Appalachian Institute for Renewable Energy
Pioneering community-owned renewable energy
Think your electric utility knows what’s best for you and the public interest? Your utility is probably not looking out for you nearly as much as it’s looking out for its profits and executives. Can we imagination a better way? Could these big utilities be equitably transformed to “public utilities?” (1) We’re at a real
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.
Because it’s cold outside, but mostly for other reasons, I’ve been thinking about quilts, so I wanted to write about them as a reflection on the past year and in contemplation of the new one upon us. My family made one of those “barn quilts” that we see so much of in rural country for
I recently spent some time with Nathan Schneider in Boulder, Colorado. He’s a Media Studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of a new book, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That is Shaping the Next Economy. I recommend it! Let me connect some dots as to how the book relates
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
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