interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
In The Heart of Energy Democracy
by Isaac Baker
February 6, 2019
This interview with Isaac Baker, the co-founder of Resonant Energy, a solar development platform expanding access to clean energy for nonprofit, small commercial and residential customers, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
How did you come to this work?
It's funny timing, thinking about my background. This weekend, I was up at Middlebury College where I did my undergrad. I spent a lot of time on our divestment campaign which focused on student organizing, and a number of different efforts to do more clean energy work. I always wanted to write and tell the stories behind clean energy, and I got more and more interested in implementation. I spent a lot of time going to communities were fossil fuel were extraction: I went to Pennsylvania for fracked gas, to Alberta for tar sands, and to communities fought various pipeline expansions in the Northeast, particularly Vermont and Massachusetts.
It was through all that that I became interested in trying to create solutions; to tell more stories and to bring our community’s money and politics towards the rapid transition that's underway.
I spent my first two years out of undergrad working with a Massachusetts-based organization called Co-op Power. Resonant Energy’s current co-founder Ben Underwood and I were on the team that pioneered the energy cooperative community solar program. This included everything from finding sites to organizing community forums and meetings to finance training. The barriers to democratizing energy are financial - a lot of energy projects are incredibly expensive, and they need capital upfront.
The more community-led they are, and the more community benefiting they are, the less likely it is that institutional capital is going to provide the nuts and bolts things you need.
The vast majority of my early work went into learning how to do all the complexities of solar financing and development and working with particularly investors who would fill that gap where banks would not. Eventually we would like to see larger, institutional capital to be serving these projects. But for now, impact investors are raising their hand, and saying, "We're going to move this market out, ahead of the more conservative investing arms in our society."
Two and a half years ago we founded Resonant Energy. We found enough financing partners, like Co-op Power, who were willing to finance high-impact projects for nonprofits and low-income communities, where the biggest problem to solve was really on the organizing and development side. I have spent the last four years in the heart of energy democracy, working to build a development platform on which community-based projects can happen.
How do you define energy democracy?
We define energy democracy as expanding access, particularly in under-invested communities - this means you haven't had access to the tools and resources to plan, develop, and benefit from clean energy projects. It means a sense of ownership of our energy system, and the ability to benefit from it, financially, regardless of race, income, creed, or other qualifiers, is what's important.
A full cooperatively, owned and developed by the community. We're excited about where we're able to do that, and to find funding that's excited about that. In the short run, we're excited about bringing people into the movement.
A framing piece that's really important to energy democracy is recognizing that energy is our single largest industry, from extracting the resources to distilling them, to distributing and use.
From a political economy standpoint, when we think about wealth inequality and employment access. For me, this is what we’re fighting for. It's about our money and changing our infrastructure.
Then there's the energy democracy version, which is about energy generation in cities and towns. People having control of their energy, and financially benefiting from it. We are working on a local basis, to take control of our energy system, and to own that energy system, where that makes sense, to have it be most cost-effective, in the face of a changing climate. That's some of the high-level framing. For me, that's important for understanding how we communicate it. Depending with whom were working, our communication tools vary.
Our energy is extremely complex, especially in the United States. With every utility, every State incentive program, we have one of the most regulated industries in the world. It's our role as organizers and educators to tell them a story first, capturing the imagination why it's important that we're doing clean energy.
When we talk about what that education is, it's explaining to them that if they install solar on their roof, many kilowatt hours they produce in a given month, they no longer have to buy from the utility. And where are they going to see those savings? And how is their meter going to spin backwards? And what policies might get triggered? And what is the broader discussion, in effectively, the fight with the utility that is well underway now over how projects get compensated.
But, really, the money is what this all boils down to. If people make this transition and make this switch to clean energy, how likely is it that they're going to get a good return on their investment? That they're going to save money on their energy bills, based on all the rules we have set up. That's where our education is focused. On telling a story to grab the heart, and on ensuring people, once they're ready to start thinking about clean energy, that it's a strong, sound financial choice that's well backed by a lot of good policy and rules that are in place, to protect them.
