CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As the United States injects hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy through its signature climate law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, criticism is growing louder about where, how and whether new development should be allowed.
As opposition grows, once-routine regulatory processes are taking several years, if they are completed at all. Some communities are concerned about landscape changes, some property values and others wildlife preservation. Layered on top of these debates is misinformation, which sows doubt and mistrust among developers and communities.
A new class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a glimpse into a novel way of resolving these types of conflicts.
MIT is offering a first-of-its-kind course that trains students to be mediators in conflicts over clean energy projects. Supervised by a professional mediator, students work directly with developers, local officials and community members. Students get academic credit and hands-on experience addressing real-world dilemmas, while the community and developer get free help resolving conflict.
“Most coverage of clean-energy opposition sloppily reaches for the term NIMBYism,” said Larry Susskind, the MIT professor behind the course, during one recent class a reporter visited. He was referring to the common acronym for “not in my backyard” opposition. Ultimately, Susskind said, such framing delegitimatizes affected community members and stokes acrimony.
Curbing climate change — and extreme weather for future generations — depends squarely on society’s ability to rapidly build new clean energy infrastructure despite the messy puzzle of local, state and federal reviews projects must overcome.
Today, the technologies being built are mostly wind and solar farms, storage facilities and powerlines. In the coming decades, new projects will include everything from carbon dioxide pipelines to facilities capturing CO2 directly from the sky to renewable hydrogen production.
There has been debate in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere around the country about how to speed up project reviews. Most has focused on streamlining permitting processes, such as limiting the time local officials can spend on reviews and giving state and federal governments power to overrule local authorities. New York and California recently passed such laws and these could become models for the whole country.
But “this risks simply ignoring community concerns instead of finding ways to make the siting process more just in the eyes of those who are protesting,” Susskind and research colleagues write in an article set to be published in the January 2024 issue of the scientific journal Cell Reports Sustainability.
In Susskind’s class, dubbed the MIT Renewable Energy Clinic, he hopes to create collaboration that may slow down projects initially by incorporating more input but ultimately speed them up by avoiding later-stage conflicts.
In one recent Friday afternoon class, students debated everything from environmental justice concerns to misinformation to oil companies. Ultimately, several students said they will need to put their own opinions aside to assume the role of mediator.
“We must find a way to be fair and create equal conditions for all parties,” Leyla Uysal, a design school student from Harvard University with an urban planning background, said. “It’s going to be difficult, but I will educate myself not to take sides.”
The students, about two dozen across a range of disciplines, ages and other area schools, recently completed a certification exam. The certification prepares them to begin the real-world part of the class. The projects in this first course are two solar farms proposed by Chicago-based Ranger Power for counties in Michigan, which are already facing opposition.
