Appalachian Institute for Renewable Energy
Pioneering community-owned renewable energy
We post our news and reflections on energy, and we also like to repost pieces that we find relevant to community-owned renewable energy. Topics touch on policy, finance, energy politics, case studies, breakthroughs, trends, electric vehicles, as well as the broader social, economic, and maybe even metaphysical dimensions of energy.
With the wave of recent hurricanes, floods and wildfires as real reminders of what we value in the face of climate-related loss, yet another climate report was just released. This one, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bears special mention because of the worldwide stature of the IPCC and it’s decades-long work on
AIRE’s core mission is to help nonprofit organizations and community-minded people develop solar projects at their schools, shelters, food systems, houses of worship, and other important public places. And, not just put solar up for show, mind you; our design principle is to push the benefits of ownership and control to that “community” and not
Two economists were just awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics. Of course that isn’t a newsflash, because it happens every year, but the work for which they were recognized is both newsworthy and urgent. The dwindling window of opportunity to decarbonize the global economy and literally save the biosphere, combined with the fact that
AIRE has spent a solid decade now experimenting with ways to develop community-based renewable energy projects. We consider honesty to be a virtue and if we walk that talk we’d have to say that we haven’t made a much of a dent in the dominant, dirty, deadly energy system we set out to help change.
My wife and I joined the ranks of EV adopters back in July. We’ve always felt like we had to “do the next thing.” When we put solar thermal on our house a decade ago, one sunny morning my wife told me “we’re making money this morning.” Her point flew straight over my head until
Nowadays most folks can’t get from point A to point B without their GPS. There’s no sense of geography or direction. Who can intuitively point to north let alone describe the difference between “true north” and “magnetic north?” Add to that the likely fact that many folks can’t name the 50 states or identify them
AIRE is very happy to welcome RIDG as a new project and creative partner, bringing with it some new thinking and important perspectives about energy. Bucky Black is the chief instigator, dreamer, and doer behind RIDG. Although AIRE has always focused on energy generation, we know that conservation is foundational to everything. In fact, we
We encourage folks to check out Seth Heald’s piece on Power for the People VA, where he opines that “Electric co-ops are supposed to operate democratically, but do they really? And what happens when they don’t?” Check out what he has to report on a petition he and fellow members filed at the state’s utility
In a sense, community-owned renewable energy and democracy are somewhat synonymous terms. Some may assume that electric “cooperatives” are democratic, but that would be an assumption worth testing once in awhile. A decade ago, two colleagues and I, attended a particularly interesting annual meeting of our electric utility, Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corporation, or BREMCO
Some things don’t seem real but in these times, reality gets a little weirder every day. We’re sharing solar finance knowledge with this terrific peer organization out in Montana, and, in turn, have learned about their impressive work. Besides solar, one of their telling projects over the summer was securing and distributing HEPA air filters