to enforce. So what's the penalty for violation of those rules?
[00:32:00] Speaker C: Oh, my. Um, so. So I gave you an example of trust laws that would work for, you know, moving property around, being a beneficiary and things like that. But there's other ways in which commons were protected in law.
So, for example, the magna Carta is very. The magna Carta means two charters, the great charters, plural. And one is, you know, what we have today in our civic rights, you know, the right to habeas corpus and various other civil rights that we claim. And the other one is the forest charter. And the forest charter basically said, you know, you the king with your property rights on everything, you have a limit to what you can do and own. And when it comes to the forest, people are not giving up any rights that they have to go in and gather wood to, you know, to raise some animals, to gather food. And they list them in that in the forest charter. So that is always remains. It's part of the US, you know, referred to in the constitution. It's part of our common law tradition here that these common rights that exist and continue on. And there are social rules around how much to take now from a forest, et cetera, to be fair to everybody and to future generations. And for example, there's a word called estovers. And estovers are the amount of wood, and it's in the magna Carta. So it's the amount of wood that a widow can take from the forest to take care of her family.
So that's different. It has a different name. You think you've got legal terms today, but they had them then too. For what are the social rules to use this, we might call it resource, let's just call it forest.
What are the social rules to use it? Well, they had words for it in the language. They were units of measurable units, like how much can you carry out of the forest for your family? And if you're a widow, what are the social conditions that change between how somebody else might carry wood out of the forest? That's just one example of how the social rules would work.
It's a little different when you're transferring property and trust law the way we're using it, because you have to recreate those social rules and obligations. Now, we don't have language for it, and so that becomes a very creative thing. I would say what we need today, of course, we need to put a lot of art and images and various other things so that everybody sees and can share the knowledge about what the new social rules are going to be that allow us to share equitably these things that need to be passed on to the next generation.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: Well, property sure is complicated.
You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipchitz. My guest today is anthropology professor Katherine Millon, and who does work on solar commons. And we have just been talking about the feudal and medieval origins of trust law, which are based on mutual trust and not on legally enforceable contracts as such.
Today we've got various kinds of trusts, we've got trust laws.
How does that work in terms of thinking about commons in general and solar commons in particular? I mean, we have land trusts. Right.
And a land trust holds land in trust, but for whom and to what purpose?
But I don't want to go off on that particular rabbit trail. But I'm just sort of thinking about contemporary examples.
[00:36:13] Speaker C: Well, I would say there's going to be some really important overlaps in all these examples. If we're trying to create community trust ownership for solar, we're going to have to look at conservation trusts and other things and look at how, what are the social rules that have been effective there? And we do have a problem with conservation trust in forests. So you want to pass on your land to your kids, let's say, and yet you don't want them to be able to sell it for a new suburban development. And so you give the development rights to a land trust and you let them. You know, we say property is a bundle of rights. So you pull out that bundle of right to develop it into a commercial development, and you give that right to a land trust which will in perpetuity hold it. That means go ahead, sell the land. Its property value may go down because of this, but you cant sell that right to use it for development. Now after two generations, whos managing that? Whos managing that, that property? Right.
Obviously, it's written down. It's actionable. Somebody can still say that this exists, but who's watching to see in a neighborhood whether or not somebody developed something on it or somebody sold it to someone else? Once you start using the system, you're going to have to have on the ground local people who are in some sense maybe entrusted or who have an obligation or some other form to kind of watch this or value it in such a way that it is used every year. And we can see, when we gather for a festival, we can see if it's been harmed. And this is how the medieval forms did it, too. They had all kinds of forms every year in a festival to go out and kind of look at, you know, jurisdictions and various things that had been set up as commons and kind of make sure that somebody wasn't infringing. So you got to put those in and you should probably have fun things happening at that time. So people want to come and have fun and know each other. So we have a lot to do that we've been doing with contract law for a long time, and we're going to need to start doing it in other ways, too.
