Latest / Clean Power Hour / Overcoming Opposition to Clean Energy Projects in Rural America with Brenden Miller | EP233

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Overcoming Opposition to Clean Energy Projects in Rural America with Brenden Miller | EP233 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Brenden Miller: One thing the opposition is really good at is bringing group people together to fight projects. And unfortunately, the renewable energy is that hadn't been that strong on that account. We've kind of changed that. So now when we go to meetings, it's not just a few landowners showing up in support and then 50 or 60 landowners, sorry, 5060, opposition folks. Now it's a group of landowners and supporters with us countering the points brought up by the opposition, intending to change the direction of some of these projects. So as a two pronged approach, talking to elected officials and then educating and gathering the community in support of projects.
• 1:28
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• 1:42
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• 1:56
  Tim Montague: today on the Clean Power Hour, building support in rural communities for renewable energy. My guest today is Brendan Miller. He is the Deputy Director for the land and liberty coalition. Welcome to the show. Brendan,
• 2:07
  Brenden Miller: yeah, thanks for having me. Tim.
• 2:09
  Tim Montague: You know, I'm fresh off the heels of the solar farm Summit in Chicago, and so I'm just super pumped for all the innovative work that's happening to bridge the gap between farmers and solar developers, but, and this is within that realm for sure, but Brendan, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, how you came to the coalition, and how you got interested in renewable energy.
• 2:37
  Brenden Miller: Yeah. So I've been a part of land Liberty Coalition since its inception in early 2019 I served as the field director for the Michigan program for five years, and now I moved up to a role as the deputy Field Director for the overall program. I oversee several of the states. Land Liberty coalition as a whole is an 11 state program. We stretch across most of the Midwest, as well as many of the Mid Atlantic states and the state of Texas.
• 3:01
  Brenden Miller: My role has been being on the ground, engaging local officials and finding supporters for renewable energy projects, and my story of renewable energy, I think, is kind of unique. So my community that I grew up in actually engaged in a renewable energy project while I was on the local school board, so I got to see upfront and personal the opposition that would arise and the arguments that were made against renewable energy. And as a matter of fact, I myself even got a little bit pulled in to the opposition. I started thinking, You know what, why are they building these projects here? Why are they coming into my community and building these massive wind turbines? And I got up to a meeting, and I said something similar to that at a public meeting. This was in, I think, 2017 and then I looked behind me and I seen a family that I known for years who was a farming family, and I thought to myself, Why am I telling these people who I've known for years, who I've respected, who have been farming that land for generations, what they should be doing with their property? Why am I telling them I as someone who doesn't own that land, who's someone who has been paying property taxes on that land, telling them, Hey, actually you shouldn't do what is right for you and your family and build those wind turbines. And that stopped me dead in my tracks.
• 4:18
  Brenden Miller: And from then on out, I became an advocate for property rights, defending the right to farmers to do with their property, with what they see fit and economic development. Since that point, I've also been elected as a county commissioner in my home county, and served in that role for many years, and I got a ton of experience from that, seeing all sides, not only from the public side as speaking in public, but also the side of being there, getting the input from the public, sometimes in quite tense and engaging situations. So that's my story.
• 4:51
  Brenden Miller: I've done a lot in my community, and I've done a lot in this particular realm of renewable energy. I've seen a lot. I've been on the project, as I said, for the last five years, I've seen situations where people have keyed my car, for instance, I've seen people have threatened me for going to meetings and staying out for property rights.
• 5:13
  Brenden Miller: And there was actually one particular meeting in a metro Detroit area where I got up and I spoke, and there was about 200 people there in opposition, and they all booed after I got done, and I walked to the back of the room where a police officer was, is, hey, we're at actually, have you leave? I said, Oh, why? They said, well, because there were a lot of threats made on your life while you were here, and we don't have the capacity to help you if things get out of hand, so we would prefer if you, you know, stuck out with us out the back door.
• 5:40
  Tim Montague: And what was the, what was the original project that you were exposed to?
