Appalachian Institute for Renewable Energy
Pioneering community-owned renewable energy
Papers & Publications
This guiding question borrows from the title of a collection of essays, “WHAT ARE people FOR” by agrarian writer, Wendell Berry. It is provocative because it calls our values into question and challenges assumptions. Our conversations and activities at AIRE have recently asked a similar question out of the same vein– What is solar for?
Jeff Deal and I had the great pleasure to speak to a group of Ancilla College faculty and students, members of the Poor Handmaids for Jesus Christ community, and to community members at large on September 24, 2019. Our Lapen Lecture topic was energy, given that this community had worked a miracle of sorts by
I’ve just drafted a wide-ranging paper dealing critically with our present incumbent energy system, its undemocratic characteristics and ecologically dangerous methods, and on the other hand an energy transition that “ought to be.” I’m putting forth the argument that energy transition, in addition to being the more obviously technical project, is also a social project.
John Farrell, whom we consider to be one of the leading thinkers on community solar, wrote this 2010 report,, which we think is worth reposting for benchmarking and reflection. Participation and ownership were the key things we wanted to experiment with in our project described in the report. This was at a time (wow, 8
AIRE’s interest in community-owned renewable energy is grounded in the idea of rights and justice in the most basic sense. That is, we ought to have the right to choose clean, green, renewable energy, and further we ought to have the right to choose how and by whom it’s generated. Similarly, and on a more