And so solar commons very much is aware of this, and that's why if we have a community trust ownership for solar, we make sure there's a mural, public art mural, and various other things there that alert people, give them a shareable meaning for what it means to share this.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: So let's get onto the application. Okay, you've got a couple of pilot projects, one which is running, one which is in planning. We can talk about both of them.
How does describe the first project, where it is and how it works so our listeners get a better sense of what we're talking about here?
[00:39:34] Speaker C: Right. So the first project that's interconnected to the grid and et cetera is in Arizona. It's in Tucson. And I just need to step back a bit because it took ten years to even get that interconnected. And why is that? It's so small. It's 14.5 by the time when we raised the money early on for this, we had enough to just do, I don't know, 5. Then over that ten year period, we could do, ended up being able to do 14 for that amount. So we see how much solar technology has dropped in price through that.
So we started way back when there was going to be a new light rail corridor added in Phoenix that was going to need a lot of electricity there in that corridor. And instead of building a couple more gas generation plants or hauling in coal fueled electricity, et cetera, from elsewhere, why not use the right of way that's there in that corridor that the city has and citizens have a right to basically hold something in a right of way. There's some social rules for that. Why not put solar in the right of way? So that was the idea. We're going to start out with a small one. We're going to put it in the right of way, and we're going to own it as a community trust. That means that the financial benefits, it'll sell electricity into the grid. We thought that eventually this could just power itself and it could keep funding itself to produce more and more solar down the corridor. But the idea would be that as the solar would sell the electricity to those who are using the light rail system, they pay for their tickets, etcetera. So there's money, so they're buying that energy.
Then the benefits of that, the financial benefits, after you take away all the costs, there's going to be money. Put it in a trust fund. That beneficiary of the trust fund will be people along the corridor that are in threat of being gentrified by all this development.
That was the vision that people have a right to stay there, too. And what happens when in a market value situation is that development comes in and you lose that, right? So we thought, well, that's a good way for a trust ownership and a solar commons to begin. And so that was the idea. And then we learned, you know, really quickly in the entanglement that, you know, the lots of people in the city government loved it. Oh, I can't even tell you how many city council meetings and various other things you can imagine. Right? And we're just a volunteer group. There was, you know, myself and some architects and, you know, and some others really committed. And so years. And of course, the utility, the investor owned utility there was also not at all happy that anybody should own solar outside of themselves. And so they were behind a program to stop it. And one thing they said is for your small, whatever, ten kilowatt system, you need $2 million of insurance to put it in the right of way. So, you know, it's, that's something we call, I think, predatory delay. You know, the people who are dominant in the electrical, in electricity sector right now, a fossil fuel, made a lot of money in fossil fuels. They hold the decision making Arizona in many states, rather corrupt with their public utility commission stuff. So they hold all the rulemaking and they didn't want to see that. And so, yeah, that was one way that they kept us out of their $2 million.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: I like to think of.
I mean, I make this argument often, right, that the solutions are easy to envision, the technology is available, but the politics are always going to stop you. And nobody wants to think about that, right?
[00:44:04] Speaker C: Oh, my gosh.
Oh my gosh.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: Everyone wants, everyone wants sort of the naturalization of the technology without taking on the politics.
[00:44:16] Speaker C: And, you know, in addition to that, you could bring the cost down almost, you know, as low as it is right now, solar is cheaper than any other form of electricity right now. And that still. So you can't even make an economic argument anymore because of the politics. You're so right. And, you know, people who work in this area and have to fight, you know, the predatory delay, that is to say, the dominant is just, you know, they have all the money to keep delaying your things while the price of steel goes up and everything else is changing for your budget, you can't end up doing it. People burn out. They burn out on the politics. And that allows those who prey and have the money on staying in that, in that lane of having power, purely political and not economic, not sustainable, not technology.
It's politics.
[00:45:12] Speaker B: So anyway, so did that project sort of go down in flames or.