• 5:42
  Tim Montague: Brendan? Where was that? And what's, what's, it sounds like it was a wind project. But what was the project? Yeah,
• 5:49
  Brenden Miller: then the original. Almost North Branch went up in the thumb. And
• 5:54
  Tim Montague: how many megawatts was that project?
• 5:58
  Brenden Miller: Approximately, yeah, roughly in the 200 range.
• 6:00
  Brenden Miller: Okay, 300 megawatts. And did it get developed? No, it didn't. It failed. Uh. Covid killed that one. Though. Uh huh.
• 6:07
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• 6:31
  Tim Montague: Ready to supercharge your clean energy assets, visit W, A, T, T, C, h.io, and power up your efficiency today. Yeah. So it is an interesting phenomenon that some people believe they should be able to tell their neighbors what they can and can't do with their land. It's a little ironic, because our rural counties here in the Midwest are largely red politically, and conservatives believe very strongly in freedom and the right to do what you please with your property with your private property, they don't like it when the government intervenes for any reason and but when it comes to clean energy, there is a growing drum beat of opposition all over the country.
• 7:29
  Tim Montague: A developer here in the Midwest recently told me that it's taking twice as long and costing twice as much to get their projects permitted. And these are community solar projects.
• 7:42
  Tim Montague: These are 3040 acre projects.
• 7:42
  Tim Montague: These are not 4000 acre projects, which there's plenty of those too. So we energy professionals have to do a better job of becoming sophisticated at working with local communities and finding angles. Agrivoltaics, I think is a wonderful one. But what is your angle? Brendan, we were talking in the pre show that you're a farmer for one thing, so you have credibility with farmers, farmers and landowners, you know, of land that is being farmed are a primary audience for energy development.
• 8:19
  Tim Montague: Certainly here in the Midwest, it's a little different. In some parts of the country where it's extremely dense, like New Jersey, they have very different rules. You know, if you want to do greenfield development, you have to do agrivoltaics Now in New Jersey, which I think is wonderful, because farmland is totally of a premium. Here in the Midwest, we're swimming in real estate. We just have more land than you could imagine, and we only need a fraction of the land to be converted to solar, solar and wind farms. But I get it. It is a change, and we want that change to be understood. So there, there's, you know, the the signals that emerged at the agrivoltaics conference, where there's a there's a knowledge gap and a trust gap between developers and farmers. And so I'm curious what, how do you see this and and what is the thrust of your work at land and liberty?
• 9:18
  Brenden Miller: Yeah, we, we are an organization that is conservative leaning, for sure, many of our people who work with us are elected officials, who are Republican elected officials. I myself was a Republican elected official, and I agree the first part you brought up, it's ironic how many of us espouse conservative values. That's something else that hit me hard is I'm up here being a conservative, up here saying that I am supportive of small government and government, you know, less government intrusion. Yet I am here basically telling someone what to do with their own property, using the government as my sort of stick to hit them with, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And these communities, I think one thing we have to understand too.
• 9:58
  Brenden Miller: You alluded this, that even community solar projects are being faced with significant opposition. That's 100% the case. I have seen tiny projects, and I have seen large projects, and in both of those situations, the opposition is the same size.
• 10:13
  Brenden Miller: They're just as angry and they're just as motivated to kill projects. It's size doesn't seem to matter to them, whether it, whether it's, you know, 500 megawatts or five mega and the one thing I do find ironic about that is we've actually gone to communities where the project was slated for 500 megawatts, and they said, Oh, you know, let's just, let's reduce it down to 100 megawatts, then we'd be okay. And then they did reduce it down to roughly about 100 megawatts. And then all of a sudden, the same opposition was still there, still angry. So that's just too big for our community. So science doesn't seem to matter to a lot of these folks. It's something else. It's a true NIMBY as. That exists, and a lot of misinformation that gets spread around to reinforce that. But our message on the ground is we go to communities and we stand up for the rights of those landowners, and we say, You know what? This is their property. They have a right to do with their property what they see fit, and the government should not be stepping in their way and telling them what they should and should not do.
• 11:09
  Brenden Miller: Because one thing I noticed is there a lot of people who are farm adjacent who see farmers as props. They see them as these quaint little people who drive around on tractors and, you know, go harvest the corn and and that's how they see them.
