Smart insights and conversations with global electrical professionals
This special interest organization allows professionals to connect and talk about all kinds of carbon-free energy alternatives, adding nuclear, renewable, tidal power, and much more.
Energy News Network is a non-profit news organization committed to keeping stakeholders, policymakers, and citizens informed about the significant adjustments taking place in the blank energy transition. . .
Saxon Metzger and her brother Ayda Donne, who are now 29 and 26, grew up in Southern California and didn’t think much about their native heritage in Oklahoma. Her great-grandmother’s family fled the reservation after her aunt watched her mother murder the Osage terror reign, when locals brutally attacked tribal members for oil resources, as the brothers learned while researching family history.
Over the past decade, the brothers have begun to explore this history, adding the fossil fuel-related violence and exploitation recently featured in the film “Killers of the Flower Moon. ” Today, the Osage Nation is home to the nation’s concentration of abandoned and uncapped oil and fuel wells, which continue to release methane and other harmful pollutants.
Today, Metzger and Donne seek to connect with and give back to the Osage Nation and other tribal communities by ensuring that power in white leaves its own legacy of neglect or disinvestment.
Eighth Generation Consulting, an organization founded through Metzger, aims to provide education and assignment management to the body of workers in the dismantling of the sun, as well as publicize the installation of the sun.
“Tribal nations, as well as many other traditionally disenfranchised communities, are rightly skeptical of progress that does not fully recognize their potential shortcomings, having borne the brunt of fossil fuels,” Metzger said.
Osage Nation leader Geoffrey Standing Bear has officially pledged to support the brothers’ vision. In March, Eighth Generation won a Community Energy Innovation Conceptual Phase Award from the U. S. Department of Energy. A U. S. Department of Homeland Security has been awarded a $100,000 grant, mentorship, and the opportunity to get more funding from the DOE. Metzger also recently won a Grid Alternatives Tribal Energy Innovator Grant, which includes $50,000 and mentorship, and is a finalist for MIT’s Solve Global Challenges Indigenous Community Fellowship Program.
Metzger studied economics at Southern Illinois University and the University of Utah, then returned to southern Illinois to help facilitate the deployment of solar strength in this largely rural and low-income region.
He served as a program director for the nonprofit Solarize Southern Illinois and later worked as an assignment developer for StraightUp Solar, a residential and advertising solar installer targeting underserved spaces in Illinois and Missouri. Metzger earned an MBA with a concentration in sustainability from Wilmington University. and then worked for a dismantling company in California.
Going out on his own, he co-founded a company called Polaris Ecosystems that provides monitoring and consulting for solar decommissioning projects. Polaris has a contract for large-scale advertising and repowering in California and Texas, Metzger said, declining to give more main points because of confidentiality clauses in the contracts.
The company collaborated with a Georgian solar waste control company called Green Clean Solar, whose discoverer, Emilie Oxel O’Leary, said it plans to partner with Polaris on more contracts. His company has discovered methods to reuse solar packaging and components, for example, thousands of boxes from shipping solar products as mulch for a nursery in Hawaii, where landfill area is scarce.
“Saxon and I respond together. We are sustainable. We bring circularity to our conversations,” he said. “Very few [corporations] do what we do. These multi-billion dollar corporations have never stopped thinking about it.
Metzger now runs Eighth Generation and Polaris from Chicago, while also teaching a course on sustainable business at the University of Wilmington.
Donne is guilty of awarding grants to Eighth Generation while pursuing his doctorate in English Literature at New York University, with a concentration in Indigenous literature and environmental justice. Donne also collaborates with Judith Zelikoff, a professor and toxicologist at New York University, performing blood and urine tests. and conducting fitness workshops with the Ramapough Lenape Nation in New Jersey, which faces serious threats to its fitness due to a former illegal Ford Motor Company landfill that is now a Superfund site. Donne hopes to further bridge the humanities and STEM sciences of academia in the pursuit of Environmental and Energy Justice for Tribes.
“My family circle is very marked by what happened during the reign of terror. They tried to flee” from this legacy, said Donne, who also works as chief librarian at the International Center for Multigenerational Trauma Legacy. “But suppressing those things rarely works, it rarely protects you for long. I like to think that Saxon and my paintings deviate from this tale of denying our identity and fleeing from the pain that exists in our family circle.
During their visits to the Osage Nation, the brothers say they identified the cultural and economic importance that fossil fuels still have for the tribe. They try to recognize and respect this dynamic while selling blank energy. Lately, the tribe has no large-scale solar installations. on his land, and this year a federal ruling ruled that a questionable wind farm should be disposed of because it failed to download the correct permits a decade ago. The tribe has long opposed the wind farm built on sacred land.
“We’re trying to stick to the existing things that they’re doing, and not show off and say, ‘Hey, we know what the solution is,'” Metzger said. “It’s my tribe, it’s my parents, it’s my culture, it’s my people. But I do so with the wisdom that, to some extent, I’m also an outsider in a market that they don’t have access to.