[00:45:18] Speaker C: Oh my God, what happened? It just you know, we were so burnt out, you know, after years, we tried to then put it in a park, put it in. You know, we kept thinking right of way. You know, right of way should be a form of commons. In fact, it is a residual commons, you know. You know, the enclosure movement as the old agricultural commons in England stuff as it was enclosed, what people found is villages around a common field. They needed a way to cross over that field, you know, instead of walking for, you know, miles and miles and miles around, now they put a fence around our common field. We can't walk through it. So that was the creation of right of way, a right of way through somebody's private property in order to get somewhere. We use it all the time. It's a residual form of commons. And so that was part of my problem, was saying, well, logically, I should be able to do this legally. I should do it all. Technically, I could do it. So anyway, that was my problem. I wasn't politically savvy. And finally, I had to start working with private entities, not public. And because of the regulatory capture of our public entities, so we industrial capture, I should say, of these regulatory things. So anyways, we were on a community center. We put that we kept, you know, we kept this money we had, you know, we had raised. And by the way, I just want to say we haven't talked about Eleanor Olstrom yet, but Eleanor Ostrom, I was invited to talk about the project at her workshop. Eleanor Ostrom, maybe some of you all know, she was the first woman to win a Nobel prize in economics. And her all her work was based on commons, what are commons? And she won in 2009, and 2009 was also when we were doing the solar commons, trying to do it in Phoenix.
There was. The Greenbuild conference was in Phoenix that year, and we did propose this corridor solution, and we won a legacy project for Greenbuild. It was a big deal. And so we were really trying to do it back then that way, and we were able to present it to Eleanor Olstrom and at her workshop in Indiana. And it was. But anyway, in the long story short, in 2018, we interconnected it with other private entities, and we connected it in Tucson, where we had friends. So talk about using trust, social trust and relationships, the only way to do it. We went through every public process for years. Public hearings, public this, public that, but our own friendships and our own relationships with people that were trustworthy. In the end, that's how we did it. And so we interconnected, and we interconnected it. We put it on a building as a community center in a neighborhood that was gentrifying. It was actually on the old segregated school of Tucson, which is a really interesting place.
And so we worked with them to the black community of Tucson, had bought that building when they were owning it and trying to hold it on for black history in that region, the history of segregation, and showing people what desegregation was going to look like. So we were working with them. We had some amazing partners to work with, and that area was gentrifying. So we made the beneficiary of the trust. Another neighborhood in Tucson that was a political refugee community, and we had the elementary school in that other neighborhood.
We made them the trustees. So they every year would distribute, say, there's $2,000 a year. It's very small. After you deduct all the costs of the system to insurance, maintain everything else, there still is $2,000 of savings left, and that goes to the trust. And so every year there's $2,000. And what we're doing now and testing is that that $2,000 is going to an elementary school in this political refugee neighborhood. There's 26 languages spoken at that school, and they're going to distribute it every year using something called school participatory budgeting. So this is very grassroots democracy framework that has been used, comes out of Brazil. It's used around the United States now in schools. It's a way for, you know, oftentimes the public coffer will give some money to a civic group and let them budget and vote on how they're going to use it. So we're doing that with the school. So a small solar commons can.
All those solar savings again, after you've paid for the system, can go and be shared. And we put a beautiful mural up on that school to show what solar commons were. So everybody in the neighborhood knows. And it's a magnificent mural. And we created a game to teach guiding principles. If you're going to share the money, you're going to make a decision. The kids are. They're fifth graders. They're going to make a decision about how to spend it. You know, they're not going to buy pizza for the whole school. They're going to. They're going to play a game that teaches reciprocity. You know, so this little game, it's a tile game. It says, you know, you took too long of a shower this morning, give back two water tiles. So it's all about building up a sense of our relationships of reciprocity. To the material, to the natural world, etcetera.
It teaches things about solar. And so after they play the game, they decide, okay, what are we going to do in our neighborhood? They produce ideas. There'll be a vote in the school about what to do. Everybody will vote. We're going to do this in a way that even parents and others in the neighborhood can vote.