• 11:22
  Brenden Miller: They don't see them as real people. But the reality is, a lot of our farmers that we work with, one they're not giving up all their land for solar, and they're certainly not giving up all their land for wind. They're putting a small portion of it away so they can protect their livelihood. They can protect their family farm. Because one thing people don't seem to understand is when you've been a farmer for three or four generations and you are failing at that business, you're not just laying down yourself, you're not just letting down your family, but you have this feeling that you're letting down everyone who's ever worked that land before you. And that's what a lot of our farmers who are, who we're working with, face, is, they are facing significant difficulties. The large farmers are fine. The Super Mega, 10,000 people who lease out land on a regular basis, those guys are okay. But to small to medium sized farmers, those people you see in the community who pay the property taxes, property taxes, who help defund the local, local school dance, or the local businesses. Those are the folks who are struggling. And we go out there and we say, Hey, let them build these projects so they can continue to invest in their community and they continue to survive. And then furthermore, let's protect the local community itself, because a lot of these communities across the Midwest have been dying for decades. The the industry is gone, the local businesses are gone, and this might be the only opportunity for some of these communities to find true investment inside their community to stay alive.
• 12:45
  Brenden Miller: So those are the messages that we go on when we go to these communities. Is protecting the personal property rights and promoting economic and Rural Development? Yeah,
• 12:53
  Tim Montague: I think that answer. So, so this, this, also, what you just said, gets to this, this angle right of knowledge and trust and people don't understand how clean energy is good for the economy, good for school districts. You know, here in Illinois, we have 16 taxing bodies that are all benefiting from renewable energy projects that and so these projects are generating more tax revenue than just the farm ground alone would do otherwise.
• 13:26
  Tim Montague: And so it is an adder, and your point is well taken about rural communities are dying. You know, young people are moving to cities. They don't want to stay on the farm. They see how hard it is to make a living, and they're like, I'm out. I want to go get a job and be social and and so it is a lifeline in some places, for sure, I guess I'm also thinking about how some of these projects end up getting concentrated in certain areas because of the infrastructure, right, the distribution network that they're connecting to, or The transmission network that they're connecting to. And so while we're only talking about a fraction of the landscape, a few percent in some communities, there's the impact is greater.
• 14:22
  Tim Montague: 15% perhaps is a number that I heard being tossed around at the solar farm Summit. And so we had to keep that in mind too as energy professionals. But how does the rubber meet the road?
• 14:34
  Tim Montague: What is it that you do? Are you?
• 14:34
  Tim Montague: Are you consulting on projects and then, really, you know, just showing up at these meetings? Or how do you get ahead of the projects and and start to build a foundation, I guess, of knowledge and understanding of what these projects could mean for rural America, yeah,
• 14:54
  Brenden Miller: so we take like, a two prong approach. So let's say we're going to be involved in a project area. We see a project that's going to need help. We go in one we talk to the elected officials, and we have one on one discussions with them, and by doing that, we help to tease out what the elected officials concerns are, because the issue that we're facing, and everyone in the energy industry is facing, is misinformation. It is remarkable the amount of bad information that's out there about renewable energy. There's this one, I think, of this one particular example where there's this one photo of this wind turbine landfill. I don't know if you've seen that before, but it's just this one photo that The New York Times, I think, published like back in 2019 is the only photo of this anywhere.
• 15:36
  Brenden Miller: But for some reason, it will continue to pop up in opposition news feeds on a weekly basis and get shared around as if this is something that's still occurring. And there are still, of course, wind turbine blades going into landfills. But for the most part, a lot of them are looking at. Being recycled now, but this mass misinformation campaign is a serious problem.