I understand how you would approach an individual, or a company, saying, "Let's put solar on your personal roof." But how do you define local? Do you work with cities or municipalities as local entities, and not just the individual?
One of solar's biggest, thorniest challenges right now, is that solar is both very popular but still very poorly understood. It's that customer acquisition costs are really high. It's not good at telling a story. It's very staff and labor intensive to find a person who wants to become a solar customer and get them to actually move forward. That's why a lot of the biggest companies, like SolarCity, have been going out of business. Or getting bought up by Tesla, and sold off for parts.
Figuring out how to cost-effectively educate people about clean energy and to build that sense of trust, is a really key piece of what we do. Partnering with groups like municipalities is one of the ways that we do that. We have a partnership with The City of Melrose, north of Boston, with a pilot campaign. We are partnering with them on a year-long campaign to do solar on some of their larger roofs, on their small businesses, and nonprofits. Through that process, we are working with their energy commission, including many volunteers from the city, to do outreach events, to bring people who are board members of nonprofits, who run small businesses in the city, and educate them about the benefits of clean energy and why they might want to do solar.
You're effectively using the city that is a trusted brand, or a point of trust in an area, to accelerate the education process around clean energy because they are lending their brand to that year-long endeavor.
Another version of working with public entities are the two projects underway in New York City. We're renting the roofs of the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which is a large, publicly-owned building by the Economics Development Corporation in New York City, to develop a low-income community solar project on that roof. It will be owned and operated to benefit low-income residents in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.
We’re also renting 40 rooftops of NYCHA, which is the public, affordable housing building entity, in New York City. We'll be bringing the benefits of clean energy to 350 households, who live in that public, affordable housing.
You mentioned resiliency – which is massively important considering the frequency of natural disasters around the world and in the US. But clean energy cannot be stored, and we are not in control of production, so how resilient is it?
When we think about energy democracy, there are a few ways. First, there's the off the grid, what we call, "micro development," happening in rural areas like those in Sub-Saharan Africa or Central Asia, where there is no grid and clean energy is allowing entire communities to leapfrog the enormous expense of building out all these poles and wires directly to locally controlled power source. They can build enough solar to power a town, use enough wires to bring power to communities, and add some batteries that, as you noted, so that you can store power so you can use power at night. That's the localized version.
Regarding retrofitting, it is only now starting to creep forward. Post Hurricane Sandy, a lot of money starts to free up to let people get more creative at the policy level about how to incentivize a utility retrofitting
We already have examples of microgrids, where we've cared about it, all over our society. A great example of a microgrid that got put to the test during Hurricane Sandy was in New York City. There are some very compelling photos that show the island of Manhattan right in the immediate aftermath of that hurricane, and Wall Street is still lit up. Wall Street is so full of backup generators that it is effectively an entirely localized grid system that can be islanded when and if the public utility grid fails. That part of the city is fully lit up, and still operational, and the rest of the city is in total darkness. Why? That costs a significant amount of money for Wall Street to be able to do that. But, for them, it was worth it. Because being without power, for even a moment, costs our global economy an enormous amount of money.
We have the technology, the know-how. What we're building is the will to create policies and incentives. We have solar, wind, and a lot of other forms of clean energy as well as batteries that are storing all of that clean energy, located all across our modern grid in an interconnected way.
The work we're doing today, on a path towards resiliency. Our work today is to install a lot of that clean energy right now, and that's what we know how to do well. We have a lot of processes in place for the work that we will have to do in the coming years. We will have to figure out how to make our grid more like a sum of little, interconnected parts so that each little piece of it can be islanded from the rest and be interdependent and interoperable. That's going to take an enormous amount of investment. Then we're going to need to finance a ton of batteries, and other forms of energy storage. We're going to need a lot more control on all of our things that use electricity, such that they can ramp up and down, so we can have more, broader coordination.
There's all this stuff, on the technical side, that will be happening. Right now, investing as an organization, figuring out how to get solar and the savings associated with it into communities not already benefiting from clean energy, and have been left out of this rapidly-growing economy. Both in terms of consumer benefits, and in terms of jobs, on both sides of that equation.
