Climate and Community: Solarize, Mosaic, and Economies of Scale

“Economies of scale are a good thing. If we didn’t have them, we’d still be living in tents and eating buffalo.”

-- Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, J.P. Morgan, 2010

This weekend, the Globe highlighted Solarize, a pilot program that encourages development of residential and business solar arrays by taking advantage of economies of scale to drive down cost.

Since Beverly High School installed solar panels in 1981 (see image), the North Shore has been at the cutting edge of renewable energy installation. It comes as no surprise, then, that Round 2 of Solarize includes the North Shore communities of Salem and Swampscott, which together have signed up so many people that they have reached “Tier 4” (of 5) status, meaning additional savings for participants in the program and an even greater snowball effect to encourage neighbors to join the movement. Other cities and towns across the Commonwealth are also taking part in the current round, from Andover to Egremont.

In 2011 and 2012, Solarize Mass led over 900 residents and business owners in 21 communities to install over 5.6 megawatts of solar electricity. The 10 cities and towns that participated in Round 1 of 2013—including my beloved Lee, Mass.—added another 3800 kilowatt hours of solar capacity.

This type of community-oriented green energy strategy has emerged with force in recent years. In particular, Mosaic, an investment platform that uses a crowd-funding model to finance solar farms across the country, has showcased the incredible potential of leveraging the pent-up demand for renewable power by bringing individuals together.

From the installation of 47 kWh of solar through Oakland, California’s Youth Employment Partnership (6.38 percent yield) to powering New Jersey’s Wildwood Convention Center (4.5 percent yield) and creating a solar roof on a school in Connecticut (5.5 percent yield), Mosaic has already provided a mechanism for thousands of Americans to directly invest millions of dollars in solar projects in their backyards and across the country.

The uptick in community-based economies of scale is not only spurring green energy (and in turn, reducing carbon emissions), it is also being used by Google to promote high-speed fiber Internet connectivity in cities across the country. Google Fiber expands to “fiberhoods” if/when communities secure enough signups to make the construction of the infrastructure economically viable.

Of course, this model has its pitfalls, particularly when it comes to ensuring access to new technologies across the income spectrum. As Newsweek noted last month, when Kansas City’s fiberhoods were unveiled in 2012, “the online map of fiber-hoods was largely divided by lines like Troost Avenue,” a street that for generations has separated affluent white families to the west and poor families of color to the east.

This outcome was not for lack of trying on Google’s part. As Newsweek stated, the company offered lower-speed broadband service on a monthly payment plan, partnered with community organizations on outreach, and hired people to canvass poor neighborhoods, sometimes with free ice cream. And yet, the divide remained.

This fact should not dissuade us from using community-based economies of scale to nudge neighborhoods toward taking up innovative technology. Rather, it simply highlights the fact that the State must do even more to subsidize the use of green tech in poor communities, many of whom stand to benefit disproportionately from its effects (such as reduced emissions).

In Massachusetts, this means expanding Solarize from the relatively wealthy communities that it has targeted thus far, to communities across the income spectrum—from Lawrence and Lynn to Springfield and Southbridge. It also means changing regulations to allow individual investors to pool resources through platforms like Mosaic.

While Congress dithers on climate policy (and tries to block the President’s historic regulatory efforts related to power plant emissions), communities across the country are hungry to support grassroots efforts to rid America of dirty energy and do their part to make the U.S. a leader in the green tech economy of the 21^st century.

Bowling Together: "Being Somebody" in Modern America

 “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1874

On August 14, 1851, Rev. Horace Bushnell of Hartford, Connecticut, delivered a speech titled The Age of Homespun, in which he mocked the effort of historians to catalog famous dates and persons and insisted that the truly valuable acts of our world are those performed by the “average” citizen.