• 15:56
  Brenden Miller: So we talk to elected officials say, Hey, what are your concerns? And they tell us things like, oh, what's going to poison the water? Or I heard that it causes sleep disruption, or I heard this infrared sound issue, right? All these different concerns that we hear from the opposition. And we get ahead of that, we say, hey, well, here are actually some studies that answer those questions. I don't want to answer them with more conjecture. I answer them with true studies that have been done on these issues, and that helps to calm them and sort of inoculate them for the opposition that may be coming their way. The second thing we do is it work directly inside community. So we go to county fairs, we go to local fairs, we host presentations for the public to attend, and then we also work with supporters to build a coalition. Because one thing the opposition is really good at is building a group of people together and bringing a group people together to fight projects. And unfortunately, the renewable energy has not, hadn't been that strong on that account, we've kind of changed that. So now when we go to meetings, it's not just a few landowners showing up in support and then 50 or 60 landowners, sorry, 5060 opposition folks.
• 17:03
  Brenden Miller: Now it's a group of landowners and supporters with us countering the points brought up by the opposition, intending to change the direction of some of some of these projects, so as a two pronged approach, talking to elected officials and then educating and gathering the community in support of projects that has critically turned the tide in so many communities and has finally gotten steel in the ground in places across the Midwest and across the United States as a whole. So
• 17:30
  Tim Montague: you're feeling like there is light at the end of this tunnel, and that you're seeing some success. Yes,
• 17:39
  Brenden Miller: we have. There are projects that we are working on that were thought dead when we first showed up to them, that there was no way this is going to happen. And somehow, after years of work, and it does take years. Sometimes just getting a simple ordinance pass takes quite a long time. Projects are being built. I can look to examples in places like Ohio, which, if anyone knows about the Ohio citing situation, you will know full and well it's not a good place to site projects. Yet we are still helping to build projects in the state of Ohio, despite the massive hoops you have to jump through and the massive opposition that shows up down there. So we are seeing light at the end of tunnel. We are making a difference. We've actually helped to cite, over 10 gigawatts of projects since our inception, and it could be up to double the next couple of years, just based on what we've been doing on the field and some of those projects that we've been working on for last couple of years.
• 18:32
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, the maker of North America's number one three phase string inverter with over six gigawatt shipped in the US. The CPS America product lineup includes three phase string inverters ranging from 250 to 275 kW. Their flagship inverter, the CPS 250, 275 is designed to work with solar plants ranging from two megawatts to two gigawatts. The 252, 275 pairs, well, with CPS America's exceptional data communication controls and energy storage solutions. Go to chintpowersystems.com to find out more. And I'm just curious, because you're one of the few people that I talked to who seemingly is quite optimistic about this situation. And I mean, I'm thrilled to hear this, that you're having success, you know, I guess I'm trying to get the big picture and trying to create a sense of urgency among my colleagues, who are developers and and getting pushback and and I think that I've personally witnessed developers doing things in a less sophisticated manner than I think they should or could. But do you feel like that's all it takes, is having a company like land and liberty, you know, in the fold and we're good. Or is there like, if you had, if you had a a room full of developers, and you wanted to give them the keys to the kingdom, so to speak. What? What are you telling them that they can do this themselves, or they have to work in coalitions, or, yeah?
• 20:22
  Tim Montague: What is the what is the playbook? I guess that you're giving them?
• 20:27
  Brenden Miller: Yeah. So one of the benefits that we have is we're a 501, c3, and we are a third party messenger with people who have credibility in our field, whether that's in the political field, amongst conservative voters or amongst renewable energy. And while you know, we have seen a lot of success, we've also seen a lot of failures, right? But one thing that people who we've worked with tend to like about.
• 20:50
  Brenden Miller: About Us is we're right in the trenches with them. We're fighting the good fight right along their side, and we bring a perspective as a third party validator that is incredibly important. Because let's be honest, you know, let's say you're an average farmer, and this big company who's based out of, you know, Chicago, Minneapolis, or, heck, somewhere in Europe, comes and approaches, and, hey, I want to build a solar project on your on your farm. And then they say, Okay, fine, and then go to community.
• 21:15
  Brenden Miller: Then, once again, this big Chicago firm is going to be building a solar project in the middle of nowhere Michigan.