Metzger added that on his first stop in the Osage Nation, “I didn’t see a single solar panel on the entire reservation. I looked for it. I was shocked. It was one of the few places I saw without Trump flags or solar panels.
Metzger said there is most likely a long way to go to install the solar force on the reservation, however, tribal leaders encouraged him and he obtained a letter in July from Chief Osage Standing Bear.
More than a fraction of states have decommissioning policies that require upfront monetary pledges, according to a year-end 2023 report by the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center and DSIRE. According to the report, nineteen states do not have state-level decommissioning. policies, adding Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
“When it comes to insurance policies, you need to make sure that the assets homeowners are left with the bill for in the end, a dine-and-run situation,” said Justin Lindemann, report co-author and policy analyst at Clean Energy Technology Center. at North Carolina State University. “In most states, this investment will need to be in place long before the task is dismantled. »
Solar energy transfer contracts and leases are usually accompanied by a dismantling estimate. In states that require monetary guarantees, developers must provide additional investment amounts over time for decommissioning, so that no primary monetary burden is added to the initial cost of the assignment.
Metzger said that in his experience, estimates can be unrealistic, a scenario that in the short term can benefit everyone, to the extent that the cost of the task appears lower.
“The truth is, our industry doesn’t need to have this conversation” about decommissioning pricing and logistics, “because a developer, if they included the full decommissioning charge, wouldn’t sell as many assignments,” he said. Metzger said. “No one needs to hear that homework is going to charge more. ”
Lindemann said he hasn’t noticed any primary disruption with low estimates, but there have still been few large-scale downgrades. State legislation and policies would likely attempt to ensure that estimates are accurate and that sufficiently large monetary pledges are available. For example, Ohio requires that estimates be reviewed periodically and, if the estimate has increased, the required bond will also have to be increased.
Conflicting ideological sides over solar power have fueled fears that solar panels will fill landfills and generate hazardous waste. These considerations are overblown because solar panels are typically made of metal and glass and the poisonous compounds in the cells pose a relatively small risk, experts say. Even if solar farms grow exponentially, solar waste will still be much smaller than other waste streams, such as structure debris and municipal trash.
However, for the industry to thrive, a culpable and elegant dismantling is necessary, experts agree.
“We live in a social media environment where bad stories, bad singular examples are spread,” Lindemann said. “We want to ensure that relations are not strained due to a lack of direction regarding deconstruction and dismantling. Do those interested or affected by a mission perceive what awaits them in 20 to 25 years? This point of Acceptance and transparency can be built, and the first step is comprehensive guidance from states and other entities.
By 2023, around 33 GW of solar will have been installed across the country, and solar deployment is expected to continue to grow.
“Managing this requires ensuring that state and local governments have the appropriate regulations to manage mass decommissioning,” Lindemann said.
Metzger notes that there are many prices and logistics involved with dismantling that can be easy to overlook: the desire to remove fences and cross fields to ship the panels, employee housing, renting appliances such as piles, checking buried electrical conduits, or others. Dangers.
“If you look at a site, there’s no single solution,” Metzger said. “Let’s say you have 20,000 panels, that is, a pile of metal. How heavy is it? What type of semi-trailer will you want to pull it? What about the labor? How many 40-pound panels can you lift in an hour?”
Metzger and Donne are putting together a decommissioning workforce exercise program and hope to eventually train members of the Osage tribe and others in aspects of decommissioning work and project management.
“We’re thinking about what this will look like for our tribe a hundred years from now,” Donne said. “Will we be able to have those structural resources when Saxon and I are no longer here?
It was this attitude that drove the so-called Eighth Generation, explains Metzger.
“It is occasionally cited as an indigenous precept to think about action across seven generations of impact, and this word has reminded me that some disorders simply will not appear until the eighth generation,” he said.
“And it’s like that’s what’s happening here, when every year we’re faced with millions of panels that require dismantling. These are all problems that can be solved for an industry that truly contributes to making the world a better place. We want to deliver on the promise we made as an industry to be particularly distinct from previous energy systems, and taking care of our legacy assets is a mandatory component of that.
Editor’s Note: A previous edition of this article described Eighth Generation Consulting as a nonprofit organization; It is a for-profit entity that explores the character of a non-profit organization.
An Indigenous solar consultant working to ensure responsible development in communities affected by fossil fuels is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service that covers the energy transition in white. If you would like to receive us, please make a donation.
The Energy Central Power Industry Network® is based on a basic idea: to force industry professionals to help each other and move the industry forward by sharing and learning from others.
If you have an experience or an idea to share or have learned something at a convention or seminar, your peers and colleagues at Energy Central should listen. It’s also simple to share a link to an article you liked or an industry resource you think would be helpful.
Start a post » Learn more about publishing to Energy Central »