[In] our historic pictures, we are obligated to sink particulars in generals, and so to gather, under the name of a prominent few, what is really done by nameless multitudes. These, we say, led out the colonies, these raised up the states and communities, these fought the battles. And so we make a vicious inversion, not seldom, of the truth; representing as causes those who, after all, are not so much causes as effects, not so much powers as instruments, in the occasions signalized by their names—caps only of foam, that roll conspicuous in the sun, lifted, still, by the deep under-swell of waters hid from the eye.

Bushnell’s simple conclusion: “True worth is for the most part unhistoric.”

I thought about Bushnell’s thesis as I unforgivingly traversed the dusty clay streets of Easter Island with my then-67-year-old mother in May 2012. Perhaps to ward off utter exhaustion or to refrain from saying what she really felt about my insistence that we walk every last inch of one of the world’s most mysterious and secluded locations, Mom took the opportunity to talk at length about her childhood, our family, and what she dreamt of as a child growing up in the small Berkshire village of Lee, Mass.

One of the most striking things that Mom said, with a tone of considered disappointment, was that she “always through she’d be somebody.” This struck me as an odd statement, and a troubling one. Mom was (and is) so many things to so many people. Within our family alone, Mom is the third child of a civil servant father and a homemaker mother, a sister to three brothers and sisters, a mother to two (and a surrogate for more), not to mention an ever-patient and forgiving spouse (right, Dad?) for 40+ years.

Beyond the familial, Mom’s life has been equally infused with meaning. She won multiple national teaching awards during her 35-year career as an educator (mainly at Swampscott, Mass. public schools). She’s been treasurer of our local library, a deacon at the First Church of Wenham Congregational, and an ever-present volunteer at Appleton Farms in my hometown of Hamilton, Mass (just to name a few of her many activities).

And of course, neither of my parents can travel the North Shore without bumping into old students who remember Ms. Airoldi (later Mrs. Kalloch) and Mr. Kalloch fondly as critical players in their emotional and intellectual development.

So how could it be that my mother didn’t think she was somebody?

In 1995, Robert Putnam, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, wrote an article in the Journal of Democracy titled, “Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital.” The article, which Putnam eventually turned into a book in 2000, was centered on the idea that the “vibrancy of American civil society” (what Putnam terms “social capital”) had notably declined in the second half of the 20^th century and that such a deterioration was having a multitude of unintended and unhealthy consequences on the state of the American republic.

Putnam continues to be one of several thinkers whose work has had a profound effect on the way I approach politics—so expect to see more of him in “First Principles” posts in the months to come. For the purpose of this post, Putnam’s observation is critical to understanding the answer to the question posed above.

Simply put, I think my mother’s conclusion is a product of how our society has slowly but surely chipped away at viewing community connections and social linkage as critical elements of a life well lived.

 

Everyone plays a role in how a society functions. Everyone is somebody to someone—and often many things to many people, all at the same time. And everyone needs to value each other’s contributions to our collective effort as citizens to make a freer, more just world for our neighbors, whether down the block, across the country, or around the world.

I’ll end—if you will indulge me—with one more familial vignette. Like my own mother, my mother’s mother, Mildred Anson Airoldi, played a variety of roles in her community. One role was as a volunteer at the local information booth on the Lee Town Green (see photo), which still stands at the corner of Main Street and Park Street.

Like many Berkshire towns—from Stockbridge and Great Barrington in the south to Williamstown and Adams to the north—Lee has long relied on tourism to boost its economy, especially as manufacturing fled in post-war period. My grandmother would welcome visitors to the Gateway to the Berkshires, whether they came to enjoy a concert at nearby Tanglewood in the summer, our famous foliage in the fall, or snow sports in the winter.

My grandmother was doing her part for her community. She was part of a world in which we “Bowled Together” and which that togetherness was valued. It’s a world that has, in some ways, passed us by. But it is also a world that can inspire us to do better—to appreciate the roles we play in one another’s success and to remember that while the world will long be full of unvisited tombs, it must never forget the people who inhabit said tombs. Those people were somebody.