• 21:20
  Brenden Miller: There's a lot of concern, and to no fault of their own, the developer doesn't have a ton of credibility in that community, because what, they're just a big outside firm. We, on the other hand, we're local, and we build those local support, and we come at it with a different message, because our message is not about things that rural voters don't care about. So you know, rural voters, for the most part, don't really care about the issue of climate change, right? That's not an issue that resonates with them. In fact, I've been in several meetings where a supporter will get up and they will say, Well, we have to do this because the climate is changing, and I don't, and if you don't vote for this, you're going to destroy our children's future. And went on this whole diatribe, and it was very unhelpful, because the people who are even making the decision, as soon as they started saying climate change, they sat back, you've seen them, and they just stopped curing they stopped listening, and then they seen them as just a AOC nut job. That's how they've been described to me. Now we don't feel that way, of course, but that's what the rural conservatives view that as. So we help to tailor the conversation to things that rural voters and rural decision makers do care about, things like property rights, as you discussed before, keeping government out, things like economic development, which is important, things like national security, having more local power plants is better for national security and better for grid security as a whole, and even things like the economic benefits of having more solar and wind on the grid, because the more solar wind on the grid, the better chances your electricity costs will come down, because they are the cheapest forms of electricity.
• 22:47
  Brenden Miller: So I by doing that, we build a united force against the opposition, which frankly, comes from all political sides as well. We've seen plenty of opposition folks who have been staunch Democrats and plenty of them who've been staunch Republicans. So it's about building a coalition of support and using the proper messaging when engaging the public. That's what changes the tide. That's what changes hearts and minds, and that's what's been, I think, leading the conversation of more Republicans in rural communities and in local legislators being supportive of renewable energy, which is something that 10 years ago would never have happened
• 23:51
  Tim Montague: here we are, you know, in 2024 we're, you know, we're aiming to hit an 80% clean grid by 2030 it's quite ambitious. That goal has many points of friction, interconnection being one, availability of equipment, the availability of labor. There are many challenges that developers and installers face. The one that we have, I think, more more control over, honestly, is local, social acceptance or not of these projects. You know, personally, I'm, I'm I'm really leaning towards this phenomenon of dual use solar, whether it's pollinator friendly, you know, for conservation purposes, or critters for food, you know, sheep, cattle and cropping. So crops, critters, conservation is the are the 3c that 10 French taught me the organizer of the solar farm Summit. And I just think that's a tremendous Win win, because farmers don't want to see farmland taken out of rotation. They're generally quite opposed to that concept.
• 25:10
  Tim Montague: And as we were discussing in the pre show, you know, one of the one of the other things that I'm quite concerned about is, is the tenant farmer phenomenon, and how tenant farmers are getting pushed off, because the landowner can triple their income, sometimes by by leasing their land to an energy developer. It's quite lucrative, but, but there are consequences, and if we could, if we could minimize those consequences for farmers, I think that would just be that would go a long way. But what? What else, if it's not aggravable, takes Brendan, what?
• 25:43
  Tim Montague: What else should our listeners know about that they can integrate? Into their playbook.
• 25:52
  Tim Montague: I mean, agrivoltaics is happening now on perhaps 10% of energy projects, and sheep grazing is 90% of that. So the cropping piece is has a long ways to go, and there's a lot of research, you know, sprouting up now. No pun intended. So you know that's we probably have 10 years before that goes mainstream. But what else should our developer and and other energy professionals know about working with local rural communities?
• 26:26
  Brenden Miller: Yeah, I think there are a couple of truths regarding farm farming in this country now that that generally people don't understand that, I think need to be more be being made aware of. First and foremost, we over farm in this country. One thing we hear all the time is, you're taking this land out of production, it's going to it's going to increase food costs, going to make it so we can't get food. And that's really not a reality. Any farmer will tell you that's not really a reality. We overproduce, and that creates a situation where prices are lower than they ought to be, and it puts farmers in a rough spot. So that's the first thing. Second thing we have to understand is that a lot of the farmland that is being farmed across the Midwest in particular have been farmed for over 100 years now, and there's a serious concern. There's a serious concern that that farmland won't be available for future generations because it's losing topsoil at a alarming rate. By allowing some of our farms to go out of production and to have solar sit on top with agrivoltaics or not, is incredibly important, because it takes over 100 years to grow or to develop one inch of topsoil.