So that's that. Solar comets, you know, we'd like to see that as a model. We're creating a lot of tools for that. We have a dashboard tool we created that can be, you know, it's digital, it can be up in the school. It, you know, and it can show, oh, here's how much. You're much. Here's how many kilowatt hours that solar unit is making.
Here's how much market value it has, and here's how much you can pull out for your solar commons trust in real time. It can show all those things. So you can teach stem. You can teach a bunch of things with this. You can have this very transparent, which builds trust. Right. Relationship between the host of the solar and the beneficiary, who's going to be not a passive beneficiary like most of trust law, but a very active beneficiary who's setting the rules and the purpose of the trust, how the money will be used. And then they, at the end of the year, after they decide to do something, they take pictures and they put it up there on the dashboard, and everybody knows what's happening with the circulation of the value all the way from the sun's celerity into the markets kilowatt hours market system, and finally, the common good that's created in the community.
So that's, you know, that's our first one. You know, we've been building a lot of tools and other things for it to make it work, to create social trust, to create, um, meaning, because, like I say, pizza might be the naturalized thing that everybody wants, but it's not what you need. We want solar Commons to be serving needs and real needs. And the other thing is, I would say that, um, you know, the idea of having a revenue stream based on, uh, a. The technology of solar, you know, solar technology, it's going to. You have a warranty on that for 25 years. You know, so for solar Commons trust agreements that we're making, you can think of power purchase agreements that happen with solar and stuff. This is a solar Commons trust agreement. So, you know, we, you know, we. We say you can have that agreement for 20 years. And the other five years of the warranty for the technology, let the host keep it because they will decommission it or repairs and various other things. So we worked with Rocky Mountain Institute, we got all the calculations done on this kind of stuff.
So our solar Commons agreement, that means a revenue stream for 20 years.
And the other thing, people who are doing community work, mutual aid work for building community wealth, you can have volunteers, thats great. But people need revenue streams and these kinds of revenue streams that are solid for 20 years, pretty much as solid as the sun rising in the morning.
These can build in a kind of stability in low income communities.
We have guiding principles for solar Commons.
Were using a creative Commons license right now that people who want to use the tools, et cetera, will have to agree to and they'll be free, which is, you know, use it to repair the world, you know, you know, that's our, that's our first principle. And, you know, so we, you can't, again, it's not just going to be used for pizza, if I can say so, 20 year. And I'll say one other thing here, Ronnie, is that when Rocky Mountain Institute worked with us back in 2018, when we did our first one, they said, you know, this is great, this works well. We had them do a whole analysis of the financial plan and its iterability, its scalability, and they said, you know, this is great. You can have a donor come in and donate because it's a charitable trust. So you can have a tax write off, you can have a donation or it can have a loan and it pays itself back on your, with the solar over time. But it turns out to be what they call net positive, net present value positive meaning, you know, it's, you know, somebody donates or gives money, there's, it makes more for the community than if you just give them the money, it will make more. So, yeah, so it does that. But they said, don't ever, ever go above 500 kw in your solar. Don't try to be, you know, 100, don't play the game of, of the investor owned utility. And third, you know, don't do what's happening with solar right now, or you just scale, if you stay at five, if you go beyond 500 kilowatt, 500 kilowatt system, which is basic community solar scale, I would say community for, you can have it on a roof of a factory. You can do this in urban areas where a point of use for the electricity is greatest, you know, and you can do it at this scale and you won't be adding administrative costs.
They found every administrative cost is going to be taking money away from the trust. Well, that's interesting. You know, it makes you think of these big mega projects. You know, if they had, you know, ten smaller 500 kw versus a giant megawatt project, there would probably be more money available and savings than not. So, yeah, that's what we learned.
[00:57:20] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Katherine Millen of the solar Commons project at the University of Minnesota. She's just been describing one of the pilot projects in which she's been engaged. Catherine, can you give us a quick summary of the one that's in the planning stage right now?