Do you think a massive grid transition is inevitable? To microgrids, to sustainable and clean energy?
I do. We've passed the tipping point where we're heading towards clean energy. Just the basic economics of utility-scale clean energy has gotten so cheap that giant solar arrays and offshore wind farms are outcompeting coal and gas and selling for unbelievably low price points. Clean energy, at the largest scale, is winning on a pure economic basis more and more all across the globe. It's displacing new natural gas systems, new coal, and other fossil fuel cites. I think that part of it is inevitable.
Not only is clean energy inevitable, but electrification is also inevitable. We're going to move most if not all of our transportation to run off of electricity, if not all of it in the next 50 years. We are going to heat our homes with electricity instead of coal, oil, and gas. Our society needs to be because if we're going to hit our climate goals, we’ll run almost entirely on electricity. And said electricity needs to be almost entirely renewable, especially in the developed countries, like the U.S.
What do you need to happen within policy to incentivize the work you do? On a micro sense, what does that language need to look like?
We develop small-scale, solar projects. We develop projects in the 25 kilowatts, for a church. Or, 500 kilowatts for a community, for examples. At a macro-level, we need progressive policies that are not just basic. We benefit from policies that see the value of having localized generation. We're putting panels in our cities right at the point of use, where power is being used.
If we produce a kilowatt hour in downtown Boston and that kilowatt hour is produced in the middle of summer, when the total grid is most stressed. That kilowatt hour is very, very valuable. Because we're producing it at a time of highest need that kilowatt hour means one of the diesel generators waiting somewhere in Upstate New York to create and sell power at an enormous expense.
But the equation of how valuable it is, is the equation for now, and forever. What is said kilowatt hour really and truly worth? That's the industry battle with the utilities, right now, to get what we feel is fair compensation for this local, distributed generation. Policy that both benefits distributed generation recognize the historical barriers our society has created to adoption.
That would prevent solar energy from getting powering in effect, a large majority of the buildings. When we distribute the pots of money through these clean energy projects, they should be evenly distributed. From our perspective that's a big part of the work we're doing. We are trying to be a part of the movement creating a more diverse and just transition to clean energy with a more diverse workforce a more diverse consumer base.
In a nutshell, we want policies that incentivize adoption and clean energy in under-invested communities, as well as recognize the significant barriers we have to overcome in doing that. To give you an example, we solved a number of barriers to be able to get financing for projects in low-income households. When we went to develop a whole portfolio of low-income households, we found the majority of them hadn't had either their electrical rooms nor metering setups updated in the last 60 years. They were eras out of date. Those are going to cost $10,000 a building, just to bring them up to code before we even consider the intervention of solar. As a society, if we want things to be evenly distributed, we have to pay for the barriers our society has created.
That's insane! Who’s responsible for keeping everything up to date? There’s no government body monitoring this?
No. The government's rule is if you're going to do construction on a home, you have to bring it up to code. Solar counts as construction. If it's not up to code, you have to bring it up to code, and the government doesn't create any progressive rules that allow low-income homeowners to do that, which is another interesting part of gentrification. One sells their home to a richer person who can afford to make all those upgrades, but the existing homeowner, without that sale and new cash that comes into the building, doesn't have the means to make those updates.
Poverty is self-reinforcing. You have progressively more and more under-invested buildings that become more and more expensive to live in, and only get updated when it gets sold to someone with significantly more resources who can afford to revamp the whole thing. In lieu of government intervention and incentives that are allocated, on a progressive basis.
To be clear there is no policy that says, for any number of reasons, homes need to be maintained and updated? It doesn’t matter to anyone they’re so far behind?
In theory it matters. There are a lot of legacy setups that are hard to maintain. For instance, in Boston, we have some of the oldest buildings in the country. People's meters are in the basement. The new rule is meters have to be outside, on the side of the building, so that if the utility company wants to come by and service the building, they can actually get to it without having to call the homeowner and be let into the basement. That's like this big, electrical intervention, where you're going to pay electricians to move all that stuff around. The short answer is that people would like for it to be updated, but we haven't had the political will to pay for repairs. It's basically just said, "Well, if you ever want to do a major construction project, you have to bring it up to code and find a way to pay for good compliance." And that falls on you, as a homeowner, period.