• 27:37
  Brenden Miller: And with topsoil loss is It's logarithmic. The more it happens, the quicker it happens, right? It goes up like that. And what we're seeing is, in many places across this country, we are getting lower and lower on topsoil, and there's really no way to stop it. So one thing I would encourage developers to understand, especially with their messaging, is that, one, we aren't going to lose all of our food like that's not a reality. And two, by allowing the land to rest, it actually creates an opportunity for this farm to use in the future, and it protects the topsoil that's remaining, because there are some places in my own state which the topsoil is getting closer and closer to unusability. In fact, I had a farm, personally, a few acres on a farm that I was working that it's no longer farmable because it's lost so much of its topsoil, it would take so much chemicals and fertilizer to make that ground work. And no one wants to farm anymore because of that, so that'd be something else, I think is important to throw into the conversation as the if you want to continue to protect farmland, we're going to need to let some of that land rest and be used later on,
• 29:35
  Tim Montague: for sure. Yeah, I love this point, and we are basically mining the topsoil, right? We're we're leveraging this amazing topsoil that was built up over 1000s of years, but it's hard to replenish. And modern, modern agricultural practices are depleting the soil, and we're also dumping a huge amount of chemicals onto the land, which is contaminating groundwater and also contaminating our rivers and now the ocean right the Gulf of Mexico has become a dead spot, and that's just a disaster. It's very ironic, because farmers tend to resonate with this concept of protecting nature, they understand that their livelihoods are dependent on nature, on the soil, on water, on clean air and and yet we have developed this very industrialized form of agriculture which is which is really not good for the soil.
• 30:43
  Tim Montague: I'll note that there's a gentleman who's now moving in this agrivoltaic Space named Will Harris, who's a farmer in Georgia, and he's written a book called A bold return to giving a damn. And I've only just started to read the book, but it's it's about his journey growing up on a farm that had become an industrial farm raising cattle and chickens and pigs, and now he's he's begun to question that those industrial practices that are so heavy, heavily dependent on chemicals, and returning to an older way. And I look forward to learning more about his thesis, but anyway, check that out if you're interested in farm practices and our future.
• 31:29
  Tim Montague: Because, yeah, we, you know, we want to have a safer, healthier future for humanity. You know, fighting climate change is one thing, but there's. Myriad of of tipping points that we're reaching in society and and and land is is one of them so well in our final minutes together, Brendan, what else, I guess?
• 31:53
  Tim Montague: What else is on your radar, like looking forward in your crystal ball? What? What are the what are the exciting things that you guys are getting involved in?
• 32:07
  Tim Montague: And how can our listeners help you guys? Yeah, so
• 32:13
  Brenden Miller: first and foremost, we are, as I said, A, 501, c3, so we would love to have more supporters in the community, whether that's a developer, whether that's someone who really believes in our cause and believes in the idea of getting more steel in the ground and more renewable energy electrons onto the grid, definitely let us know, and we'll be happy to have a discussion with you and find ways that we can assist you guys with that process as well. As far as some exciting things on the horizon, we have been exploring more into the storage space, which has been interesting energy storage, which is really beginning to blow up across the across the Midwest and really across the country. We're seeing more of these storage facilities, and we're seeing opposition to those storage facilities too, like this idea that these facilities, well, as I kind of said, we're going to blow up. Literally.
• 33:03
  Brenden Miller: That won't happen. And this idea that this storage facilities have these like green goo that goes throughout it, that might leak out of it at some point, like some sort of Simpsons episode about a nuclear plant, you know, that's an exciting development, though, finding out more about storage and how we can help that transition, because the more we transition to storage renewable energy, particularly on the store, on the solar front, the amount of opportunities for having more solar on the grid increases exponentially. The other thing we're kind of taking a look at is what you mentioned before, as a grid as a whole, particularly our transmission. Our transmission is delayed right now. It needs to be upgraded, and there are several projects for upgrading that transmission, and we're beginning to broach that discussion and how to make sure transmission is a major part of the discussion, because we can't build more renewable energy if we don't have the lines to transmit said renewable energy across the greater grid.