[00:57:39] Speaker C: Sure. So this is a 500 kilowatt solar array, and this is going to go on, a fact for a factory. So it's going to be behind the meter, producing electricity for a factory in northern Minnesota. That factory is in a small town called Mountain Iron on the Iron Range, and it's a solar manufacturing factory. And the CEO of this factory is. The factory is Aline. And Martin Pichartic is the CEO. And we were so fortunate to start working with Martin because he had a perfect vision for the repair of the world work of solar, and he loved the idea of associating it with his factory. And he is now building other factories as well. So what we're doing is this. The. The. He will be the host, Aline. The factory will be the host. It'll be behind the meter. So 500 kw, it will power that, I don't know, maybe 10% of the low electric load at the factory, and all the solar savings minus cost. You know, our usual solar commons agreement is going to a trust, and that beneficiary of that trust is the boys Fort reservation, which is about 40 miles away. And the Bois Fort reservation is going to use that money for food sovereignty, and the food sovereignty work they're doing. So now it will make about maybe 60,000 a year for 20 years. That can fund. A food sovereignty coordinator can do all kinds of things. We'll pull out some of that money as well, and have that in the Ojibwe school on the reservation. We'll translate our game into Ojibwe about solar commons and reciprocity, and the kids will also be involved there in using the funds and be decision makers in the process. So that's our project up there in northern Minnesota at 500 kw.
[00:59:43] Speaker B: Okay, Catherine, our time is almost up, and I had one last question to ask you about this. Some critics might argue that you're not really providing access to solar energy or electricity, but are extracting money from private owners, kind of like a charitable donation into the trust. How do you respond to that particular criticism?
[01:00:06] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great criticism. And I'm very aware that some people say, hey, if you're going to be doing this charitable stuff and creating these revenue streams, isn't that something the public's supposed to be doing?
Are you now letting the public, the government get off the hook on stuff like that? And I'll just go back to this problem of dividing things up into public and private property, and that's part of the problem here. So what we're doing, I do not feel at all that we are, with this arrangement, just taking away from private or, you know, private profits or taking from what should be the public domain. We are creating a new space where, in this energy transition, with trillions of dollars coming from the federal government for infrastructure, that we're going to create the tools, the agreements, so that people can do solar commonly and they can share at, at, you know, at smaller community scales, build community trust, and start having revenue streams. So the financial benefits of solar are not just going to the state or to the private domain, but they're actually going to a common good. So that's the argument I would make against that.
[01:01:25] Speaker B: Okay, where can our listeners go to learn more about your, you know, the solar Commons project and your work?
[01:01:33] Speaker C: So. Right. We have several publications, and you can go to the Solar Commons project website. It's at the University of Minnesota, although I have to say, I'm going to have to update that this summer because I've been kind of busy in the field and haven't done that. So you'll. But there's public. We go to the research area. We try to publish on the projects we have and the research.
You can see more projects that we've been working on there.
But. So that's one place.
Yeah. And there's a, there's a small nonprofit called the Solar Commons, also has a website, solarcommons.org, and that you can go and look at that, too. The solar Commons nonprofit sometimes has to act as a trust protector in all of this. It can't just be a research university project. So it has some things to do as well.
And so that's where you can go and find out more about what we're doing. And, hey, we always are looking for people to work with, Ronnie, and so we would love people to contribute to our work. We would love people to experiment, be part of the great experiment with us and have demonstration projects in every state. And so anybody wanting to work can contact me and you can find my address at the University of Minnesota.
[01:02:52] Speaker B: Okay, well, listen, Katherine, this has been a really interesting interview and provides, I think, a lot of hope to people out there who are fighting with utilities and other big institutions. So thank you for being my guest on sustainability now.
[01:03:11] Speaker C: Thanks. Thank you, Ronnie. It was a pleasure. Thanks for the great questions. And yeah, big fan of your show. So it's an honor to be here.
[01:03:21] Speaker B: If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainabilitynow as well as Spotify, Google podcasts and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make case good your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday, sustainability now.
[01:03:53] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs, and not through currents and thriving seas and winds blowing through freezing trees, strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good plan.