What are you working on currently?
As a community based solar developer, you think about us like an affordable housing developer.
We are building one of the first organizations that is explicitly for nonprofits. The industry has been royalling with a new study that just came out recently. That study: racial and ethnic barriers to solar adoption for rooftop solar showed that black communities, even normalizing for income have significantly and statistically lower adoption rates of clean energy. When we think about the work we're doing, it's to address disparities. We have communities that are middle to upper income, often white neighborhoods. Then we have the Amazons and all of these large corporations rolling out clean energy in a big way. These people are saving a ton of money. It's not a vanity project. These are really cost-effective interventions that require the ability to leverage capital. They have the ability to borrow money or to finance contracts in some way that allows them to invest in clean energy. We are working to bring that chain benefit, to the equivalent markets at both sizes.
We want to be bringing clean energy to everyone. At the household level, we want to bring it to the low-income household, and start that process of bringing in the financing, and the resources it's going to take to have their home be comfortable, powered by clean energy, and affordable to live in.
I talked a lot about access. We offer pay-as-you-go models, we offer loan options, and we coach people through different ways of paying for this clean energy transition that's underway. That's a big part of our consumer side work. When we think about who's working in the industry, the big numbers the Solar Foundation put out is that it is still 70% white and male, of which I am included. I’m very dedicated to being a part of changing, and evolving that statistic, over time. That’s one of the key pieces of the work we have before us. To ensure we have a diverse stakeholder group, deciding what's the next community that gets a big, community-wide marketing campaign.
What's the next big effort around clean energy? In a market-based context, the energy sector decides where and how clean energy goes. The industry needs to reflect the we they want to serve. Some of our projects have direct, workforce training funds. Our work in the city will partner with a number of different folks, including Green City Force. That will directly train 30 residents experiencing joblessness to find employment in clean energy. That's a larger initiative. At the local level, we do work with grassroots groups who want to do more clean energy. We also want to inspire young people with clean energy. We are working with high schools in the neighborhoods like Dorchester. We do a lot of work in schools. We're starting talks with faculty and staff to include building clean energy in the curriculum. How do we tell the story about that school having gone solar? That instills a sense of pride, and that makes people want to get more involved with that.
That is a very 360 approach.
I certainly appreciate your saying that, and I think from our perspective, we are both community-based as well as a developer, right? We're trying to build a replicable model that allow clean energy to expand. We have a revenue model. We are not registered, but we are on our way to becoming a benefit corporation. You believe that business can be a force for good, in this modern context. We have that side of us.
It's not going to happen by robocalling people, by sending out mailers, by filling people's inboxes with newsletter updates. It's going to happen by telling a powerful story, that we’re going to build our movement and actually drive systemic change. Like what we're seeing with the Green New Deal. On the policy level, we have to build that kind of love for the work we have before us, in a societal context.
Have you looked closely at the Green New Deal? It's a little vague still, but is it using any of the language you just mentioned? Is it the progressive policy you're looking for?
Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, at the national level, the principles of the Green New Deal are not set. They're pretty high-level, stretch goals. But I think they’re good for rallying the public. Governor Cuomo of New York just put out his version of a Green New Deal. Our job now, between the politicians putting out press releases, and things actually happening, is to work. That's where the utilities and lobbyists water everything down – between press release and implementation. There’s up until the press release, and there's the work that happens after. We're starting to see a version of climate work, that is much more grounded in community benefit. It’s much more grounded in how it attracts people. We're not talking as much about carbon in the atmosphere. We're starting to talk more about community benefit, about low-income access, about jobs. Those are all the things that matter to people, not just carbon in the atmosphere. The language is changing, and the focus is coming back to include marginalized communities. Putting our dollars behind that, saying that matters to us, that we will actually pay to transition jobs of fossil fuel workers. We will pay to do the massive employment efforts that are needed before us and to make this more accessible. The short version is, we're headed in a good direction, and the rubber will hit the road as we go forth and continue to build a coalition.