• 33:57
  Brenden Miller: And a lot of our transmission infrastructure is quite old and needs to be replaced sooner rather than later, and we are seeing opposition to that already began to crop up across our footprint. So finding more opportunities to talk about transmission, how to engage in it, our battery discussion, even things like hydrogen, which we've our parent company, the conserved energy network, has been digging in deeper to the ideas around what hydrogen will mean to the Renewable Energy Community, because there's a ton of opportunity there opportunity and things like thermal geothermal plants. And one other thing is like CO two sequestration, what that will mean for renewable energy, and what that will mean for the discussion as a whole when it comes to energy in this country.
• 34:42
  Brenden Miller: So those are some of the exciting things along the way that we've been working on. Of course, our continued field work is important. We've been doing these power hour presentations across the across the country, where we go to communities and we give it an hour long presentation about why renewable energy is a good thing, why the myths that you're hearing are wrong, and how to get more involved to see more renewable energy. We've been doing that, not only in regular communities, but also been engaging in college communities and making sure that we educate people the best we can while they're being educated. Right? So those are some of the exciting things that we've been developing. But as I as I said at the beginning, I would really encourage anyone who hears our message, who sees us out in the ground, making a difference, being a voice for renewable energy in these rural communities, to reach out to myself or anyone other land Liberty team across our footprint and assist us.
• 35:30
  Brenden Miller: Because, you know, I hear people all the time say, hey, it's great. What you do. We really appreciate that, and we appreciate hearing them at the same time, action also needs to be taken, and we need more support to garner that action if we want to continue to fight the opposition, because the opposition, because the opposition is still loud, it's still very angry, and it's still throwing misinformation left and right across this entire country, which is killing projects, as you pointed out, and leaving sort of a more pessimistic, more pessimistic mindset across the country in regards to developing more of this energy future. And
• 36:03
  Tim Montague: to your point about the grid, I would encourage our listeners to check out Episode 218, 218, with aleshina Jackson, who is the Vice President of Strategic Development at AES, a large utility. They are working on what they call grid enhancing technologies, or gets and there's a handful of technologies that can really make a dramatic impact on the viability of the grid without adding like a bunch of new conductors at the transmission scale, for example. So check out Episode 218 with Alessandra Jackson. Are your solar and storage assets performing at their peak? Some wait for failures. Or send technicians for costly diagnostics. But what if optimization was just a click away? Enter watch, the cutting edge monitoring and controls platform with watch owners and operators can maximize their portfolio performance, avoid unnecessary site visits, boost production by up to 8% all without expanding your team.
• 37:01
  Tim Montague: Ready to supercharge your clean energy assets, visit W, A, T, T, C, h.io, and power up your efficiency. Today, I want to thank Brendan Miller, Deputy Director at land at Liberty, for coming on the show. Today, I really appreciate your time, Brendan, please check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. Tell a friend about the show, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from my listeners, and with that, how can our listeners find you?
• 37:29
  Tim Montague: Brendan,
• 37:31
  Brenden Miller: yeah, they can find us. at landliberty.com and they can also shoot me an email at Bmiller@landlibertycoalition.com I encourage anyone to reach out if they have any questions or thoughts or want to know more about our program, because we are always about educating people and educating developers and other people in the space
• 37:48
  Tim Montague: fantastic. And Brendan, what are the conferences coming up that are on your radar? I'm just curious.
• 37:54
  Tim Montague: Well, right
• 37:55
  Brenden Miller: now we aren't so much in the conference space. We will be at re plus, okay, since I know we have a presence there, but our major focus of land Liberty coalition is actually the county fair. So we are at right now some around 20 county fairs across the country. So that's our major focus right now. But re plus will certainly be there. So if you see our guy, feel free to stop by and say hi to
• 38:16
  Tim Montague: him. You're going to have a booth. I don't know if
• 38:19
  Brenden Miller: we have a booth.
• 38:19
  Brenden Miller: I think we're going to have a booth. I'm just not certain yet.
• 38:21
  Brenden Miller: Actually, I do know that our leader, Bradley Pache, will be speaking at re plus. Okay,
• 38:28
  Tim Montague: cool, all right.
• 38:28
  Tim Montague: Well, I'm Tim Montague. Let's grow solar and storage. Take care. Bye.